Evangelical Deaconess Home and Hospital in 1930

ALAN writes:

On an overcast day in St. Louis in November 2011, I was walking near the huge building that was once the Evangelical Deaconess Home and Hospital. It stood on a high point of land across from Forest Park in the western end of St. Louis.

It struck me as odd that there were no cars in the parking lots, no sign of life around the seven-story main building, and no lights visible in any of its windows. Only then did it occur to me that the hospital was closed permanently. It was rather a stunning realization.

During my walk, I met a security guard: A young white woman. (This fact alone is proof of a cultural revolution.)  She seemed intelligent and conscientious. At that time, the future of the building was uncertain. We talked for about ten minutes. I told her some of my memories of the hospital.  She said there were still books and paintings and files of papers in the building.

I walked past the main entrance doors. No one was there but the lights were on in the lobby. I could see framed paintings on the walls. Suspended from the ceiling was a banner that read: “Welcome to SUCCESS Healthcare.”  That, I thought, was hilarious: Bombast about “success” asserted by its owners in another state who were either too stupid or too conniving not to take the hospital into the ground. A decline in standards within the building had been evident to me even from just walking through its halls a few times over the previous ten years after it was no longer owned by the Deaconess Sisters.

The hospital was established in St. Louis in 1889 by the Evangelical Deaconess Sisters of the United Church of Christ.  Many years later a College of Nursing and residence for the sisters occupied an adjoining building.  A chapel, gift shop, and cafeteria were added in later years, as were other buildings.

One of my uncles and a good friend of mine spent their last days in that hospital in 1971. My mother spent a few nights there in 1990 after suffering a minor stroke.  I remembered walking many times through a long hall and glancing at groups of Deaconess Sisters pictured in framed photographs on the walls.  In the 1990s I attended several book fairs in the hospital’s auditorium. A retired bookseller friend of mine told me he often enjoyed dining in the hospital’s cafeteria in the 1980s.

By 1989, only 13 Sisters remained. All were retired. No Sisters had been consecrated since the 1950s. “The once-thriving sisterhood is now virtually extinct…,” a St. Louis newspaper article reported in 1989.  The hospital was sold by Deaconess in 1997 to a group in Texas, and acquired in 2004 by a group in Arizona, and then acquired in 2008 by a group of cardsharps in Florida.

Today the hospital and the adjoining buildings are dust. They were demolished earlier this year. The St. Louis Zoo acquired the property for expansion, primarily for parking lots.

[St. Thomas Hospital was Catholic, whereas Deaconess Hospital was Protestant. Each had a nursing school.  Each building had two towers on its roof.  Both were demolished to make way for parking lots.]

During my walk past those buildings on that cloudy day, I paused to admire three larger-than-life sculpted figures of Deaconess nurses on the wall of one of those buildings. They were depicted in their traditional nursing uniforms.  At night, the figures were highlighted by spotlights. They were a silent reminder of the competent nursing care for which the hospital had been known for decades. I regret not going back there later to take a picture of that wall and those figures.  (I have looked in vain for any such photographs online.)

Then I stopped to look at the cornerstone of the main hospital building, on which these words appeared:

Erected
to the
Glory of God
A.D. 1929

It was with a mixture of astonishment and disbelief that I lingered there, trying to absorb the fact that Deaconess Hospital was gone.  It had stood there in a landmark building for nearly seventy years, operated by people with an excellent record of medical care.  The last remaining Evangelical Deaconess Sister in St Louis died at age 100 in 2010.  As children, she and her sisters had traveled by horse and buggy to a one-room schoolhouse.

And so an era has ended and another concrete expression of Christendom is gone from the landscape.

I was reminded of the demolition of the original red-brick building of St. Anthony’s Catholic Hospital in south St. Louis in 1976, which had stood for 75 years and where I was born; and of the demolition of the Little Sisters of the Poor residence; and of the abandonment of Catholic buildings like the Alverne Residence and St. Mary’s Infirmary in St. Louis and the Catholic Community Building in East St. Louis. In their place today are parking lots, supermarkets, and vandalized buildings.

The demolition or alteration of Christian hospitals; the closing of Catholic schools, churches, and parishes; and the conversion of those schools or churches into Muslim schools or mosques – all are consistent with the longstanding Marxist-Communist-Socialist-Feminist war against Christianity. How tragic that most Americans are now too brain-dead to realize how much better and stronger this nation was when those places thrived than it is or ever will be without them.

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