Urban explorers love vacant hospitals.
Stephanie Botkin should know — she lives across from one, the former St. Alexius Hospital on Jefferson Avenue. “They’re totally attracted to it,” Botkin said. “Because you've got the morgue, and how scary is that? You've got the old operating rooms with all the equipment still in them.
“There's something about abandoned hospitals, like where people lived and died,” she continued. “Are there ghosts? Are there spirits?”
While Botkin may not know for sure about ghosts, she and her neighbors do know they’re fed up with the condition of the campus at the now-shuttered site. They say it’s become a massive eyesore and a potentially dangerous hazard.
Botkin claims in the three years that it’s been vacant, there have been break-ins — by metal scrappers, squatters, vandals and curious trespassers who want to explore the abandoned property.
Vandals have broken practically every window in the five-story, X-shaped hospital on the west side of the campus. A passer-by can easily see into rooms that housed patients. An adjacent lot has served as a place for people to dump old furniture and trash. Graffiti tags cover the other historic buildings.
Botkin and other residents who live nearby, along with the Gravois Park Block Link Neighborhood Association, are suing the property’s owners in St. Louis court, hoping the campus will be cleaned up or that the court will declare it abandoned.
“[The hospital] makes us come across as that stereotypical trashy neighborhood who doesn't take care of anything,” Botkin said. “I think it just pulls the neighborhood down as a whole, because it seems like nobody cares.”
The death of a hospital
Botkin and her husband moved into the house diagonally across the corner from the two-block St. Alexius-Jefferson campus in 2018.
“When we got here, it was a busy hospital. It had all of the services. It had a nursing school … outpatient centers, it had a dental office, it had medical doctors, everything,” she said. “And then just slowly, one by one, services left.”
Another neighbor, Yvonne Houston, recalls it is just one of many hospitals in the city’s core that has closed.
“It’s not like it used to be,” she said. “I remember it was City Hospital, and then Homer G. Phillips, and after, the only thing I can remember was Lutheran and then Alexian Brothers … it’s not fair.”
The former St. Alexius-Jefferson campus — a complex of connected medical and hospital buildings spanning two city blocks on Jefferson Avenue, a couple of blocks south of Cherokee Street — has been vacant since 2022, according to the lawsuit.
In its final years it was a satellite campus of the former St. Alexius hospital on South Broadway, but many older residents in the neighborhood still call the hospital by its old name, Lutheran Medical Center.
SA Hospital Real Estate Holdings–Jefferson, a limited liability company, bought the complex in 2021. The neighbors’ lawsuit lists a California company and another California-based individual, Mark Ganjianpour, as owners and co-defendants.
According to St. Louis property records, SA Hospital Real Estate Holdings also owns the South Broadway hospital, which for a short time before closing was renamed South City Hospital.
“I live maybe a block and a half away from the building, and it's a very scary-looking area, like there's open spaces, and you can look in there and it's just pitch black,” said another neighbor, Tansie Anderson.
She loves her neighborhood, she said, but called the property “creepy.” She was worried about people starting fires this winter when it becomes cold.
“They need to close the holes, close all of the ways that people are getting in," she said. “As soon as they put it up [fencing], they make holes and they still go into the building.”
Ward 7 Alderwoman Alisha Sonnier represents the neighborhood and shares the neighbors’ frustrations about the property. She said people have broken in to steal materials, squatters have been living inside the building and drug use and crime has increased around the property.
“Vacant properties obviously always have negative impacts on communities,” Sonnier said. “But a vacant property of this size, that is this large in magnitude, that was left in the condition that it was in, definitely poses a lot of threats.”
A lawsuit filed
The neighbors filed the lawsuit against the St. Alexius-Jefferson owners in St. Louis Circuit Court in 2024 with the help of attorneys from Washington University’s Environmental Law Clinic.
The plaintiffs claim the property fell into disrepair within months.
“Photographs purporting to show the property’s interior show considerable amounts of abandoned equipment, including what appear to be incubators, motorized hospital beds, computers, and ultrasound machines,” the suit claims.
“These images also show bones and partially assembled skeletons made of human remains (presumably donated to science by good Samaritans and used for teaching purposes), a book of birth records, and even images of unclothed infants with severe birth defects — all accessible to anyone who enters defendant’s unsecured Property.”
The plaintiffs are seeking a court order requiring the owners to bring the hospital up to code within 45 days and to pay damages to compensate for the neighbors’ decreased property values.
“SA Hospital-Jefferson’s greed — its desire to own property without maintaining it, its decision to seek profit while ignoring legal responsibility — is actively destroying the Gravois Park neighborhood,” the lawsuit alleges.
Laura Robb, one of the Wash U clinic’s attorneys, said there’s still quite a long road ahead for the suit. But the plaintiffs did celebrate earlier this year when a judge denied the defendant’s motion to dismiss, allowing the case to move forward.
St. Louis Public Radio made attempts to contact the owners through their attorney but did not get a response.
A potential buyer
Despite the troubled recent history of the campus, Alderwoman Sonnier said neighbors may have reasons to be hopeful about its future.
Last year, several city agencies, including the fire and buildings departments, “secured” the property in response to “the owners continued failure to do so,” according to a press release from then-mayor Tishaura Jones’ office.
She said the owners have become more responsive about issues on the campus: "I think that they are understanding a lot better than they understood it."
Perhaps most encouraging for people who live nearby, Robb and Sonnier said a potential buyer and developer has shown interest in acquiring the property.
The prospective buyer, Anthony Boyd, owns a roofing company. He attended a meeting of the Gravois Park neighbors group in August to discuss potential development plans for the campus.
According to residents who attended the meeting, plans included converting parts of the hospital into apartments and possibly adding a bowling alley or other amenities.
Real Estate Broker Justin Ströhm of St. Louis-based Circa Properties confirmed he has been working with the Kansas City-based Boyd as he considers purchasing the property.
“Of course I will say that this is about half a million square feet of building that needs to be completely renovated,” Ströhm said. “It would be, to my knowledge, the largest redevelopment that South City has ever seen.”
Sonnier said that although no sale has been negotiated, the campus’ current owners have put up $600,000 to pay for increased security, coordinated by Boyd. Security staff in a guardhouse now patrol the property.
Sonnier said the cooperation between the current owners and the potential buyer is a good sign.
“Hopefully the owner can either decide his own redevelopment plans or he can decide to sell a property,” Sonnier said. “But in the meantime, we're hopefully able to get through what we know is another cold winter and not see it go up into flames.”
