Charity Hospital treated New Orleans's uninsured for two hundred sixty-nine years — from a single ward endowed by a French sailor's bequest in 1736 to the twenty-story Art Deco tower on Tulane Avenue that Huey Long commissioned and opened in 1939 as the second-largest hospital in America. Designed by the same firm that built the State Capitol in Baton Rouge. Every poor child born in New Orleans for most of the twentieth century was born here. Every resident who trained here has a Charity story. The building was the institution; the institution was the building.
Katrina flooded the basement generators in August 2005. The hospital evacuated and never reopened. LSU consolidated operations into University Medical Center in 2015, four blocks away. The 1939 tower — a National Historic Landmark — has stood empty for twenty-one years. Inside, much of the equipment is still where the staff left it on August 29, 2005. Redevelopment proposals come and go. The building stands there, waiting, as New Orleans does what it does.
What stood here
4 surviving images.
The previous Charity Hospital building, early 1900s
A Charity Hospital ambulance in 1912
Charity Hospital Tulane Avenue New Orleans seen from LaSalle Street corner, 2014
New Orleans, 1906: Milliken Memorial Hospital for Children on Tulane Avenue. Building was demolished in 1952, 1906