If you check out the featured image, you’ll note that the most prominent building remaining from the old City Hospital complex is now known as the Georgian Condominiums (white arrow.) Behind that was the old Malcolm Bliss Hospital, shown with the red arrow.
Here’s an early photo from the best days of the Malcolm Bliss Psychiatric Hospital. The word “bliss” seems an interesting choice for a psychiatric health facility. As if the more you engage with the real world, the less blissful it becomes, so a complete retreat from reality might truly be “blissed out.” Then again, on first arriving in St. Louis, I thought calling a grocery store ‘schnooks’ was odd. So was ‘maul’s’ barbecue sauce and ‘bush’ beer. All part of the charm.
Bliss builds his hospital
Malcolm Bliss (1863 – 1934) was a physician, dentist and Washington University lecturer. He was politically active, and possessed enough sway to pull support together for creation of a St. Louis psychiatric hospital, built in 1939.
The complex was located just north of City Hospital at the corner of Park and Grattan. This is where the A.T. Still University Dental School is now. It consisted of an original six story cross-shaped central building, and an impressive 13 story tower building added later. In 1964 Bliss became a state health facility.
Hospital administration meets federal administration
The Reagan administration did away with the Mental Health Systems Act in 1981. Over the course of the decade, 40,000 beds in state mental institutions were lost. As a result, homelessness and imprisonment both increased. Pressure for dealing with the mentally ill transferred from the US health system to the US justice system, where much of it remains today.
The center was closed in 1991, vacated in 1996, and demolished in 2002-2003. A smaller version today occupies ground on the 5300 block of Delmar. It’s short sighted when we lose structures like this, but a good reason to cheer the saving of the old City Hospital administration building, recast as the Georgian Condominiums. It was hard work to pile up bricks like we used to, and our history suffers when these old beauties fall.
Thanks to Vanishing STL blog and Paul Hohmann for background and a photo. http://vanishingstl.blogspot.com
Photo of Bliss Building from 1962, courtesy of Missouri Historical Society, taken by Henry Mizuki
Overhead view 1947 – from Becker Memorial Library of Washington University
A good treatment of the shifting responsibility for treatment of the mentally ill during the 1980s is in from Dr. E. Torrey Fuller in Salon of September 29, 2013. https://www.salon.com/2013/09/29/ronald_reagans_shameful_legacy_violence_the_homeless_mental_illness/
Thank you. Very prevalent to my existence. Mentally ill.
Someone has gone wrecking ball crazy on this city. Just two weeks ago my old elementary school fell. My home neighborhood is completely gone. Not even the streets run the same way. And I started kindergarten at that school in 1957. I’m sad, I’m embarrassed and chagrined, and I’m angry.
Its a story that my grandmother or my dad didn’t and never wanted to talk about. My grandfather Robert J Hitchcock Sr went missing back in the 50’s.
I don’t have a specific day or time of the year but all I can tell you is he was beat by the white staff at the hospital and thrown down an elevator shaft.
No one knew of his whereabouts for days and no one in the staff never told the story.
The only way that my grandfather was found in the elevator shaft was from the stench of smell of his decomposing body.
The only reason for his untimely death was told to my grandparents was because he was dating a white nurse at the hospital at the time.
A story that has never been told
How sad, Gloria. You can find your grandfather’s death certificate online at the Missouri Digital Heritage web site: https://s1.sos.mo.gov/records/Archives/ArchivesMvc/DeathCertificates#searchDB
His death certificate states his cause of death as a fractured skull resulting from a “fall” down an elevator shaft at the hospital. The date is listed 7 December 1959.
My grandmother Mary McCabe (Maiden name Holt) born in September 1941 was admitted there at one point. She used to tell us about it as kids but it wasn’t until I became an adult I realized it was a psychiatric hospital. Can anyone help me find out why she was admitted? She died in 2013 to lung cancer.