St. Elizabeths in Washington, DC opened in 1855 as a psychiatric hospital to provide care for army and district residents and it continued to provide mental health care at its original location until April of 2010, when the hospital was relocated to a new $161 dollar building with the intention of allowing DC to build a more modern mental health care system and improve upon the overall reputation of the hospital.2 Since then, the original campus has been converted into the headquarters for the Department of Homeland Security; therefore, St. Elizabeths is an example of a historic asylum that both continued to be used for its original purpose following deinstitutionalization and faced the issues that arose in dealing with aging structures and changes in mental health care, as well as an example of a building that has been repurposed and the historic preservation concerns that come with these transformations.
In the later half of the twentieth century, St. Elizabeths came under fire for allegations of patients’ rights violations, with a class action lawsuit made against the hospital in 1974.3 These issues continued after the hospital came under the management of the district government in 1987 and the lawsuit would not be settled with the US Department of Justice until 2007, a year after ground was finally broken for the new hospital.4 However, over time it became clear that the issues with the care the hospital was able to provide and the deteriorating buildings that housed it were connected, with the District struggling with the daunting and costly task of upkeep, and it was necessary that it be transferred to a new location. Discussions of the move by officials connected to the hospital and lawsuit give the sense that it was believed that the hospital could not truly move beyond those issues until it moved from its original site. Those such as Attorney General Peter Nickles, who had aided in filing the 1974 lawsuit, and others who attended the opening ceremony of the new building expressed the move as a way of bringing the hospital into the modern era of mental health care and as a test of if, as many including Nickles now believed, St. Elizabeths had finally made enough progress that it could work towards fulfilling the terms of the 2007 settlement even without court supervision, something that had been a struggle to do at the previous location.5
The new location was described as comfortable and welcoming to patients and an environment which, while not intended to be one’s home as the hospital had been in the past, would be conducive to patient healing.6 It is against this description that the problems that emerged for St. Elizabeths as it began to look for a new purpose become particularly obvious. When Rob Nieweg of the National Trust for Historic Preservation toured the facility in 2007, after patients had already begun to be removed from its buildings, he was disappointed to find that the Hitchcock Hall theater, a specific part of the hospital he was interested in due to its role in the history of mental health care in DC, had been damaged by a burst pipe. Now that the historic hospital was no longer used in its entirety, visitors to this area were sparse enough that he could not say if the leak had occurred days, weeks, or even months earlier.7 This incident is characteristic of the plight that facsd many of these buildings, particularly as large, sprawling mental health complexes are simply not necessary for the hospital’s use as they once were. Beyond simply the issue of historic preservation, this becomes an issue as the buildings attempt to find new, non-mental health care related investors. While the east side of the St. Elizabeths campus remained owned by the city, as of 2007, the west side owned by the federal government was the largest section of unused federal land in the district. Despite the ideal location of the expanse of land and despite its status as one of the most endangered historic sites in the United States at the time, restoring the sixty-one buildings on the west campus was estimated to cost $3 billion, making its restoration so expensive that private investors were not interested.8
As a result, the decided fate of the original campus was that it would be used for the Department of Homeland Security to consolidate its headquarters in a single location. St. Elizabeths was uniquely qualified for this role as the Department had previously been unable to find a location in DC that was expansive enough to accommodate it in its entirety.9 However, even as this solution was found to the problem of the historic buildings being neglected, new criticism arose. A 2009 article written by Richard Moe, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation which had previously identified St. Elizabeths as being one of the top eleven most endangered places in the US in 2002 due to neglect, outlines these clearly. With it being used for the Department of Homeland Security, the complex would be largely cut off from the community surrounding it, something that many Moe spoke to were distressed by. The DHS would not bring new work and economic vitalization to an area that desperately needed it and access would be cut off to not only the hospital but also the 300 Civil War soldier graves on site believed by some to be the first public non-segregated cemetery in the US.10 Additionally, Moe felt that the plan for over six million square feet of new development including both buildings and parking lots was more than the area could accommodate without destroying the integrity of the historical site.11 While repurposing it would save the campus from destruction, the concern remained that it would be cut off from public access and so much of the historic site might be lost during the remodeling that there would not be much left to visit anyway.
St. Elizabeths is representative of the struggles of allowing historic asylums to continue to be used to provide care for patients and the struggles of trying to find developers who are willing to provide the restoration needed to allow it to serve another purpose. Furthermore, similarly to Allentown, reactions to St. Elizabeths likely being cut off from public access shows the connection many in the community felt to the hospital.
- “The St. Elizabeths Center Building in August, 2006,” (image), “St. Elizabeths Hospital,” Atlas Obscura, accessed October 29, 2023, https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/st-elizabeths. ↩︎
- Thomas Otto, “St. Elizabeths Hospital: A History,” (Washington, DC: United States General Services Administration, 2013), accessed September 11, 2023, 308.
Henri E. Cauvin, “D.C. celebrates building opening at St. Elizabeths,” The Washington Post, April 23, 2010, accessed September 11, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/22/AR2010042204136.html ↩︎ - Otto, “St. Elizabeths Hospital,” 308. ↩︎
- Otto, “St. Elizabeths Hospital,” 308.
Cauvin, “D.C. celebrates building opening at St. Elizabeths.” ↩︎ - Cauvin, “D.C. celebrates building opening at St. Elizabeths.” ↩︎
- Cauvin, “D.C. celebrates building opening at St. Elizabeths.” ↩︎
- Joe Holley, “Tussle Over St. Elizabeths,” The Washington Post, June 17, 2007, accessed September 11, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/16/AR2007061601192.html. ↩︎
- Holley, “Tussle Over St. Elizabeths.” ↩︎
- Richard Moe, “A Disaster for St. Elizabeths,” The Washington Post, January 8, 2009, accessed September 11, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/07/AR2009010702977.html?nav=hcmoduletmv. ↩︎
- Moe, “A Disaster for St. Elizabeths.”
Holley, “Tussle Over St. Elizabeths.” ↩︎ - Moe, “A Disaster for St. Elizabeths.” ↩︎
- Colin Winterbottom, “The Center Building in 2016” (image), “The Sorrow And The Beauty: D.C.’s St. Elizabeths,” WAMU 88.5, American University Radio, March 29, 2017, accessed October 29, 2023, https://wamu.org/story/17/03/29/sorrow-beauty-d-c-s-st-elizabeths/. ↩︎
