City Hospital No. 2

A five-story Renaissance Revival block on a corner, its rusticated stone ground floor opened by round-arched and square shopfronts and a deep-set entrance. The upper brick walls are framed by stone-quoined piers; the third-floor windows carry alternating triangular and segmental pediments, and the top floor sits in recessed panels beneath a bracketed, modillioned cornice and a paneled parapet. Carved console brackets mark the canted corner. The whole is symmetrical and heavily trimmed in stone, in the manner of an 1890s commercial building.

Built in 1896 as the second building of the Barnes Medical College, a for-profit medical school, at Lawton Boulevard and Garrison Avenue in what became the Mill Creek Valley neighborhood. In 1919 the City of St. Louis opened the former college building as City Hospital No. 2, the municipal hospital for Black St. Louisans under segregation, with about 177 beds; it treated patients and trained Black physicians and nurses, one of three institutions serving the city's Black residents alongside the private St. Mary's Infirmary and Peoples Hospital. The hospital was long criticized as overcrowded and inadequate for a population that grew rapidly during the Great Migration, and from 1922 the attorney Homer G. Phillips campaigned for a larger facility. A replacement public hospital opened in the Ville in 1937 as Homer G. Phillips Hospital, and the Lawton and Garrison hospital closed. The old building was demolished in the 1960s during the Mill Creek Valley clearance; Lawton Boulevard itself no longer exists.