Missouri Pacific Railroad Hospital

A large Renaissance Revival hospital of buff brick over a rusticated limestone base. The lower floors are stone, their windows capped by alternating triangular and segmental pediments and half-round fanlight lintels; a belt course divides them from the brick stories above, which run as a regular grid of windows to a dentiled cornice. An added attic story of paired windows sits under a corbel-block cornice, and green glazed-tile hipped lanterns with louvered openings rise from the roof. A tall, plain brick stair tower — a later addition — stands against one end. The building crowns a low landscaped rise above South Grand.

The Missouri Pacific Railroad ran its own hospital for employees — one of about forty such railroad hospitals in the country, concentrated in the West and South, of which St. Louis had two (the other being the Frisco's). The railroad's hospital dated to 1884 and stood earlier at Henrietta Street and California Avenue before this building opened on South Grand Boulevard, built in 1922 to a Renaissance Revival design by the architect Charles H. Wray. It held about 375 beds and, like other railroad hospitals, trained medical residents and worked to lower the mortality and disability rates of a dangerous industry, though it did not handle maternity or venereal cases; an order of nuns supplied its nurses. The building later passed out of railroad hands and now serves as the South Campus of Saint Louis University Hospital, under SSM Health.