People’s Hospital

A three-story building of dark brown brick trimmed in gray stone, its Locust Street front centered on a round-arched entrance with a fanlight and keyed stone surround, the address 2221 cut into the transom bar. A denticulated stone band and a bracketed sheet-metal cornice cap the front. A granite base carries a bronze plaque and a carved inscription, and a taller brick block with a battlemented chimney rises behind. The building steps back along the side street in a long, plainer brick elevation of segmental-arched openings, much of it now boarded.

The building was erected in 1903 for the St. Louis Provident Association, a charity organization, to the design of the architect J. H. Lynch; its granite base is carved with the association's motto on charity and self-help. On October 10, 1944, it was occupied by People's Hospital — founded in 1894 as one of the few St. Louis hospitals that admitted African American patients under segregation, staffed by Black physicians and nurses and running one of the city's first nurse-training programs for Black women. People's Hospital closed in 1967 amid financial trouble; after brief use by other charities, including the Brennan Center for the Blind, the building has stood largely vacant since 1972.