A large brick hospital at the corner of Arsenal Street and Sublette Avenue, built at the western edge of the city across from the Insane Asylum, with a companion "House of Industry" next door. Depicted on Plate 95 of Compton & Dry's Pictorial St. Louis (1875). The site is now Sublette Park.
Built with fees collected under the Social Evil Ordinance of July 5, 1870, which made St. Louis the first American city to legalize prostitution. Registered sex workers who failed their mandatory weekly medical exams were confined here for treatment; the adjacent House of Industry, meant to reform them, closed almost immediately. After the ordinance was repealed in 1874 the institution became the Female Hospital, a charity hospital for poor women and children — segregated, with Black patients kept in a separate two-story frame building on the grounds. Josephine Baker was born here on June 3, 1906. The hospital closed in 1910, briefly housed elderly residents of the neighboring Poor House, and was razed in 1915 to create Sublette Park.
