A large red brick hospital of four stories and attics, set back on a rise behind a picket fence, with a curving drive climbing to its entrance. Long wings with rows of plain windows were broken by projecting pavilions under steep hipped roofs, small gabled dormers and corner turrets with pointed caps. A tall square tower rose near the entrance, open at the top in a pair of round-arched belfry windows and capped by a steep pyramidal roof with a cross. Later additions for a chapel, novitiate, laundry and more patient rooms grew around it.
German Franciscan Sisters, who had reached Missouri late in 1872, opened St. Anthony's Hospital at Grand Avenue and Chippewa Street in south St. Louis. The first building, dedicated in June 1894, also served as the sisters' home. Within six years they had outgrown it, and a larger hospital on the same site opened in April 1900. The complex kept growing for decades with a chapel, a novitiate, a boiler house, a laundry and more patient wings, and the sisters ran a nursing school there from 1901 to 1935. They moved their motherhouse to Wheaton, Illinois, in 1947, the same year the hospital began treating polio patients, and in 1967 they turned governance over to a lay board. By the late 1960s the old buildings could no longer meet the hospital's needs. A new hospital opened in 1975 at 10010 Kennerly Road, today Mercy Hospital South, and the altar, pews and stained glass of the old chapel went with it. The Grand and Chippewa buildings were demolished in 1975, and a National Super Market opened on the site in November 1976. The store building later became a Habitat for Humanity ReStore.
