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Endangered Charity Hospital and Mid-City Neighborhood – and the Fight to Save Them

Historic Places in Danger

Despite Post-Katrina recovery efforts, Charity Hospital's doors were permanently locked when the building was deemed unsafe and unusable by the Louisiana State University Medical System. Today, the iconic building's future remains uncertain.

Charity Hospital is a major Art Deco landmark completed in 1939 as a Public Works Administration project and designed by the same architectural team that created Governor Huey Long's Art Deco skyscraper state capitol building in Baton Rouge eight years earlier. Within its sturdy overbuilt limestone-clad walls and a million square feet of space, it served New Orleans and the region as a leading public hospital and teaching facility until Hurricane Katrina struck on August 29, 2005. Close-by is the historic Lower Mid-City neighborhood in which home and business owners, heeding Mayor Nagin's call to return and rebuild, worked to restore their homes and businesses after the flood waters subsided.  

Within weeks of Katrina's landfall, Army and volunteer doctors had achieved major cleanup and repair of a substantial portion of Charity Hospital. This was abruptly cut short by Louisiana State University's order to close Charity in late September. 

The Threat

A row of houses in Mid-City.

The threat to the Mid-City neighborhood and Charity Hospital are the plans announced by LSU and Veterans Affairs in November 2008 to build new medical centers in the Mid-City neighborhood. This would cause the clearance of 67 acres of land – 25 square blocks. This includes the demolition of 165 historic structures, most of them homes and all contributing to the Mid-City National Register Historic District. The buildings targeted for demolition include a restored landmark school and thriving small businesses. This is a classic Urban Renewal clear-the-land model, demolishing vast numbers of homes in a city desperately in need of more housing.

In addition, the plans abandon Charity Hospital, leaving it to an uncertain fate and pulling major economic drivers out of the still-struggling Central Business District.  

A Better Alternative

RMJM Hillier, an internationally known architectural firm with extensive expertise in large medical facilities, was commissioned in 2008 to assess the feasibility of re-using Charity Hospital. The study was done by authorization of the Louisiana Legislature through the Foundation for Historical Louisiana. The extensive engineering and planning study concluded that –

Philadelphia architectural firm RMJM Hillier's rendering of a renovated Charity Hospital. The firm says it will be faster and cheaper to renovate the building than constructing a new complex.

Credit: RMJM Hillier

• Charity Hospital is structurally sound. Its shell, floor plates and high ceilings provide the valuable framework for a 21st century medical facility to be built within it. 
• This alternative would cost 22% less than a comparable brand new, one-million-square-foot facility as LSU proposes. Using federal and state tax credits, this re-use of Charity would cost 38% less than the new construction.
• The alternative could be accomplished two years faster than the process of acquiring land and building the comparable new facility.
• The reuse of Charity Hospital for this 21st century use returns it as the anchor of the state's medical center in the New Orleans Central Business District and enables the VA medical center to be built on a portion of the land proposed for LSU, drastically reducing the number of demolitions.
• The re-use creates a compact urban medical district more closely tied to other institutions like Tulane University's hospital and medical school, Delgado School of Nursing, the Cancer Consortium and the Bio-Innovations Center.

This professional study has thus opened the door for an alternative to the destructive, time-consuming and expensive plans proposed by LSU and the VA.  

National Trust Actions

Take action! Use our online form to tell Gov. Jindal that you're concerned about the future of the historic Charity Hospital building and the surrounding Mid-City historic neighborhood in New Orleans.

• The National Trust with the Foundation for Historical Louisiana and the Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans have formed a coalition totaling 62 organizations – local and national, including the American Planning Association, Congress for the New Urbanism and the World Monuments Fund. The coalition is calling on Governor Jindal to order a side-by-side comparison of the LSU/VA plan and the alternative RMJM Hillier plan, and for the New Orleans Planning Commission and City Council to hold public hearings on the plans.
• The National Trust has been an active participant in the federal historic preservation and environmental reviews of the LSU-VA plans. In considering the Mid-City sites, the state and the VA declared that their plans had "no significant impact" on the neighborhood. The National Trust subsequently filed suit in Federal Court challenging these determinations under federal environmental law.
• As a participant in meetings reviewing preliminary design schemes for the LSU academic medical center, the National Trust has called attention to the fact that far more land is being cleared than will be built upon, and has called into question the use of eminent domain for the proposal to use up to half the land for commercial development.
• Some state legislators have grown impatient with LSU's lack of transparency in providing detailed information on how LSU proposed to finance the construction and operation of a new hospital. The fear is that land could be cleared, and houses demolished, all for nothing. The National Trust worked actively in Baton Rouge for the passage of a bill designed to prevent a result that would leave large swaths of vacant land.
• Visit our Save Mid-City page for additional information, resources and updates, and click here to take action to help save 165 historic structures from demolition and the landmark Charity Hospital from abandonment.

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