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11 Most Endangered
St. Elizabeths Hospital
Year Listed: 2002
Location: Washington , District of Columbia
Current Status: Endangered
Threat: Demolition
Latest News
Importantly, the Department of Homeland Security can't move forward with its destructive proposal unless it guarantees a highway access road to the site. GSA and DHS want to seize national parkland to build the road, and the National Park Service – commendably – has not agreed to transfer the property. For more details on this unique legal situation, please read the Section 4(f) comments from the National Trust and the Department of Interior.
St. Elizabeth’s Hospital Administration Building, Washington, DC.
Credit: Washington, D.C. Preservation League
Significance
It may be the most famous mental hospital in America, but now Washington, D.C.'s St. Elizabeths Hospital – a sprawling 300-acre complex that dates back to the 1850s and has housed such notorious residents as John Hinckley and the poet Ezra Pound – is also one of the most endangered. This National Historic Landmark – which at one time included a railroad, bakery, greenhouse and an impressive collection of Victorian and Colonial Revival buildings – is crumbling, and a shrinking patient population has left many historically significant structures vacant.
Updates
Read the online version of an op-ed by National Trust for Historic Preservation President Richard Moe that appeared in the Washington Post on Thursday, January 8, 2009.
The master plan for St. Elizabeths has been approved by the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts and the National Capital Planning Commission. The National Trust continues to participate in project review to minimize harm to the site.
Vacant and unused but no longer seriously threatened with demolition by neglect, rampant water damage and vandalism, St. Elizabeths is now the target for an oversized re-development scheme by the General Services Administration (GSA) and the Department of Homeland Security which would shoehorn more than six million gross square feet of office space and parking structures into this pristine and salvageable National Historic Landmark.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation along with the D.C. Preservation League, the Committee of 100 on the Federal City, the National Park Service, the National Coalition to Save Our Mall, the Commission of Fine Arts, the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation [link], and the D.C. Historic Preservation Office produced a consensus report detailing where new development might be appropriately sited, designed and scaled on the West Campus of St. Elizabeths. Unfortunately, GSA ignored the consensus recommendation of the coalition – and direction from the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts and the National Capital Planning Commission – to develop a proposal with a maximum above-ground density of 2.5 million gross square feet on the West Campus, citing the Department of Homeland Security's much larger consolidation need.
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