Barnes-Jewish Hospital continues to make its mark on the east side of Kingshighway across from Forest Park. In a couple of years, a massive new building will rise on the blocks north of Children’s Hospital. The design, which you can see here, is clearly responding to other massive hospital projects popping up across America, such as the recently opened “signature building” at Chicago’s Rush University Medical Center.
The old Jewish Hospital is now largely gutted, and I suspect they will begin to take the exterior walls down soon. It’s a bit surreal to see the building without all of the mature trees obscuring it.
The plans call for Parkview Place to become a tunnel under the building; I can’t imagine how miserable of a place that section of street will be.
There was almost nothing left of the Schoenberg Pavilion when I photographed it last week, and I would imagine even less is left now.
As I mentioned at the earlier post, while it is sad to see this segment of history lost, I must also weigh it against the continued expansion of one of the best hospitals in the world. Surely ideology must be put aside for practical reasons at times. Kingshighway as a walkable street is already impossible, and the new building will no more detract from the “traffic sewer” conditions along this section of the boulevard than the old buildings.
Taking a look at the renditions of the new buildings (as shown on NextSTL) I find it really amusing that there appears to be a “green space” integrated into the whole layout. As if they are forgetting that there is one of the largest city parks in the world directly across the street.
Granted, it looks as though that green space (if it actually IS one) may be a few floors up, and in order to get to Forest Park you’d have to get across Kingshighway without dying, but it seems like a Pedestrian bridge could be considered?
Either way, I do feel that we’re pretty fortunate to have this complex in our town, and I am excited to see the new building.
We should not have to weigh hospital expansion against legacy architecture. If the right safeguards were in place, we could have had a fabulous new building AND kept some of the old beauties.
You make a strong argument for better planning; the whole hospital complex is a very poorly organized conglomeration of buildings. Better utilization of existing land could save a lot of the historic buildings in this area.