Charity Hospital — Six Buildings, 270 Years, One Mission

Jean Louis died in 1735 having never built anything in New Orleans except a will. The French sailor left his estate to finance a hospital for the indigent, and on May 10, 1736, Charity Hospital opened at Chartres and Bienville in what is now the French Quarter — one month after Bellevue Hospital in New York, making it the second-oldest continuously operated public hospital in the United States. The colony was eighteen years old. The hospital would move five more times across 270 years, always outgrowing what it had.

By the 1850s, Charity held 1,000 beds, 200 more than the Hôtel-Dieu in Paris — probably the largest hospital in the world. In 1858, during the yellow fever epidemic, 2,727 patients were admitted; 1,382 died. The Sisters of Charity ran the hospital for a century starting in 1834. That same year, three American physicians founded the Medical College of Louisiana, using Charity as a teaching hospital — a tradition that continued into the 1960s.

The sixth and current building rose on Tulane Avenue in 1939, designed by Weiss, Dreyfous & Seiferth, the same architects who built the Louisiana State Capitol. At twenty stories and over one million square feet, it was the second-largest hospital in the United States, with 2,680 beds. The Art Deco structure featured two stone bas-reliefs and a cast-aluminum screen called *Louisiana at Work and Play*, all by Enrique Alférez. By the time of Katrina, Charity served one of the largest populations of uninsured citizens in the country and ran the second-ranked Level I Trauma Center in the nation, behind Cook County Hospital in Chicago.

Hurricane Katrina flooded the hospital in 2005. Patients were ferried through high water, then lifted by helicopter from the roof of Tulane Hospital as toilets backed up, supplies dwindled, and temperatures rose above 100 degrees. Personnel hand-pumped ventilators to breathe for patients and used IV fluids to feed each other after food ran out. Despite the ordeal, only eight patients died. Three weeks later, Governor Kathleen Blanco said Charity would not reopen as a functioning hospital. LSU, which owns the building, built a replacement hospital elsewhere and left the 1939 structure empty.

In October 2019, LSU approved a redevelopment plan to turn the building into housing, retail, and other facilities. The project stalled. In February 2025, Tulane University announced it remains committed to redeveloping the building, with a completion date of 2027. The building is one of the largest abandoned structures in the country. What happens to it is a test of what the city values now that the emergency is over.