This essay appeared in the first print issue of The Ampersand, May 2002.

The abandoned City Hospital complex sits prominently perched at a major junction of two interstate highways just south of downtown Saint Louis. The imposing twelve-building complex has sat mysteriously vacant since the city closed the hospital in 1985. All sorts of odd stories -- all real in some way -- have been told about the buildings since they closed. There was a criminal gang using an ambulance garage for an automobile “chop-shop”. A police dog broke a leg in a fall while chasing thieves through the building. There are underground tunnels linking the complex. The city left whole desks full of files and office supplies in the building. About the only thing about the buildings that you won’t hear about are what the nonhuman animals are up to there.

One of the first time I saw the buildings, around 1993, I immediately noticed how a group of squirrels climbed the Administration Building’s window sills and stone courses without care. And then, how many birds fluttered about the stripped skeletons of the once-copper cupolas. The buildings must be home to more than just the occasional homeless person or criminal, I thought. At the time, I lived with my parents across the river in rural Monroe County, Illinois. I was very aware of the animal presence in the abandoned barns there, so I had an instant analogy to draw upon in this very urban setting.

I continued to pass the buildings, impressed with their marvelous Georgian Revival architecture as much as their suggestive glimpses into a strange urban ecology. These buildings and their grounds -- which were left unfenced -- teemed with life that was both familiar and strange. Familiar because the species of animals and plants were well known to me out in the country, but strange because they were found in unfamiliar contexts, like the scrub trees growing out of fifth-floor guttering. The buildings mesmerized me every time that I visited them, which was quite frequent.

Early on, the buildings were located in a sort of green ghetto. The vacant hospital was surrounded by other forms of vacancy: on the east, long blocks of vacant public housing towers surrounded by overgrown lawns; on the south, a strip of vacant houses cut off from their neighborhood by an interstate highway; on the west, a huge vacant lot (once the site of a nurses’ school) that was part of a string of vacant lots the city was assembling for a still-unrealized parkway; on the north, then-rundown low-rise public housing. In this area were few resident humans, and many opportunities for flora and fauna to occupy the buildings that people had abandoned.

The palpable vacancy in the area at first made me fear the hospital neighborhood as a place that was fundamentally unsafe. And, at first, the neighborhood was indeed the scene of crimes. Later, though, the vacancy spread entirely and even criminals stopped using the streets around the hospital for their activities. The neighborhood was simply vacant -- it had no human presence at most hours, save those drivers of cars passing through. But the growth of plants and animals was increasingly impressive. Spontaneous pear trees appeared on the grounds and began blooming annually. Birds made elaborate nests inside windows on the buildings. The vacant lots to the west of the buildings, some paved with crumbling asphalt, sprouted wild grasses and morning glory. Occasionally I took photographs of the developing ghetto, but mostly I came to watch.

Eventually, economics tried to subsume ecological processes and the green ghetto was consumed by developers. The low-rise housing was renovated before the high-rise towers and overgrown lots were leveled. Now, the lots are being covered in condominium units with brick and vinyl walls -- all set on manicured lawns with carefully-chosen landscaping. The vacant buildings to the south have been divided up as an urban subdivision. Those units still habitable have been slated for renovation, while the others have been demolished as lots for new homes. The casual wisteria growths and the rabbits are nowhere to be found. A green ghetto that grew untouched for ten years, claiming new land every year, was wiped clean in two years.

The City Hospital then was left where it started: the large imposing vacancy in the center of a changing neighborhood. Only this time the transition was from green to blacktop, and the hospital would not escape the inversion of the forces it started. It could not continue to remain fallow in the midst of redevelopment. When I heard that the hospital was finally being redeveloped, and that most of the buildings were to be renovated, I was partly saddened. The extent of the hospital’s integration into its neighborhood was becoming so full by late 2001; its second nature seemed betted suited to be the foundation for the first nature returning to its site. To strip the hospital back to its intended utility would destroy a beautiful ecology even if it ensured that beautiful architecture would be preserved.

Before the buildings were fenced off in October 2001, I finally went inside of them with a friend. I stayed inside for nearly five hours, and was so amazed at what I saw that I only left when I thought that someone passing by had seen us through a window. Much of the time inside was spent figuring out ways around the obstacles the city had placed to discourage unwanted visitors. Of course, the space was still heavily vandalized. Thieves took anything with resell value, even from the newer and better-secured tower building where we spent the most of our time. Copper wiring and pipes were ripped out of walls, elevator doors were dangerously missing on open shafts, and everything else was smashed or spray-painted. A few makeshift campfires and homemade beds were evident throughout the 14-floor tower, but otherwise the human presence seemed as remote and destructive as the still graffiti. Who would expect a human to try to make a home out of this space?

There are obvious reasons why one would not live here, the abundant insulation being foremost. The place smells funny. I can’t put it any other way. There is an overwhelming smell of everything -- a damp and fertile smell of concrete, wood and dirt. Most everything left in the hospital is made from a few materials: brick, plaster, glass, metal, wood, concrete or paper. A few fixtures remain, like the microscope chained to a desk on the third floor and the footstool down the hall. But everything else is readily biodegradable and is decaying. The floors are covered in plaster, dirt, broken glass and paper. There is not much green growing in the dark confines of the buildings’ interior, although there is plenty of materials to root in.

Surprisingly, the only nonhuman animals I saw in the buildings were pigeons nesting in a tenth-floor room where the windows were missing. We neither saw nor heard any cats, rats, mice or snakes. No insects, either. We did not visit the dark and wet basement, of course, but we did travel a first floor hall with no natural light. No residents came to see us, or else they were well hidden. I had heard of bats living in these halls, but apparently not in any part of the complex that I visited.

While we were exploring, there was a brief windy downpour which caused the buildings themselves to be animated. Doors were blown open and shut in a cacophony of slams. We remained in the few seats left in an old lecture hall, listening. Here was first nature animating second nature. It was beautiful while it lasted.