Northview Village Nursing Home in St. Louis, Missouri, was the largest nursing home in the city, 320 beds in the old DePaul Hospital, which opened in 1930 and is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
It closed on December 15, 2023, in the hours after a payroll failure, and its 174 residents were moved out overnight, most to a dozen or more other homes.
A fire tore through part of the first floor at 2415 North Kingshighway on December 2, 2024. The nursing home had been vacant for nearly a year.
The paperwork has moved faster than the building. A federal court awarded former staff $1.9 million in 2025. As of August 2026, the old DePaul Hospital is still on Missouri's National Register list.
The hospital that opened in 1930
Ground broke at 2415 North Kingshighway in north St. Louis in 1928, a century after four sisters opened a three-room log hospital on Spruce Street, paid for by John Mullanphy.
This time the Daughters of Charity built a campus: seven interconnected masonry buildings, one to nine stories, around courtyards, the central one half an acre.
DePaul Hospital opened in August 1930.
People came in through a two-story arch with a carved head of Christ at the keystone, into a lobby with marble floors and walnut-paneled walls.
Orange Spanish tile on the roofs. A chapel with mosaic tile and a carved wooden altar.
The complex won a St. Louis better-building award for buildings constructed that year.
When DePaul left for Bridgeton
DePaul ran there for nearly 47 years, and then the region moved out from under it.
In 1969 DePaul, St. Vincent's, and St. Anne's combined under one organization, which bought land in Bridgeton and started a $48 million medical center there in December 1972.
The new 334-bed division was finished in March 1977, and DePaul left Kingshighway that month.
A businessman leased the building that April at $10,000 a month, and North St. Louis General Hospital reopened the first and second floors.
Rent went unpaid for October, November, and December. The lease was terminated just before Christmas, and the hospital closed in January 1978.
Turning a hospital into a nursing home
In 1981 Tower Village Nursing Care Center set out to convert the hospital into a nursing home with state and federal money.
The old nursing school was going to be apartments for older residents.
DePaul Hospital was listed in the National Register of Historic Places on March 29, 1983, during the work, and nursing operations were running by 1984.
The financing came apart. A 1985 restructuring put a $1.95 million state housing loan at 11 percent interest behind the project.
Tower Village defaulted anyway, and in October 1987 the operating lease was surrendered, clearing the way for HUD to take title.
The Northview Village name was already in the paperwork by 1985, when the project was called Northview Village Nursing Center, formerly Tower Village Nursing Care Center.
Medicare and Medicaid certification came on December 7, 1992.
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Northview Village at 320 beds
Northview Village Nursing Home grew into a 320-bed skilled nursing facility, the largest nursing home in the city of St. Louis.
Recruitment ads in May 1993 wanted nurses and nursing assistants and offered on-site day care.
Older adults, people with physical disabilities, and short-term rehab patients shared the building with a growing number of people who needed psychiatric or behavioral care, as Missouri cut its own institutional capacity.
Medicaid paid $132 per resident per day in 2010, and nursing assistants earned at or near minimum wage.
Northview was one of the few places in St. Louis that would take someone whose diagnosis or finances made placement hard elsewhere.
Twelve fines and a one-star rating
Between March 2021 and December 2023, federal regulators fined Northview 12 times, more than $140,000 in all.
A February 2023 complaint found that a resident had gotten out through an unsecured door. The federal rating was one star out of five.
The books were worse.
In 2022 the home spent $16.4 million against $13.3 million in revenue, and it had lost a special Medicaid payment worth $1 million a year.
From 2020 to 2022, $1.5 million a year went to owner compensation, administrative services, and rent paid to related businesses.
In 2019 the building held 253 residents. By the last quarter of 2023 it averaged 168.9 a day, half of its 320 beds.
The Friday the paychecks stopped
Direct deposits didn't land on Friday, December 15, 2023.
Staff found out around 3 p.m. One of the owners had refused to pay. At 4:15 p.m. the state was told the home was closing.
There were 174 residents inside. Shuttle buses and emergency crews moved residents through the night to a dozen or more nursing homes nearby.
An elevator stuck for 30 minutes with nine people in it, one of them in a wheelchair. The last resident left before 6 a.m.
Some arrived in the clothes they had on, with no medication list or records.
The phones went down, and families calling to find a relative couldn't be told where they'd gone.
Two residents left with no transfer at all. One turned up the next day at a gas station seven miles away.
The other, a 61-year-old man, was missing for more than three weeks before he was found alive in early January.
What's left at 2415 North Kingshighway
Northview gave up its Missouri license, and its Medicare and Medicaid agreements ended on December 17.
Federal regulators charged $56,500 for three days.
Then the building sat. A fire on December 2, 2024 heavily damaged part of the first floor.
It still stands, windows broken, its National Register listing active, with no public plan to restore or demolish it as of August 2026.
A registered nurse sued a week after the closure for about 180 people who lost their jobs without the 60 days of notice federal law requires.
The company's lawyers withdrew and weren't replaced, and in September 2025 the court entered a default judgment of $1.9 million.
In July 2026 the judgment was registered in a federal court in Illinois to continue collection.
The people who worked that last shift are still waiting on the money.
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