St. Alexius Hospital ran on two campuses in south St. Louis, Missouri, and neither one takes patients now. One is a hospital building on South Broadway. The other is a two-block medical campus on South Jefferson Avenue.
The Broadway hospital opened in 1870 under the Alexian Brothers, a Catholic order. Lutheran Hospital moved to the Jefferson campus in 1883 and stayed a separate institution for about 120 years.
A for-profit operator eventually put both under one name. The hospital closed in August 2023. The two campuses have been drifting apart ever since, because nothing operating is left to hold them together.
Broadway has a recovery hospital proposed for it that hasn't opened. Jefferson is vacant and for sale. City crews came out this summer to mow the grounds at both, and the window openings on Jefferson are exposed to the weather.
A mansion on Broadway, bought in 1869
The Alexian Brothers established their St. Louis branch in 1869 at the former Simonds mansion near today's South Broadway and Osage Street.
Patients were being admitted by 1870. Expansion followed quickly: a new hospital had its cornerstone laid in June 1873 and opened on June 4, 1874.
The building was only 30 feet deep across a 176-foot front, but it could hold 100 patients. The property covered roughly 4.5 acres.
The hospital handled 936 patients in 1881.
Its finances mixed paid care with charity: people with the means to pay were charged, while poor patients could be admitted free.
The inpatient wards were for men. Its later outpatient department also treated women and children.
The physical plant grew again in 1890, when a four-story main building was completed, and another floor followed in 1897.
Capacity had reached 300 patients by 1909.
That year the hospital affiliated with Saint Louis University's medical school, which appointed the hospital's staff.
The fifth floor and the demolition
By the middle of the twentieth century the hospital ran a large psychiatric service, and its beds were on the fifth floor added in 1897.
That floor is where the best-known thing in the hospital's history happened.
In 1949 a Jesuit priest led an exorcism rite authorized by the archbishop of St. Louis, in sessions held at several places around the city, and the last of them took place at the Alexian Brothers hospital shortly before midnight on April 18.
A five-foot statue of Our Lady of Fatima spent Holy Week near the patient's fifth-floor room.
The hospital administrator had originally placed it downstairs in the lobby. The case later fed the book and film The Exorcist.
The old fifth floor doesn't survive.
In the late 1970s the Alexian Brothers demolished the old hospital and built a new complex on the same ground, with a chapel behind it.
The fifth floor came down with everything under it.
The institution never left its corner, and the building anyone picturing 1949 has in mind has been gone for almost 50 years.
Lutheran builds around a red-brick house
Several blocks west, a second hospital had been growing since before the Alexian Brothers arrived.
Lutheran medical work in St. Louis started in 1858 in the home of a church member at Broadway and Geyer, and in 1883 the organization bought the Christian Lange residence at Ohio Avenue and Potomac Street and dedicated it for hospital use on September 4.
The red-brick house is still there.
Everything else grew around it. A nursing school opened in 1898.
Ground was broken for a five-story modern hospital in May 1954, and the building was dedicated on November 13, 1955.
Its 195 beds were full by December 10, taking the hospital to about 350.
A nurses' residence in orange brick and limestone held 96 students and 16 graduate nurses.
Over the next two decades, the campus filled two blocks between Jefferson, Potomac, Ohio, and Miami.
Enclosed bridges joined the hospital, the nursing buildings, and the doctors' offices, so staff and patients could cross between them without going out to the street.
Texas Avenue stopped working as a through street and became part of the hospital's own circulation.
How Broadway and Jefferson became St. Alexius
On Broadway, the Alexian Brothers gave up sponsorship in 1997 after more than a century of running the place themselves.
The hospital stayed open and stayed Catholic, first inside Unity Health and then under St. Anthony's Medical Center, which became its sponsor in 2000 and gave it the name St. Alexius.
When Unity Health broke up the following year, Tenet Healthcare bought the 203-bed St. Alexius. Tenet was already running SouthPointe.
That is how the two lineages met.
By 2004 Tenet was describing St. Alexius as one hospital with two campuses, Broadway and Jefferson, the second of them the former SouthPointe.
Acute care stayed on Broadway.
Jefferson got the offices and the specialty work, including a 35-bed rehabilitation pavilion on a campus that had run about 350 beds when it was Lutheran.
By 2020, the nursing school founded in 1898 was still on Jefferson, alongside primary-care and intensive outpatient psychiatric services.
How Broadway and Jefferson became St. Alexius
On Broadway, the Alexian Brothers gave up sponsorship in 1997 after more than a century of running the place themselves.
The hospital stayed open and stayed Catholic, first inside Unity Health and then under St. Anthony's Medical Center, which became its sponsor in 2000 and gave it the name St. Alexius.
When Unity Health broke up the following year, Tenet Healthcare bought the 203-bed St. Alexius. Tenet was already running SouthPointe.
That is how the two lineages met.
By 2004 Tenet was describing St. Alexius as one hospital with two campuses, Broadway and Jefferson, the second of them the former SouthPointe.
Acute care stayed on Broadway.
Jefferson got the offices and the specialty work, including a 35-bed rehabilitation pavilion on a campus that had run about 350 beds when it was Lutheran.
By 2020, the nursing school founded in 1898 was still on Jefferson, alongside primary-care and intensive outpatient psychiatric services.
The last patients left in two days
The hospital changed hands repeatedly over the next 17 years and went through two owners' bankruptcies.
In January 2021 SA Hospital Acquisition Group closed on both campuses and renamed the whole operation South City Hospital.
A year later a $27 million ground-lease financing was announced to modernize the Broadway building, from the cardiac catheterization laboratory to the intensive care unit and the cafeteria.
The work was interrupted and never finished as announced.
The nursing school on Jefferson closed in July 2022, ending a line of nursing education that ran from 1898.
When the receiver took over in 2023, half the elevators were down and the cooling system was only partly working.
Closure moved quickly once the money ran out. Months of missed lease payments had already led the ground lessor to seek a receiver on May 15.
Further operating support ended on August 2, with no replacement funding available, and the receiver had transferred the patients and laid off almost all clinical staff by August 4.
Missouri's WARN list records the closure on August 3 and counts 563 affected employees.
The state kept the hospital license suspended for 90 days in case a buyer emerged. None did.
Where St. Alexius stands in 2026
St. Alexius Hospital, at 3933 South Broadway in St. Louis, Missouri, opened as Alexian Brothers Hospital in 1870 and closed as South City Hospital in 2023.
Its Jefferson campus, at 3535 South Jefferson Avenue, opened as a Lutheran hospital in 1883 and is empty.
The two sites share nothing now but a name neither of them uses. Broadway has a proposal on it.
St. Louis Recovery Hospital filed a letter of intent in October 2024 for a 41-bed psychiatric and substance-use hospital at the same address, and Missouri cleared it of certificate-of-need review in February 2025.
The company registered as a general acute care hospital at that address in May 2025 and has been advertising for nurses, counselors, and a medical director.
It is not a participating Medicare provider.
Its service pages describe a licensed hospital taking inpatients around the clock, and its front page still says the hospital is coming soon.
Which part of the old building would hold the 41 beds is not on record.
Jefferson has a queue of problems instead.
City agencies cleared and secured the complex in May 2024 after the owner didn't, and a neighborhood association and other plaintiffs filed a nuisance action under Missouri's Abandoned Housing Act.
The pending case puts a claim in the title record that can hold up a sale.
The property went on the market anyway in May 2026, 486,900 square feet on 8.8 acres appraised at about $1.2 million, and several nursing-school parcels failed at tax sale and headed for the city land bank.
On Jefferson the window openings are exposed, and the Lange residence still stands at Ohio and Potomac with the old Lutheran entrance beside it. The lawsuit is still pending.
Meanwhile, the city's new Plan Area 7 neighborhood plan is moving through a process that runs into 2027, and the former hospital is already a major subject in talks with residents.
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