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Most Endangered Places
2002

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Most Endangered Places for 2002

St. Elizabeths Hospital (Government Hospital for the Insane)
2700 Martin Luther King, Jr. Avenue, SE

The St. Elizabeths Hospital site is composed of more than 300 acres in the Anacostia section of Southeast Washington, DC. Most of the original 19th century buildings are on the west campus, which is owned by the Federal Government. To the north of the oldest of these buildings is a magnificent vista over the city of Washington and the Potomac River to Virginia, a prospect that had been chosen for curative purposes. The grounds are graced by specimen trees gathered from around the world over a century ago. The buildings to the east of Martin Luther King Ave., which are owned by the DC Government, are largely of the twentieth century and both sides have a campus layout with a succession of quadrangles, with curving drives between. There are just over forty contributing historic structures.

The site is well known and prominent in the mental health field. St. Elizabeths was the first large scale government run insane asylum, the result of Dorthea Dix’s persistent lobbying of Congress. The lack of government funding for maintenance, pressure to develop the property and the failure to plan for adaptive reuse of the buildings are the fundamental threats to this historic site.

St. Elizabeths is listed as a National Historic Landmark and on the National Register, but not designated as a local landmark or historic district, and hence, it enjoys no protection under the DC Historic Preservation Law. The grounds were open to the general public until about ten years ago, but entrance to the grounds is now restricted. The threat could be mitigated and potentially eliminated by funding preservation campaigns and by finding appropriate adaptive reuse strategies for many of the buildings.

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