ST. LOUIS — City officials said Friday that they have cleared out and boarded up the former Lutheran School of Nursing, which has been vacant since the school shuttered almost two years ago.
The nursing school opened in 1898, and was recently run by South City Hospital, formerly St. Alexius Hospital. The school shut down in 2022, citing financial challenges. The hospital closed last year.
The mayor’s office said the buildings on Jefferson Avenue and Miami Street had become a safety issue, and Alderwoman Alisha Sonnier said the steps taken Friday were a result of Gravois Park residents’ persistent concerns. No neighborhood should be “plagued with this degree of neglect,” Sonnier said in a statement.
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In recent years the nursing school had operated as a department of South City Hospital, and was troubled by the same financial problems. Beginning in 2018 the hospital endured an accelerating series of bankruptcies, changes of ownership and a revolving door of leadership until it, too, closed last year.
Leading up to the school’s closure, the state nursing board cited it for financial issues and high faculty turnover. The board pressured administrators to vacate one of the buildings for mold and pest issues, and for a time imposed a moratorium on admissions.
The school’s former leaders fought for its survival. Despite its challenges, they believed firmly that the Lutheran School of Nursing served an important purpose. It offered a diploma program, which is faster and far less common than a bachelor’s or associate’s degree program.
The school attracted recent high school graduates, parents and second-career students alike. If they had already taken some general education classes, students could finish the program in about two years, for around $24,000.
“Our school is a school of second chances,” an instructor told the Post-Dispatch in 2020. “We just got to weather the storm.”
Connor Kerrigan, a spokesman for Mayor Tishaura O. Jones, said city officials met with the property owners, who agreed to take other security measures.
City records show that the property is still owned by SA Hospital Real Estate Holdings, a company operated by the former owners of South City Hospital.
Attempts to reach the owners for comment were unsuccessful.