Abandonment as Process: Columbia Hall and St. Michael’s Hospital

This week, I’ve started to photograph the old Columbia Hall-St. Michael’s Hospital building which is slated for demolition next spring (and a destructive asbestos mitigation process in the new year). It’s a pretty cool site which shows signs of three major phases. The original phase as a hospital is visible particularly on the upper floors, where shared rooms, surgeries, and even the nursery is visible. Most of the rooms were adapted to serve as offices at some point. Bathrooms were turned into storage closets and oddly tiled “wet” room were carpeted and turned into lounges or student spaces. Finally, the building is abandoned today and undergoing the usual transformations of an abandoned structure. Spaces are used for permanent storage of old equipment and furniture, spaces show conspicuous signs of neglect, and many of the rooms were disturbed during asbestos testing with holes in walls and torn up carpets. Tomorrow, a local SWAT team is going to use some of the space for training.…

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