Albatross or opportunity?

Earlier this month, the Gazette ran a story referring to the old St. Catherine’s Hospital as an “albatross” hanging around the city’s neck for “more than a decade.” That’s a powerful image. Is our lovely old building really that bad? Well, it wouldn’t be the hardest case to make.

The building, now 100 years old, spent the first 50 years of its existence as a thriving hospital that brought health and well-being to our city and the surrounding area. The second half of the building’s lifetime has been comparatively inglorious, leading us to the structure that stands today, vacant and in disrepair.

When I first moved to Nebraska in 1994, I looked around for a cheap place to rent as I set up my new business in downtown McCook. Among other options, I learned that our old hospital had been out of business for 20 years and that the majestic old building had been converted to apartments. My mind immediately leapt to the swanky downtown lofts I had seen in urban manufacturing areas, but my first impressions of the St. Catherine’s were very different.

In addition to the toys strewn around the complex, I was stunned to see that someone had erected a clothesline on the front lawn of the building. Apparently, curb appeal was not a priority for management, and the interior reflected a similar lack of care. I recall thinking that the property didn’t look like a successful repurposing project, and those suspicions were eventually confirmed. In 2010, when the apartments closed, 22 households were displaced and at least 46 units were taken off McCook’s already tight rental market.

The next owner was a disabled veteran who was a genuinely nice guy. He had the very best of intentions but wasn’t able to make a go of it either. I wouldn’t pretend to know the reasons why that effort was not successful, but it was not a failure of imagination. At one time, he went so far as to invite a team of ghost hunters armed with electronic gadgets to investigate the building, but even that wasn’t enough to save the project. Now time has taken a toll. Fifty years of diminishing care has resulted in boarded windows, a home for the occasional feral animal and a magnet for graffiti and mischief.

With all of that in mind, it’s still hard to ignore my soft spot for old buildings. Once we lose them, we can’t get them back. I’m still hot about the Ralph Brooks home. Razing the home of a former Governor to put a jail exactly where the commercial district meets residential was two mistakes for the price of one and for the record, I’m still not over it.

While I can’t believe we let that happen to our downtown, the Brooks home was by no means an architectural wonder. The hospital, on the other hand, is an impressive property. It was built at the dawn of the Art Deco movement and incorporates a few of the themes associated with that era, but with the serious modesty that one would expect from an organization run by nuns.

When I look at the oldest, main section of the building, I imagine that it survived the Depression, Prohibition, the dust bowl, a world war, the booming fifties and Vietnam. I think of all of the babies who were born there, the old homesteaders who died there, and the multitude of personal dramas that unfolded within those halls. Many chapters are long forgotten, but the energy and purpose of that institution have left an imprint on our community just the same.

So, back to our albatross analogy. What can we do with an awkwardly located white elephant that was once beloved by all and now useful to none? Is that an albatross around our necks, or is it asbestos? As of this writing, no definitive proposal has been brought forward, but current ownership is working the problem.

While I genuinely share our friend Mr. Trail’s concerns about the redistribution of our money and the additional debt owed by our grandchildren, experience tells us that any large, disintegrating structure with no conventional business model to support it, eventually becomes a public project by default. Challenges like this one are best handled locally, but given the magnitude of this effort, a bit of assistance from our oversized government could come in handy. We are, after all, in direct competition for business development with our Colorado neighbors, who are more than delighted to take advantage of Uncle Sam’s largess at every turn and have a housing supply to show for it.

Regardless of its questionable origins, the funding made available can either help preserve our old hospital or flatten it. My gut tells me that the building will cost substantially more than a million dollars to become viable, so the probabilities, unfortunately, lie in demolition rather than redevelopment. I hope I’m wrong, but more importantly, I just hope that whatever we do looks better in the rearview mirror than our county jail.