Charity Hospital: New Orleans' Abandoned Giant That Never Reopened

Charity Hospital in New Orleans was built on a promise that sounds almost impossible now: walk in and get treated, money or no money. It was founded in 1736, long before the city even hit its stride, and for generations it stayed true to that mission.

Then the building everybody recognizes, the massive Art Deco tower on Tulane Avenue, opened during the Great Depression and became a training ground for LSU and Tulane doctors. About 100,000 patients a year came through those doors, but the whole system hinged on something as simple as electricity staying on.

And on August 29, 2005, when Hurricane Katrina broke the levees, Charity’s basement became the first place the disaster got personal.

One of the Oldest Hospitals in America

Charity is almost as old as New Orleans itself. The hospital was founded on May 10, 1736, paid for by the will of a French sailor and shipbuilder named Jean Louis, who left his estate to fund care for the poor of the colony. The city had only existed since 1718. Eighteen years later it had a hospital for anyone who couldn't pay, originally named L'Hôpital des Pauvres de la Charité, the Charity Hospital for the Poor.

That mission held for centuries. Charity became one of the oldest continually operating public hospitals in the country, second only to one in the entire United States. It was a place built on a simple promise: walk in, and you get treated, money or no money.

The building most people picture today went up much later. In 1939, during the Great Depression, the state commissioned a towering Art Deco hospital on Tulane Avenue, funded through federal public works programs and designed by the same architects who built the Louisiana State Capitol. The finished tower was staggering. Around 2,680 beds, a full million square feet, an entire city block. For a time it was the second-largest hospital in the United States.

It was also a teaching hospital, where medical students from both LSU and Tulane trained. Doctors who worked there describe it as one of the best teaching hospitals in the country, a place that saw roughly 100,000 patients a year.

Generations of physicians learned trauma medicine in its halls, and medicine itself moved forward inside those walls, sometimes through careful research and sometimes through the kind of lucky accident that has shaped science for centuries. For a working-class, largely uninsured population, Charity was a safety net. Then the levees broke.

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Before Katrina, Jean Louis’s old idea of care for the poor kept the place running, even when the city could barely keep up.

By 1939, that promise had a skyline-sized home on Tulane Avenue, with thousands of beds and a million square feet waiting for the next patient.

What Happened Inside Charity During Katrina

Hurricane Katrina made landfall on August 29, 2005. When the New Orleans levees failed, floodwater poured into the city and into Charity's basement.

That basement held the hospital's electrical and mechanical systems. Underwater, they died. The hospital lost power and running water, and the towering building turned into a trap. Hundreds of patients and staff were stuck inside, in late-August Louisiana heat, with no air conditioning, dwindling supplies, and floodwater rising in the streets outside.

The conditions became horrific. The basement morgue flooded too, and staff were instructed to move bodies out of the water and stack them in the stairwells. Toilets backed up. Temperatures inside climbed past 100 degrees. When equipment failed, doctors and nurses hand-pumped oxygen to keep critically ill patients breathing, taking turns, hour after hour. The smell, one doctor recalled, was so overpowering that people were physically sick.

Evacuation was agonizingly slow. Patients were paddled out through flooded streets on small boats to a nearby parking deck, then carried up as many as seven flights of stairs, then airlifted by helicopter from the roof of nearby Tulane Hospital. At one point the rescue effort was reportedly halted by rumors of sniper fire. It took about a week to get the last patient out.

Against those odds, the death toll inside Charity stayed remarkably low. More people died in other New Orleans hospitals during the same crisis. The staff who held that building together for a week did something close to miraculous.

The dread of those flooded corridors, water rising over everything familiar, is the same primal unease people feel looking at eerie things found underwater. Except this was a hospital full of people, in the dark, waiting for help that kept not arriving.

And speaking of old institutions, Paris’ summer growth over a tunnel network of six million skeletons is wild.

The Decision That Made Charity an Abandoned Hospital

Here is where Charity's story turns from disaster to dispute.

Three weeks after Katrina, Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco announced that Charity Hospital would not reopen. The Louisiana State University System, which owned the building, said it had no plans to bring the hospital back at its original location.

The storm caused an estimated $340 million in damage, and officials declared the facility unsalvageable. A lot of people who were there strongly disagreed.

By many firsthand accounts, Charity flooded mainly in the basement, not throughout the tower. In the weeks after the storm, a volunteer force of more than 200 doctors, nurses, technicians, and military personnel reportedly pumped out the water, cleaned the building, and got it close to "medical ready," in some descriptions cleaner than before the storm.

Retired Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, who commanded the military Katrina task force, was among those who said the building could function again. Architects later argued Charity could have been fully modernized in about three years for roughly $550 million.

Instead, it stayed shut. Critics, including writers cited by The Nation, have called the closure a textbook case of "disaster capitalism," a phrase popularized by author Naomi Klein, arguing that LSU and state officials used the chaos and displacement after Katrina to do something that would have been politically impossible otherwise: abandon the old safety-net hospital and replace it with a new facility built more around paying patients and academic prestige.

That replacement is the University Medical Center, which opened in Mid-City in 2015 at a cost of roughly $1.1 to $1.2 billion. To build it and the neighboring veterans hospital, the city used eminent domain to clear a large stretch of a historic neighborhood, and hundreds of homes were demolished or moved.

The new complex has fewer psychiatric beds, no birthing unit in some accounts, and sits across an interstate from the downtown core, harder to reach for the poor population Charity once served.

Whether you read it as a hard call after a catastrophe or as a quiet abandonment of a promise, the result is the same. Big Charity never treated another patient.

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Then on August 29, 2005, the levees failed, floodwater rushed into the basement, and the hospital’s lifelines started going under.

Once the electrical and mechanical systems were compromised, the same doors that welcomed everyone could no longer reopen the way they used to.

Charity Hospital Today

The building has loomed over downtown New Orleans, empty, ever since. Behind its fences, weeds grow and the facade flakes. The state has paid millions of dollars a year just to secure and maintain a hospital that does nothing.

Over the years it picked up a second life as a local legend. The towering, shuttered structure became a fixture on the city's ghost tours and the subject of paranormal rumors, the way so many abandoned hospitals and asylums do once they fall silent. Its silhouette is so classically ominous that part of the 2023 vampire film Renfield was shot there, after a production designer remarked the building looked like a vampire's castle.

Few abandoned structures in America match its sheer scale, short of vast, eerie human-built spaces like Turkey's underground city of Derinkuyu. Plans to revive it keep surfacing and stalling. In 2019, LSU approved a redevelopment to turn the tower into a mix of housing and retail.

More recently, in 2025, the city pledged $20 million toward a plan for Tulane University to convert it into a research center, a proposal that survived a mayoral veto only after the City Council overrode it.upi.com/Top_News/US/2025/08/29/20-years-after-Hurricane-Katrina-a-hospital-stands-abandoned/8611756489402/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">hospital that still stands abandoned, its future remains unsettled.

Charity is not the only New Orleans landmark that Katrina hollowed out. The flood that emptied this hospital also drowned the abandoned Six Flags amusement park across town, another giant the storm shut down and the city never reopened.

What makes Charity sting more than most abandoned buildings is the argument at its center. A sanatorium or a fire-gutted hospital is a tragedy you can understand. Charity is something else: a structure that many insist could have been saved, left to rot anyway, in plain sight, while the population it served scattered.

It carries the same haunted weight as places like Waverly Hills Sanatorium, but with a sharper edge, because its emptiness still looks like a choice. Nearly 270 years of treating anyone who came through the door.

Ended not entirely by a storm, but by what people decided to do after it. The tower still stands. The promise it was built on does not.

The hospital that was built to never turn people away became a symbol of what happens when the city’s safety net collapses.

Want more abandoned horrors, see how America’s forgotten hospitals turned into empty monuments.