NEW ORLEANS — As people bike down the Lafitte Greenway and paddle through Bayou St. John, the Lindy Boggs Medical Center casts a shadow over it all.
Abandoned 17 years ago, the former hospital is now covered in graffiti and broken windows.
“There’s a sense of lawlessness there,” Thomas Ecker said. “There’s an overall sense of benign neglect.”
Ecker is the president of the Mid-City Neighborhood Organization. He see’s the blighted building looming over his neighborhood every day. He also see’s the people coming and going from the abandoned site and the garbage collecting around it.
“What we do see is the ever-increasing graffiti,” Ecker said. “We do see the always broken into fencing and people going in and out at will.”
The property has been surrounded by a seven-foot tall chain link fence since Hurricane Katrina, but it doesn’t stop much. While writing this story, we spotted someone on the building’s roof after breaking into the old Mercy Hospital.
Developer Paul Flower, CEO of Woodward Design+Build, bought a majority interest in the building in 2021. He says they’ve tightened security at the building, but keeping people out of it is an impossible task.
“There are probably 100 ways to get into that building right now and you can’t just cover them all,” Flower said. “That’s true of almost any building that’s not occupied.”
Flower says his team has stabilized the building, put up fences, cleared out the water in the basement and has regular security patrols clearing out the space. But the only way to keep it secure is to re-develop it.
The biggest obstacle to getting that done is funding, according to Flower. Like other developers we’ve spoken with, he says getting outside funding in New Orleans is a challenge, making the project more reliant on federal money.
“It’s difficult in New Orleans because you almost always need subsidy because of all the issues we have here,” Flower said. “It limits your options.”
Flower is applying for funding through the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the next couple weeks. If approved, he expects closing on the deal will take anywhere from eight to 11 months. Then, construction will take another two years. That makes late 2025 an optimistic estimate for when the building could be back in commerce.
“We do think we can get it done,” Flower said. “We’ve run into some unexpected problems, but I think we’re going to overcome them.”
The plan is to turn the long-abandoned hospital into a continuing care facility with a nursing unit, independent assisted living and memory care.
Though after 17 years of plans and promises, it’s not hard to see why some neighbors have lost faith in the project. But for Thomas Ecker, there’s still hope that the blight in the heart of Mid-City will be cleared.
“It’s not hopeless. In fact, it’s filled with hope,” Ecker said. “We’ve just got to learn how to turn promise into action and then see where it goes from there.”
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