One of America’s Oldest Hospitals Lay Abandoned. Then a University Stepped In.

The last time Lee Hamm was working in New Orleans’s Charity Hospital, critically ill patients were being hauled up and down dark, sweltering stairways as nurses hand-pumped oxygen to keep them alive. In August 2005, for those inside a hospital ravaged by Hurricane Katrina, the sounds of helicopters whirring nearby only added to the frustration, as day after day went by with no rescue. Over the next 18 years, Hamm, now a senior vice president and dean of medicine at Tulane, relived memories both horrifying and inspiring as he looked out the window of his nearby office building. There, in a gritty portion of New Orleans’s downtown, the abandoned skeleton of Charity Hospital loomed, boarded up behind chain-link fences and overgrown weeds. The million-square-foot Art Deco building occupied a full city block.