Exploring St. Luke Hospital, abandoned art deco jewel of Northeast Pasadena

Update June 4, 2026: We are removing the paywall from this subscriber-edition newsletter the morning after the United States government conducted surprise overnight urban warfare exercises at the St. Luke Hospital campus, with helicopter landings and flash bang explosions.

We are extremely concerned about the potential damage to delicate historic resources, including the stained glass, decorative terracotta, tile and copper sheet roofs, and encourage Pasadena councilmember Rick Cole, who reported from the scene last night, to have the City conduct an assessment of the condition of the buildings in the aftermath of the military activities to determine if anything was harmed.

We believe this precious, useful place should be brought back to life as a mixed-use campus, and that more people should know about all St. Luke has to offer. Maybe something good can come out of this disturbing incident: a new plan for bringing the old hospital campus back to life.

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Gentle reader,

Greetings from your friendly historic Los Angeles sightseeing tour company, now offering walking tours like tomorrow’s excursion through Raymond Chandler’s Noir Downtown.

For our latest post that’s hidden from the rest of the internet, we want to take you on a rare tour inside Pasadena’s St. Luke Hospital, an extraordinary Zigzag Moderne Art Deco structure (Gene Verge, 1933) that’s been mostly shuttered since 2002.

Drone footage from real estate marketing packet.

It’s not impossible to visit St. Luke: production companies often do, filming in the portions of the building that still retain the look of a modern, maintained medical facility or spooky morgue. Potential tenants can walk the 13+ acre site with their real estate agent, or peruse the lease package online. There are still some medical offices on the grounds. And the main buildings have become a too popular spot for urban explorers and vandals, who sneak in looking for ghosts or for blank walls to spray paint. The metal thieves have long since stripped the fixtures for scrap—which the city of Pasadena recently discovered, when they sent staff to evaluate St. Luke as a Covid treatment center and found it uninhabitable.

But it’s not often that architecture enthusiasts have the opportunity to explore St. Luke, so when we were graciously granted access recently, we made a special effort to document the original interior features to share with you.

[Update June 17, 2023: The City of Pasadena is not happy with the increasingly squalid condition of St. Luke, but property owner Mehdi Bolour of Denley Investments isn’t taking their calls. He’s been hard to find since LAPD cleared out his illegal art colony in Hollywood’s Palmer Building in September 2018, displacing dozens. He sold the Palmer the following year, and it’s now slated for hotel conversion. We hope St. Luke, too, can find a responsible new owner with fresh ideas… and that Pasadena will act swiftly to protect the vacant, and apparently now unguarded, landmark.]

St. Luke has a convoluted history of use, decline and real estate speculation that maps to other early Los Angeles medical facilities founded by religious organizations, like Chinatown’s French Hospital and St. Vincent Hospital at 3rd and Alvarado.

Original stepped, tiled dome (Harold A. Parker, Huntington Library)

Established as a non-profit Catholic hospital by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange, the initial structure was an impressive 7-story domed ziggurat facing Washington Boulevard and the San Gabriel foothills. That dome was originally turquoise stepped tile, and in 1965 had a neon lit cross installed. The current dull lead and copper sheeting was a cheap fix for damage from the 5.6 magnitude Sierra Madre earthquake (1991).

Over the decades, additional buildings were added to the campus—most notably a 1940s copper roofed chapel and monastery also designed by Gene Verge, most regrettably the low-rise 1976 additions that cut into the loggia and block views of the facade.

By the 1980s, St. Luke was facing competition from the well-funded non-profit Huntington Hospital with its world class trauma center and popular maternity facilities—Richard was born there!—and could no longer maintain its aging physical plant. In 1985, the sisters sold the hospital to the for-profit Summit Health. The clock was ticking. OroNda Healthcorp took over in 1994, and that debt burdened company was acquired by Tenet Healthcare in 1996. Tenet shut St. Luke down in 2002, then sold the campus to Caltech for a research facility. In 2007, Caltech flipped the property to David Schwartzman’s DS Ventures, a major player in the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers that helped trigger the global financial crisis, as well as a lousy negotiator with the neighbors.

And so twenty years after the hospital discharged its last patient, there is still no plan. While St. Luke is a Pasadena city landmark and has some protection from demolition, the site is incredibly vulnerable and suffering ongoing demolition by neglect. We’re hoping that a new steward will see the potential in this special place, and revitalize the campus in a way that lets the fine historic buildings shine again. Until then, here’s a history lesson, and a glimpse at what hides behind tall walls.

Architect Gene Verge was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada in 1893, and came to Los Angeles as a small child. There were eight children in the family, Gene the fourth born and second son.

He studied at St. Vincent’s College (now Loyola Marymount) graduating in the final Downtown high school class of 1911, and learned the architectural trade as a draftsman in the offices of A.C. Martin, with the Beaux-Arts trained David C. Allison’s Atelier Allison and with period revival residential architect Reginald D. Johnson in Pasadena. In 1921, he collaborated with master decorator Joseph L. Feil (Bullocks Wilshire, Dutch Chocolate Shop) on the Larchmont Village home of French consul Louis Sentous, Jr., like Verge a graduate of St. Vincent’s College.

Verge must have had enormous drive, charm and talent, for he went out on his own in 1924 and almost immediately snagged a plum commission: collaborating with amateur architect Buster Keaton and his special effects expert (and fellow Canadian) Fred Gabourie on the design of the silent comedy legend’s sprawling $300,000 Italian Villa (1926).

The firm of Gene Verge & R.N. Clatworthy would go on to specialize in large institutional projects, mainly for Catholic clients: the magnificently streamlined Church of the Incarnation and parish school (still there in Glendale)…

… St. Finbar Church and parish school (Burbank), Queen of the Valley Hospital (Napa), Our Lady Queen of the Angels School (Chinatown), Dominguez Memorial Seminary (Compton), Little Company of Mary Hospital (Torrance), Sea Breeze Beach Club (now the Jonathan Beach Club, Santa Monica), with the occasional period revival residence like the gorgeous Grether House (Glendale).

All of Verge’s buildings are handsome, but no project was as spectacular or close to his heart as St. Luke. The architect spent a year researching modern hospital design and conferring with the Sisters who would be caring for patients before setting pencil to paper.

J. Allen Hawkins, Pasadena Museum of History Collection

The building was reinforced concrete, with its ornamentation cast in place. There were six operating rooms spread across the fourth floor, with open air facilities for sun therapy and convalescent rest on the roof. Glassed in solariums were found on each end of the second and third floors.

While Gene Verge was deep in consultation with the nursing sisters, his politically connected big brother Arthur was running for Congress on the Crusaders’ platform: repeal Prohibition to keep some of the $80,000,000 that American tourists splashed around each year partying in boozy Paris here at home. He lost, but so too soon did Prohibition, and attorney Arthur stayed busy representing Los Angeles nightclub and gambling boat owners in licensing battles.

But enough of that—let’s explore the hospital!

Happily, these graceful hand wrought metal railings in the central court have escaped the scavenger’s wrench.

St. Luke was until fairly recently a working hospital, and the lower floors have been modernized, then left to rot.

It’s dark inside, and gloomy. But there are treasures to be found.

From the end of this hall, we thought a tagger had made an elaborate pin striped drawing. But this turned out to be a tiled mural of stylized leaves and flowers, a feminine decorative touch for a hospital run by women.

Here, some trespasser has spray painted “God Forgives.”

But after seeing the condition of the desecrated chapel, we wonder. (Here’s how it looked when YouTuber Exploring With Josh posted to his millions of followers six years ago.) Small blessing: the windows are still intact.

This is the original entry porch on the Washington Boulevard side, which is better secured than other sections of St. Luke and has not been vandalized.

The blend of silver metal screens, textured concrete walls and austere tile friezes is understated and elegant.

When the hospital was new, a visitor might cross the lobby and enter this stunning art deco elevator, to ascend to the sunny recovery rooms above.

The elevator wasn’t working, so we took the stairs.

Here’s the utilitarian upper door. One day we’d like to see inside that cage. Is it tricked out art deco in style, or more modest?

Upstairs, it still had the look of a mid-century medical center. Broken pipes had flooded some sections, turning fallen ceiling panels to porridge.

Up here, Gene Verge’s vision for this place of healing was still almost unaltered, with generously proportioned halls and big, well placed steel windows. California sunshine paints the walls.

The stepped pyramid design created large porches where patients could take the San Gabriel foothills air, with easy access back to their beds. We wonder what purpose these square stanchions served.

Climbing higher, we came to the dome and a spaghetti snarl of ducts and pipes.

Beneath the dome is a large open room that would make a nifty supervillain’s lair.

Back at street level, we marveled at the size of the St. Luke compound, and remarked that even with the water damage and vandalism, if some enlightened buyer were to fix it up as affordable housing with gardens and low rise bungalows surrounding the protected landmark tower, it would be a green and economical solution for a deteriorating white elephant.

Until then, the production companies and urban explorers will continue to haunt the halls, and we hope be kind. We wondered if some fragment of Gene Verge (died 1953) and his clients, the Sisters of St. Joseph, might be lurking around, too, keeping an eye on the gleaming healing pyramid they imagined together.

Verge is a great Los Angeles architect, but in focusing on utilitarian Catholic commissions, remained personally obscure. He could easily have leveraged the Buster Keaton connection to become a motion picture star’s architect, but one celebrity home was enough for him. Why? Maybe he didn’t enjoy the family dynamics of building a frame for Buster and Natalie Keaton’s miserable marriage.

So he sought out clients who were unmarried by vocation.

We couldn’t help but think of Monastery of the Angels, another now vacant compound where a Catholic architect (Wallace Neff) worked closely with his nun clients to craft a machine age structure where they could practice their ancient faith and service work while enjoying the hygienic conveniences of the most modern materials.

That Hollywood monastery has just been suppressed by the Pope, and at last report had just one nun remaining in residence on four acres of land. Like St. Luke, we believe it remains useful and beautiful, and ought to be of service rather than left for the ghosts, the vandals and the motion picture crews to stage.

Thanks for joining us on this stroll through St. Luke Hospital, which was facilitated by a kind guard who loves the building and is charged with ensuring no troublemakers have gotten inside. We hope St. Luke soon finds a tenant, and he can find another job!

yours for Los Angeles,

Kim & Richard

Esotouric