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

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.]