Most people do not walk through Fairview’s Environmental Services in the "B" corridor on the first floor of the Mayo Memorial Building. Even if they do, they may not realize that this corridor was the former home to Station 12 of the old University Hospital. They also may not realize that this section of the "B" corridor was originally the Elliot Memorial Hospital which opened in 1911.

A passerby will also not know that at one time an artist, who was also a patient, painted a scene of this corridor and that it hung behind the desk at Station 12. The painting depicted the patient's view of the hallway while suffering from a detached retina. The upper left portion of the picture is shadowed from the loss of vision. I ran across a copy of this painting in a former newsletter published by the University Hospitals; however, I do not know where the original is located. It no longer seems to be hanging on the wall at the former Station 12.

Posted by Erik Moore at 12:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Tagged as Curiosities | Facilities |

A reader sent in the following photograph in an effort to help identify unique and obscure locations within the Academic Health Center.

The scale is an 850 kg capacity flat scale (also known as a platform scale) located in the A (north) wing on the fourth floor of the Mayo Memorial Building. It was manufactured by the Toledo Scale Company with its motto, "No Springs, Honest Weight," printed on the back of the lollipop scale. The scale's design used a pendulum weight rather than a spring for measurement. The model number indicates it might have been manufactured in 1921, thirty-three years before the dedication of the Mayo Building.

At the time of the Mayo's opening, the fourth floor was designated as the Department of Surgery including space for operating rooms, recovery rooms, and patient rooms. This type of flat scale is used to record weights of patients (minus the bed or wheelchair) in intensive care or surgical recovery. The scale's platform was built into the floor and offered a seamless surface in order to role a wheelchair or gurney onto the scale.

The scale is no longer operational. The platform is fixed in place. A few unanswered questions remain: Why was a possibly thirty year old scale installed in a new facility and was the scale in use in the University Hospitals prior to its placement in Mayo? Did the scale serve some other purpose over the years before being disabled?

If you witnessed the use of the scale or used the scale yourself your input would be appreciated in the comments below.

After all, history is a matter of weighing perceived facts counter balanced by interpretation and local knowledge.

Posted by Erik Moore at 09:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Tagged as Curiosities | Facilities |

As institutions grow in size and new buildings are added, older facilities are often remodeled (or not) and used for some other purpose other than originally intended. This often leads to the silent wondering of "What was this place?" by the present day occupants.

My own office space acts as a perfect example. Situated in the former (albeit the building still bears the name) Children's Rehabilitation Center, my door opens up to an abandoned station that once greeted visitors and patients as they stepped off the elevators.

Many other spaces within the buildings that physically comprise the AHC are only shadows of their former self. The map below provides more examples. It depicts the third floor of the former Mayo Memorial University Hospital circa 1970. Today, the Office of the Dean for the School of Public Health is situated in the former space of Neurology Psychiatry. Station 32 along the southern wing (once the original Elliot Hospital) now serves as office space for many hospital social workers who now work out of old patient rooms. And although the coffee shop north of the main entrance is no longer there, a small snack counter is open for service at the former information desk.

Posted by Erik Moore at 01:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Tagged as Curiosities | Facilities |

We will become the architects of health care delivery programs that bring to every citizen of the state the finest health care that society has seen.

With these words, Malcolm Moos, the tenth president of the University of Minnesota, celebrated the groundbreaking for Health Sciences Unit A in 1971. Unit A was the first in a series of interconnected facilities designed to integrate interprofessional education and optimize health care delivery. Based on commissioned studies and committee recommendations during the 1960s, health science education was brought together under the newly created administrative body of the Academic Health Center as well as physically in a complex of buildings, tunnels, and skyways.

Also during the groundbreaking ceremony, the Board of Regents charged the newly formed health sciences administration and faculty to remember

It is the Health Sciences facilities which we are here talking about today [that] will be implemented physically by a moral and intellectual commitment to see that all people of our state, those in the inner city and those in the out edges of the state, without regard to the particular circumstance in which they find themselves economically, will have available to them the degree and the facilities of health care which are adequate and appropriate to the dignity which each man has as a human being.

The building was completed in 1973 for a total cost of $45 million and was home to the School of Dentistry, teaching laboratories for basic sciences, and departments from the School of Public Health and the Medical School upon its opening.

In 1983 the University officially changed the name of Health Sciences Unit A to the Malcolm Moos Health Sciences Tower to commemorate President Moos' commitment to the expansion of the health sciences on campus.

Read the full remarks made at the groundbreaking ceremony on April 1, 1971.

Posted by Erik Moore at 08:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Tagged as AHC documents | Dentistry | Facilities |

William Henry Eustis, born in 1845 in New York State, was a prominent philanthropist, entrepreneur, and politician in Minnesota. After graduating from Columbia University's law school, Eustis practiced in New York City and in Minneapolis, moving to Minnesota in 1881. Eustis served a single term as mayor of Minneapolis from 1893-1895. In addition to his law practice, Eustis built a fortune in real estate acquisition and development in partnership with his brother Gardner T. Eustis, also of Minneapolis. Eustis never married. He died on Thanksgiving Day 1928 at the age of 83.

Modeling himself after Andrew Carnegie, Eustis believed his wealth should be passed along to those in need. After suffering a debilitating accident at the age of fifteen, Eustis focused his gift giving to institutions that provided benefits to disabled children. During his life, Eustis gave large portions of his estate to the Dowling School in Minneapolis and provided the funds to establish the Minnesota Hospital and Home for Crippled Children. Construction began at the University in 1928 and the hospital included an outpatient department, two floors for hospitalized children with a space for an on site school, and an amphitheater for teaching purposes. In total, Eustis gave over $1 million dollars to the University, primarily for health care services. Eustis agreed to the University’s request to name the hospital and facilities after him in recognition of his generosity only after first refusing their overture.

Eustis saw the city of Minneapolis as a secularized manifestation of the proverbial City on the Hill, albeit with a river running through it. In a 1926 letter to the Board of Regents accompanying his gift of his final interest in the Flour and Corn Exchange Building, Eustis predicted,

The time is ripe under your guidance to establish here one of the great medical centers of the World. The helpful generosity of the Rockefeller Foundation, the genius of the University, and the old time spirit of Minneapolis united and working in the closest accord, bearing aloft the banner of Excelsior would establish here a beacon light of medical science and research that shall for all ages redound to the glory of man's genius and the highest welfare of his being.

Only yesterday the barbers were our surgeons and the pharmacists our physicians. The time is short and the distance long between the barber's pole and the Mayo clinic…The tide is at its flood. The golden opportunity is here, and I cannot believe that the heroic, civic spirit that once dominated Minneapolis will now be weighed in the balance and found wanting.

By the early 1930s, the Eustis Children's Hospital and the Elliot Memorial Hospital with its newly expanded Christian and Todd wings provided inpatient care with outpatient and rehabilitation services at the University of Minnesota.

Elliot Hospital (center) and Eustis Hospital under construction (right), circa 1929.

In 1954 the Mayo Memorial Building opened as a consolidated health care delivery and education facility. The construction process of Mayo incorporated the Elliot and Eustis Hospitals as wings of the new health sciences center. Some services and operations that previously took place in Eustis Hospital were moved to other locations within Mayo. However, the Eustis Wing of Mayo still had an active hospital station (Station #35), audiology and dental clinics, and medical educational rooms including the Eustis Amphitheater.

Posted by Erik Moore at 10:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Tagged as Curiosities | Facilities | Hospitals |

Question: Upon groundbreaking in 1950, how many stories tall was the Mayo Memorial Building to be?

Answer: Twenty-two stories. Unfortunately, due to increased costs for building materials during the Korean War and the lack of additional state funding, the building plans went under several revisions during construction. The final result was the fourteen-story building dedicated on October 21 & 22, 1954. See the architectural rendition of the proposed building below.

Posted by Erik Moore at 08:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Tagged as Curiosities | Facilities |

Building trivia: After which Academy Award-winning actor was research laboratory space named in the Phillips-Wangensteen Building?

Answer: Jimmy Stewart

On April 3, 1981, the 13th and 14th floors of the Phillips-Wangensteen Building were dedicated as the "Jimmy Stewart Research Laboratories" as part of a gift provided by the Variety Club. The space was designed to be used for the departments of pediatrics and internal medicine.

The gift was a result of a $100,000 grant made by the Sears, Roebuck and Co. to honor a theatrical personality involved with promoting the work of the Variety Club. The total cost for completing the laboratory space was an estimated 6.2 million dollars. The Phillips-Wangensteen Building was dedicated two years earlier in June 1979. At the time nearly one-third of the usable space in PWB was unfinished. The Variety Club gift assisted in completing some of the open space.

Posted by Erik Moore at 02:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Tagged as Curiosities | Facilities |

As the AHC and the University of Minnesota continue to expand and develop within the confines of a limited space, take a look back to 1968 and see the perceived growth and expansion of the health sciences on campus.

The Planning Report was the result of a four-year effort sponsored by the Hill Family Foundation and overseen by the University Long Range Planning Committee for the Health Sciences.

There are many familiar landmarks today on campus that were merely architectural models at the time of the report’s publication. Similarly, there are a few proposed construction sites that never materialized.

As the campus changes today with the construction of the new stadium and the proposals for bringing light rail to the University, planning documents like this show that although change is a constant, there is usually a through line to its logic.

A vision of the future (1973) for parking and traffic in the 1968 Health Sciences Planning Report

Posted by Erik Moore at 02:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Tagged as AHC documents | Facilities |

Construction workers put up a tree in a precarious place during the construction of the on campus hospital, circa 1983. The photograph is part of the University Hospitals Board of Governors records at the University Archives.

Addendum

Thanks to several comments (see below), a more accurate description of the image is that of "topping out" the frame of the hospital. Although the photograph was taken between November and January, the tree is much more likely a representation of a long time tradition in building construction.

Update

The photograph was taken on December 13, 1983.

Posted by Erik Moore at 10:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Tagged as Curiosities | Facilities | Photographs |