First photo credit to the Jeannette Spirit
I apologize for the quality of the photos, these were taken from a moving car.
Ever since I first laid eyes on this place I was fascinated with interest. For starters, the building looks strange. It had a 1700s era mansion out with frontage right on the Lincoln Highway and then this tower and some other buildings were built into the complex. The mansion burned last year and was torn down for safety reasons along with some adjacent buildings. According to an article from the Trib, early this year the demolition crew started with tearing down those buildings and is supposedly going to tear down the tower this year. I hope that is the case. We will outline why this needs to be done immediately. I only wish that the mansion was able to survive.
This place started off well, providing the first administered penicillin in Westmoreland County. As the industry, followed by the population, and the wealth of the city drying up, the fortunes of this hospital would turn. It operated under bankruptcy protection from 1980 until closure.
This building, the former Monsour Medical Center in Jeannette, PA, is possibly one of the creepiest abandoned buildings I have ever seen. The building has clearly seen better days. The hospital started in the late 40s/early 50s as a small hospital. It would eventually grow into a facility with a few hundred beds. For the better part of the life of the hospital it was overwhelmed with debt and would eventually close in 2006 for serious state inspection failures. If that is not creepy enough, only 8 years in abandonment and it looks like this. I cannot imagine what kind of shape the hospital was in during its final years. They closed the hospital without even removing any bio-waste and other hazardous materials and the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection had to investigate the building. If that is not bad enough, they did not even destroy all sensitive medical documents, so the health records of many people pretty much went into the public. Additionally, the building was hit with vandalism and arson. Due to the economic downturn of that region that has extended for a long time since the glass industry pretty much left the city, the hospital has also become a home for squatters. Due to the many hazards that this building poses in regards to bio hazards and the terrible condition of the building, this is extremely dangerous. The owner of the building is now out of the picture and has left this building for the locality to have to deal with. I hope that this building gets torn down and something gets built in this prominent spot on Route 30 that provides jobs for folks in the area. I would love nothing more than to see a prominent campus or facility of some sort in this exact spot that spurs a re-flourishment of Jeannette.
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