Demolition of St. Elizabeth Hospital expected to finish by year’s end

Published 4:00 pm Friday, July 31, 2026

HANNIBAL — Mark Kempker is intimately familiar with St. Elizabeth Hospital, quite literally from the day he was born. As Hannibal’s assistant director of Central Services, Kempker is now overseeing the demolition process of the facility.

“I know the community has a lot of interest because there’s a lot of history in that building,” Kempker said. “I was born in that building, but safety has to outweigh the history.”

The original portion of the hospital was built in 1915, with the final addition going up in 1973. Since 2009, the campus has been empty, waiting on developers who kept promising big plans, but who never delivered on their vision.

The building has had countless unauthorized visitors in the time since it closed, including scavengers and homeless individuals. Those visits have frequently led to injuries and fires, incidents that require law enforcement and firefighters to clear the entire compound with no electricity and walls that make communications systems spotty.

The city’s administration under Mayor Darrell McCoy made the St. Elizabeth project a priority, following the path set by former Mayor Barry Louderman.

“With all of the complaints from neighbors, I can tell you that nobody in the city administration took it as just background noise,” Kempker said. “The administration and council have taken it as a very serious issue. It was just a matter of finding the right avenues to pay for it to be done the right way, the safe way.”

In a variety of previous careers, Kempker has gone through the building, including time as both a law enforcement officer and a firefighter, as well as a building inspector for the city. He knows the historic loss is important to keep in mind, but community safety interests have him ready to see the walls come down.

“It’s a relief to see that the building is going to get its closure,” he said. “It’s much-needed closure, and it’s going to end up being a safer block in the neighborhood. As a firefighter it got to the point where there were some very hazardous environments in there that we could put our guys into, with parts of the elevator shafts open, things like that. In the later days, when we were still having fires and homeless people were getting in there, even though it’s brick, there’s still the old part of the sanctuary, where the chapel was, that still had a lot of timber in it.”

The city has made contact with a number of organizations, including the Catholic Church, to remove and preserve statues and other historically significant portions of the structure, even as the building is undergoing remediation to take out anything that could still be hazardous prior to full demolition.

As of now, the arduous process is running on time and under budget, according to Kempker.

“We hired Klingner & Associates, and they were very good for us,” he said. “They did a lot of the heavy lifting, finding and bidding and making sure that we’re getting our money’s worth, making sure that we’re following all of the rules, and taking care of the hazards that present themselves there.”

At the beginning of June, the Hannibal City Council approved a bid of $1.4 million from GreenTrac LLC as lead contractor for the demolition work, while General Waste Services LLC had the winning bid of $254,049 for the site remediation.

According to Kempker, if the process remains on track, the space will be cleared and seeded before winter, with spring bringing a new, clean greenspace for the city to develop further.

“The way it was planned out is that it will be done by the end of the year,” Kempker said. “I’m hoping to seed it and do everything by the end of the year, and then it can sit with the snow and settle, and we should be able to start seeing some grass growing next year.”

No plans have been finalized for the space, with Kempker noting that there has been informal talk about making the lot a park or possibly adding new housing on a portion of the property, but those discussions will step up after the demolition work is done.

“As a person that was born there, I’m sad to see it go,” he said. “But everything has to have a rebirth. We’re happy to see that it’s going to get rejuvenated. People don’t always realize when communities and neighborhoods start to get older, you’ve got all these old buildings, and if they’re not maintained, they become eyesores. That’s what happened to this one, unfortunately.”

Kempker said once the demolition is completed, the city intends to do street work to modernize Magnolia Avenue and Virginia Street to help breathe some new life into the area. The hospital’s overflow parking immediately east of the building has already been ripped up and is in the process of being cleared out.

“Once the buildings come down, we’re not just walking away,” he said. “We have plans to repave and beautify the streets, all the sidewalks, as much as we can.”