Old Boulder City Hospital

About this property

Boulder City Hospital is an 82-bed facility (including 25 acute care/swing beds), a 47-bed long-term care facility, and a 10-bed Geriatric Behavioral Medicine Center. Built by Six Companies while the company was building the Hoover Dam, the hospital opened on November 15, 1931 with 20 beds. The hospital closed in 1935 when the dam was finished. Later in 1943, the hospital reopened. The old hospital building was abandoned when a new building for the hospital opened on December 8, 1973, a mile southwest on the southeast corner of Adams Boulevard and Buchanan Boulevard. Despite subsequently serving as a charity retreat home, it was ultimately demolished in late 2015; the old hospital site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Boulder City's first hospital was built by Six Companies, the joint venture responsible for building Hoover Dam. The U.S. Public Health Service, the government agency that would have been responsible for maintaining health in the dam town, couldn't afford to build a hospital. A second government agency, the Bureau of Reclamation, felt since the majority of workers on the project were employed by Six Companies, it was the companies’ responsibility to build and maintain a hospital. The government worked out an arrangement by which Bureau employees could also use the hospital. The hospital site was the top of Block 8, a hill on the northeast side of town originally reserved for a resort hotel. The view from the hospital was magnificent: the Eldorado Valley and McCullough Mountains to the south, and to the north the Colorado River wound lazily through its bed. Construction began in August 1931, and the hospital was opened November 15, 1931. The cost of the original Boulder City Hospital was $20,000. The hospital was built of brick and white stucco, and the L-shaped building housed 20 beds and a special orthopedic ward. The Pest House, an eight-bed isolation facility for contagious diseases, was maintained away from the main hospital building. In 1933, a wing was added to the hospital as an isolation ward and the Pest House was torn down. Six Companies employees were charged $1.50 per month health fee through payroll deduction which entitled them, but not their families, to services at Boulder City Hospital. Family members of the dam workers were forced to travel to Las Vegas for care. When the dam was finished in 1935 and the Six Companies left Boulder, the hospital was closed. Those needing medical care went to Las Vegas. In some emergency cases, the time to travel into town proved fatal. In 1938, the National Park Service assumed responsibility for the hospital building and turned it into a museum and office. The Park Service left the building in 1941 and the building remained vacant for two years.

Location

Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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