I took Kallie for a longer-than-usual walk last night thanks to the unseasonably Spring-like weather. A few blocks north of our usual route landed us in Ravenswood. I lived there the last few years in Chicago before moving to Los Angeles with Ken. We walked past my old apartment. It’s where I lived when I fell in love. My whole experience living in Ravenswood was somewhat magical. I loved living there as I love this part of the city.

My old apartment stands next to Ravenswood Medical Center. When I moved there I was excited to have such a big apartment and somehow felt a sense of security having it be only feet from a dependable neighborhood hospital. The hospital was sold years ago–probably even when I was living next to it–and slowly began to shut down as services were switched to another nearby hospital owned by Advocate. It closed for business in 2002, the same year I moved.

The hospital dominated the skyline of the neighborhood and provided somewhat of an anchor. And I’ve always been fascinated by it. Even after I moved, I thought of the neighborhood and the hospital, and often googled both to see what was new. It had been abandoned for almost five years when I returned to the neighborhood in 2006 when Ken and I moved back from California. I often took walks past it, and it never ceased to give me pause for sadness. A once vibrant center for medical health and treatment sold off and reduced to an empty shell–presumably full of equipment and records. (One of the conditions the hospital’s sale was that it couldn’t ever be used as a medical facility.) What a waste.

The largest section of the hospital was called the Adler Pavilion. All the times I passed it on the way to work, I figured it was the same Adler as the Planetarium. Recently, I lost an afternoon googling everything I could think of regarding the hospital and I made some interesting discoveries. I found the obituaries of the Adler donors William S. and Elizabeth S. Adler. They were incredible philanthropists who lived to ripe old ages, both dying in 1982. Though she’d been comatose for several months prior to her husband’s death, Mrs. Adler died with 24 of hours of his passing. Sad and a little romantic. (I couldn’t figure out if they were related to Max Adler who was the benefactor of the Planetarium.)

I stumbled across this fascinating Flicker album from a photographer who somehow got inside inside the abandoned building in February of 2011 and took some pretty amazing photos. I find them beautiful, haunting and profoundly sad–and I can’t keep from looking at them. In my mind’s eye I can picture each scene in the hospital’s better days when it was full of life, people and activity. Ken was admitted there years before I knew him. So, it’s no wonder I feel a little bit of a connection with it.

Since demolition of the hospital began, I’ve taken many walks and drives by and photos of the structure. I know my nostalgia is driven by more than my love and memories of the neighborhood. It’s loss and change, and seeing something that was once vital and healthy decline and decay until it “dies.” It’s Ken–in a way. Having experienced what I did with him during his illness has most certainly slanted my perspective and made my hypersensitive to metaphors of loss.

The good news is that the hospital campus is being torn down to make way for the new campus of the Lycée Francais de Chicago. Something about the land going to use for a school takes a little of the sting away. Oui!