Places That Were

Riverside Hospital served the Toledo area for nearly a century before it became a dark, forsaken husk surrounded by a field of cracked pavement.


It was upgraded in 1920 with the addition of a 75-bed facility. Over the years, other additions were built and the scope of services offered expanded. The hospital admitted its first male patient in 1932.

The name of the institution changed several times until 1945, when it became Riverside Hospital. In 1983, the Sisters of Mercy founded Mercy Health, which managed the hospital from then on. The 271-bed hospital closed in 2002.

Entrances and windows on the ground floor were boarded up. The freeze-thaw cycle of harsh Midwestern winters cut networks of cracks through the expansive parking lots.


Outdoor sitting areas became overgrown with lush ground cover and thick layers of moss blanketed the surfaces of wooden benches and tables.


The Toledo Public School District bought the site in 2004 for $750,000 and renovated one of the structures to house its central administrative offices.

The future of the rest of the building remained uncertain. When scrappers began breaking into and looting the abandoned structure, motion detectors were installed and the local police began closely monitoring the property.

Over a decade after the hospital's closure, quite a bit of equipment still remained.




Office furniture and files were also left behind.



The abandoned cafeteria was eerie and dark. Wires and fixtures hung from a ceiling that had begun to fall in.




Scattered artifacts left clues about the employees who once worked at Riverside.

Finally it was decided that Riverside Hospital would be demolished, with plans to transform the property into a green space.

In June of 2018, a group of former employees gathered to open a time capsule that had been entombed behind a cornerstone in 1972. The capsule contained surgical tools, a stethoscope, a nursing cap, a list of hospital employees, a visitors pamphlet, pens that had been used to sign revenue bonds, and newspapers from 1972.


Demolition of Riverside Hospital began on August 22, 2018 and is expected to take 5 months to complete at a cost of $998,500.

After a quick visit to Toledo, I continued on to Detroit. Nothing could have prepared me for what I'd find there. I can hardly wait to tell you about it.

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Until then, click here to read about other abandoned places I've explored.


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The abandoned Boulder City Hospital sat atop a hill overlooking Lake Mead. From its magnificent vantage point, the old structure kept vigil for more than 80 years, while the man-made lake rose and then slowly fell and the city around it quadrupled in size.

Furniture and assorted trash was piled out front.


The front doors were tightly locked.


A stop work order tacked to the plywood announced that an appeal had been filed, requesting that the building not be demolished due to its historical status.


I peered through one of the few windows that wasn't covered with plywood and saw that the deconstruction process had already been well underway by the time the stop work order went into effect.


I walked around the outside of the building and snapped a few photos.


All of the possible entry points were secured shut. Judging by what I'd seen through the window, it seemed like the building was pretty much gutted and there wasn't much left to look at on the inside anyway.


The Boulder City Hospital building (also known as Six Companies Hospital) has a robust history that extends back to the very beginning of Boulder City.