Doug Kenck-Crispin's insightful Willamette Week article about Portland during the 1918 flu pandemic, reminded me about what was then the Multnomah County Hospital, located in present day Lair Hill Park. Below is an excerpt from my book, Lost Portland Oregon, about the house-turned-hospital.
Charles and Hedwig Smith Residence
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| Charles and Hedwig Smith House after it was acquired by Multnomah County, circa 1909. Oregon Health & Science University, Historical Collections & Archives. |
Lair Hill Park, located between Southwest Second and Barbur
Boulevard, between Hooker and Woods Streets, is a small city park, with a
former public library in one corner and a building from 1918 that used to serve
as a residence for nurses, in another. The nurses’ building is a clue to what
once stood in the park a century ago: a mansion turned hospital.
Charles E. Smith was one of the city’s largest employers
before the turn of the twentieth century. His Smith Brothers and [later] Watson
Iron Works Company produced ornamental and structural cast iron for buildings,
steam boilers for ships, and mining equipment, selling their wares all over the
world. Their foundry stood along the river, just south of the Hawthorne Bridge,
in the area known as Riverplace today.
In 1885, Charles Smith and his wife Hedwig hired Justus F. Krumbein
to design a new house for them. By this time, Krumbein was at the height of his
architectural career, finishing work on the Kamm Block while designing houses
for other noted Portlanders, including one in northwest Portland for Levi and
Henrietta White. The Smith house was finished around the end of 1886, and was
indicative of Krumbein’s residential designs from that period. The three-story
house had a large corner tower and the ornate exterior woodwork, much of which
was made of durable Port Orford cedar, included finials, brackets, turned
columns, and a variety of spindlework on the wide front porch. On the interior,
many of the walls and ceilings were hand painted, with cherubs, flowers, and a
variety of imagery. One room in particular was later noted for its “mystic
oriental designs.”[1]
The Smiths lived in the house until around 1909 when they
sold the house and property to Multnomah County so they could turn it into a
new hospital. This was not the first grand old Portland house reused in such a
manner. The White house had become a private sanatorium only a few years
earlier. By the time they sold the house to the county, Charles Smith had been
in poor health for many years. He died in 1912, around the time that Hedwig and
son-in-law Charles Schnabel, were overseeing completion of their new
investment, the Congress Hotel at Southwest Sixth and Main.
The new Multnomah County Hospital, in the refurbished house,
opened in 1912. Never really considered a long-term solution to the need for a
new hospital, within a few years of opening, there were cries that it was inadequate
and possibly a firetrap.[2]
In the meantime, Multnomah County was beginning to consider a move to the top
of Marquam Hill, more or less overlooking the Smith house hospital site in
South Portland. In 1916, the University of Oregon Medical School offered a
piece of land on their hilltop property to the county.
In August 1923, the first patients moved into the new county
hospital on Marquam Hill. The demolition of the Smith House-Multnomah County
Hospital began only a couple of months later. Meanwhile, at the northern end of
the property a new Carnegie funded library branch neared completion. In 1927,
the remaining property where the Smith house once stood became Lair Hill Park.
[1]
“County Hospital Historic Building,” Oregonian,
September 9, 1923.
[2]
“New Hospital Need Told,” Oregonian,
November 18, 1914.
