Herman Kiefer Hospital

01 / The story of this place

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The City of Detroit opened Herman Kiefer Hospital in 1911, naming it for Dr. Herman Kiefer, a German-born physician known for treating Detroit's poor and for his work on public health and vaccination. Over the following century the sprawling campus, whose later buildings were designed by architect Albert Kahn, grew into the city's main public health hospital, treating generations of Detroiters for tuberculosis, diphtheria, scarlet fever, and other infectious diseases, and later housing the Detroit Health Department. The city closed the hospital for good in 2013 as its public health functions moved elsewhere. A private developer signed an agreement in 2016 to convert the twenty-five-acre, multi-building complex for new commercial uses, but the project has moved slowly and stalled, and by the mid-2020s the city and the developer were disputing who controls the buildings' future.

1. Opened in 1911, named for physician Herman Kiefer
2. Later buildings designed by architect Albert Kahn
3. Detroit's main public health hospital for more than a century
4. Closed in 2013; a stalled redevelopment has left the buildings mostly vacant since