Gateway Community Hospital is located in East St. Louis. It closed in 1989 due to financial difficulties. It is a large, connected structure that's easy to get lost in. Its interior has been severely gutted, and many of the windows on the front of the building have been removed. The structure is wide open in many places, and several doors leading into the hospital have simply disappeared.
My friend and I first noticed this building on one of our many trips through East St. Louis. It's a massive building that sits off a main road and it's very hard to miss. I was immediately attracted to the building and wondered why many of its windows were missing. But I was hesitant to explore the hospital. Given that it was so large and easy to get inside of, I feared there would be a lot of activity inside. It wasn't until a few months later that I put my hesitations aside and explored the hospital.
Gateway is surprisingly calm. I didn't run into anyone inside the hospital, and I didn't see any clear evidence that people were living inside the building either. The hospital is larger inside than it appears from the outside, but it's so gutted that it fails to make for interesting exploration. The many floors and rooms inside the hospital quickly become monotonous and somewhat boring.
There were, however, a few interesting things about the hospital. Many pieces of promotional literature and hundreds of old records can be found littered throughout the building. There are several places inside the hospital that still contain pieces of out-of-date medical equipment. The building is a hypnotic maze of long hallways and hidden spaces, but unfortunately lacks a certain residual energy that I've come to expect from hospitals of its size.
Gateway is not the kind of place I would go out of my way to visit again. It's a mildly interesting building, but quickly becomes repetitive. In some respects it reminds me of City Hospital, but not enough so to put the two hospitals in the same category. City Hospital offered a more rich and enveloping feeling than Gateway; a feeling no other place has come close to.
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