City Hospital is pictured in color on this 1909 postcard on a hill south of downtown Kansas City with a background of tall trees. Carrie Whitney describes the new facility in her three-volume 1909 history of early Kansas City: These are the main facts about Kansas City's new general hospital, completed in 1908. The building cost approximately $425,000...is five stories high, built of gray brick laid in white mortar. The structure is fireproof, the floors are hardwood, laid on concrete and the window sills marble. The corners of the floor are round; the hospital faces west on Robert Gillham Road, where the thoroughfare broadens into a parkway...To the right of the main entrance is a bronze tablet with these words: 'Because of his love for his fellow man, Thomas H. Swope gave to the people of Kansas City the site of these buildings. 'A bronze tablet on the left of the main entrance bears this inscription: 'Built by the people of Kansas City - her officials, her physicians, her architects, her artisans - each doing his part with loving thought of the good uses of these buildings. 'Whitney goes on to describe the 10 sun parlors where the convalescents may find relief from the melancholy 'atmosphere' of the various wards and relates details of the new air washing system with two fans, 16 feet in diameter, pumping each minute 57,000 cubic feet of air into the building and shafts where sprays of water wash the air cleansing it of dust and germs, the air entering the wards through registers high on the walls, and temperatures controlled automatically. In summertime the air will be cooled and in winter it will be heated...the degree of warmth being regulated by thermostat. All new ideas then - and a proud accomplishment for Kansas City some 80 years ago. Kansas City Times, January 5, 1990.
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