Three buildings at Tucson Medical Center have been added to the National Register of Historic Places.
The buildings, located near the Grant Road entry to TMC’s main campus, once functioned as sleeping quarters for nurses and a tuberculosis clinic, said Corky Poster, an architect at the firm that handled the buildings’ rehabilitation. The historic buildings are all either in present-day use or undergoing renovations.
“They could have just been made into three museums, but TMC took a lot of time and effort to
find an economically sustainable use of these old buildings,” Poster said in a news release.
In the early 20th century, Arizona’s arid climate and abundant sunshine were thought to be beneficial for the treatment of tuberculosis. In 1926, the Desert Sanatorium of Southern Arizona opened on East Grant Road and North Beverly Avenue in Tucson, where people from all over the country sought medical treatment at what would later become Tucson Medical Center.
An influx of tuberculosis sufferers traveled to Arizona in the 1920s and ’30s in order to treat their disease through “solar radiation,” or exposure to direct sunlight. The Patio Building at TMC is now an administrative office for the hospital, but when it was constructed in 1928, the building’s U-shaped patio was designed for tuberculars to sit in the sun.
The Arizona Building, which stands nearby to the Patio Building, was built in 1927 as a nursing dormitory. The building is currently empty amid renovations.
The Erickson Building on Beverly Avenue, another of the historic buildings, now contains TMC’s Facilities Department. It once served as the home of Alfred and Anna Erickson, a wealthy New York advertising executive and his wife who helped finance the Desert Sanatorium. After Alfred’s death in 1943, Anna Erickson donated the property to the community with the hopes of turning it into a hospital.
The advent of antibiotics for the treatment of tuberculosis in the mid-1940s rendered many sanatoriums obsolete, and in 1944, the Desert Sanatorium was absorbed by TMC, though the hospital preserved the historic structures.
The three buildings’ original architects, Henry Jastaad and Roy Place, designed some of Tucson’s most well-known landmarks, including St. Augustine’s Cathedral, El Conquistador Resort, the Pima County Courthouse, the Steward Observatory, the Benedictine Sanctuary, and Tucson High School.
The TMC buildings are one of more than 200 Tucson sites on the National Register of Historic Places, which lists locations that are designated for preservation due to great historical or artistic significance.