Perhaps you’ve walked by the stately building, on Pennsylvania Ave SE right near Eastern Market and wondered what it was. I know I have, often. You’ve probably also noticed that there has been a lot of work done on the building – a full restoration is in the works. Turns out the building is the Old Naval Hospital, and it houses a long history of medicine in our nation’s capital.

The site on which the Old Naval Hospital stands has been associated with naval medicine since the Federal government moved to the city in 1800. An apothecary shop at the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and 9th Street, where the hospital is now located, provided medical services and supplies to the nearby Navy Yard.

In 1864, President Abraham Lincoln signed an Act of Congress that authorized the building of the naval hospital. The final cost of building the hospital was $115,000, a lot for the 1860s. The fence surrounding the hospital was cast at the local iron foundry of F. & A. Schneider, as their name is stamped on the fence.

The hospital was meant to treat soldiers during the Civil War, but wasn’t completed until after the war had ended. It closed as a hospital in 1903, as the Secretary of the Navy called it “antiquated and insufficient, and conforms in no respect to the conditions of modern hospital requirements.”

The building then was used as hospital Corps training school, the headquarters of the Naval Reserve in the teens, temporary home to ex-soldiers until the 60s, and then the headquarters of the Center for Youth Services in the 80s and 90s. Then, the publicly-owned building stood abandoned for years.

Beginning last summer, the Old Naval Hospital Foundation is now restoring the building. Plans are for the building to become the Hill Center, a campus-like center for lifelong learning, cultural enrichment, and community life.