Tussle Over St. Elizabeths

With its college-style quadrangle, sumptuous gardens and expansive lawns dotted with fountains and ponds, the campus itself was considered therapeutic. Patients who could work were assigned jobs in the bakery, sewing shop, shoe shop or broom factory. Some worked in the hospital's fields, orchard and vineyard.

Buildings went up through the decades -- a nursing school, a surgical hospital and centers for the deaf and for alcoholics and drug addicts. Beauty and barber shops, a library, credit union, chapel, tennis courts and a movie theater served residents and employees. At its peak, 4,000 people worked and 7,000 patients lived there.

Scientists carried on groundbreaking research, including development of antipsychotic medications. In 1913, Carl Jung visited to study African American patients to determine whether the symbolic content of their dreams differed from that of other races. In the 1940s, Walter Freeman began to practice lobotomies as a cure for schizophrenia. His patients included John F. Kennedy's sister Rosemary Kennedy, who was lobotomized in 1941 with disastrous results.

Decline began in the 1950s. Massive institutions came to be seen as a problem, not the solution. Mental hospitals began to deinstitutionalize patients. The idea was that they could get personalized treatment in community-based facilities and that new psychiatric drugs would allow them near-normal lives.

Although the District's outpatient system had enormous shortcomings and many patients ended up homeless, St. Elizabeths was no longer a primary resource. In 1987, the federal government deeded St. Elizabeths to the District to come up with an alternate use. But the District's mental health program was in receivership, and long-range planning was not a high priority.

By 1996, the remaining 850 patients had to cope with medicine shortages, a lack of equipment and a heating system that failed so frequently patients went weeks without showers. Life at St. Elizabeths had regressed to a condition disturbingly similar to those that inspired Dix's crusade in the first place.

The last patients were moved to other facilities in 2002. All became quiet in Dix's once-magnificent city on a hill, the ghostly structures slowly succumbing to time and neglect.

As D.C. mayor, Anthony A. Williams (D) wooed developers to the Point. With construction cranes just beginning to loom over long-dormant neighborhoods southeast of the Capitol, he urged the developers to imagine the possibilities on the Anacostia side of the river -- maybe a high-tech center, perhaps a research center or a corporate headquarters. Nothing came of it.

In 2002, the Urban Land Institute recommended the University of the District of Columbia move in. Nothing came of that.

In 2003, David Garrison, a deputy director at the Brookings Institution, proposed a thriving neighborhood -- offices, condominiums, houses, assisted living.

It would take $50 million to $100 million just to bring the buildings up to code.

"Restoration involves restoring a small city," said Carter Wormeley, who manages the site for the General Services Administration. "Water, sewer, streets, curbs, gutters -- that's got to be done from scratch."