Tampa Heights Hospital- St Joseph’s on 7th Avenue

Tampa Heights Hospital on the southeast corner of 301 East 7th Avenue, intersecting with Morgan Street. 1933. Burgert Brothers. Courtesy, Tampa-Hillsborough County Public Library System

Mobley Park Apartments, 301 E. 7th Avenue, Tampa, FL. 2021. © Chip Weiner

Tampa physician Dr. W.H. Dyer opened the Tampa Heights Hospital at 301 7th Avenue in July 1932 during the Great Depression. When it opened, the building was incomplete, and only two of the four floors were ever used. By 1933 the Catholic order of St. Francis bought the installation to complete and modernize the hospital to be known as St. Joseph’s Hospital. In the following years, the hospital expanded when it acquired two small adjacent lots, but the need for a larger facility persisted. In 1963, a symbolic groundbreaking on ranch land (they didn’t own the property yet) was held on the site of a new hospital on Buffalo Avenue (now Dr. Martin Luther King Boulevard). In 1967, the new 400-bed facility opened.. In the 1980s, this building became St. Francis Residence, a branch of Care Unit of Tampa, and by 2001 was demolished. The entire block now houses Mobley Park Apartments, a low-income housing development. The 70 acres of ranch land for the new St Joseph’s Hospital on Buffalo Avenue were sold by the Faedo family, descendants of whom still run food businesses in Tampa.

From Burgert Brothers: Look Again Vol. 1