Raconteuse: Nothing But Footprints

The day was warm, the light tinted golden with early afternoon. Here, maybe ten minutes off of I-29, it didn’t feel like I stood in Missouri’s largest city. The road was cracked and cratered, empty but for a flattened, sunbaked crow and a row of spectating trees. To the left, a chain link fence was sagging between each post, crowned in rusting barbed wire and latticed with skeletal vines. And behind it, a field of tawny grass stretched toward a gray-brown building with empty eye socket windows: Wheatley Provident Hospital. The place I’d come to see.

Brief Googling—research before I’d made the trip—had informed me that the building was 114 years old, and had spent nearly half its life as a hospital. In 1916, the Kansas City medical establishment systemically excluded black professionals, while the city’s segregated hospitals simultaneously refused service to the black community, leaving sick and injured people with no options for proper care. The carved letters of the hospital’s name were faint now, iridescent sunspots dancing across the

words—Wheatley Provident, after Phillis Wheatley, the brilliant, enslaved poet. Dr. John Edward Perry, a black man from Texas, established the hospital specifically to serve the city’s marginalized, suffering black population and to open the medical field to that same community, offering essential training unobtainable elsewhere. And he succeeded. Until in 1972, for some undocumented reason, the hospital transferred its patients and began an inexorable slip into ruin.

Now, its lawn wild and yellow, glass long splintered from the windows, Wheatley Provident looked nothing like a hospital. It was a Catholic school before Dr. Perry, but that identity was equally hidden, lost in the years and weeds and immutably unspooling vines. Along the leftmost side of the roof, spindly, rusted metal letters still etched ASYLUM into the sky, a relic from a brief incarnation as a haunted house in the ‘80s. Eyeing the battered, crumbling building, it was hard to believe that Wheatley Provident was in the Kansas City Register of Historic Places. There was no sign, no marker, no hint of care. The hospital was broken and alone, forgotten in the middle of a sprawling city. I adjusted my camera, its strap broad and rough against my neck, and stepped through a gap in the fence.

What I was doing had a name, though I stumbled across it long after I started photographing abandoned places. Online it was called “urban exploring,” which had always sounded a bit pretentious to me, a little too aggrandizing. But I liked the unofficial motto. I followed it before knowing it existed: “Take nothing but photos; leave nothing but footprints.” I liked the sentiment, really. The point wasn’t to take or leave something behind. I wanted to say goodbye to the places as I found them—preserve them, in some small way. I was coming to see, to notice, and to document the hospital for myself. To capture it in this one specific facet of its existence, when I had the chance to witness, and to wander through the broken places.

On either side of me, the fence’s broken wires hung poised like metal fangs, and I looked up again. The building was shaped like a toppled L. Halfway down the long side of the letter, crumbling concrete steps ascended to an arched entrance. This long, protruding branch had to be the addition. When the hospital opened it had only a handful of available beds: the north wing, built in 1925, helped to fix that problem. It also housed the new pediatric department, brainchild of a second impassioned doctor: Katherine Berry Richardson. Dr. Richardson had also witnessed the effects of segregation, having already opened another hospital with her sister—as female physicians, however white, were barred from practicing at the city’s established institutions. Where Dr. Perry focused on serving black medical students and the neglected adult population, Dr. Richardson’s attention turned to the sick, undernourished children placidly ignored by the high-minded medical system. Dr. Perry’s hospital accepted her initiative, and Wheatley Provident started saving children.

And now, the hospital’s door lolled to the side, unhinged. The entryway was unobstructed. The thin black rectangle beckoned.

As I moved through the field, the familiar anticipation burned low in my chest. My pulse became suddenly insistent and anticipatory goose bumps frolicked uncontrollably up and down my arms. My breaths, however, came slowly, consciously measured. I climbed the hospital’s shattered stairs. Paused. Breathed. And crossed the threshold.

The stale air welcomed me inside, enfolding me in dark, cold arms. The smell was familiarly unsettling. Like the abandoned houses in my own neighborhood in Des Moines, Iowa, the hospital smelled like breathing too much of it would probably kill you. Like the underside of a stone, or the space below an overpass, or the nook beneath a staircase where the air swims with dust and broken cobwebs. It wouldn’t kill me, of course. But it wasn’t a rational response. It was like the smell of cold, trapped air and moldering forgetfulness was coded; hardwired into that place that ignored odds and logic and just whispered leave, leave, leave behind my eyes. Except it wasn’t the only primal, essential tug. There was the stronger one. The thing that brought me in here, that nudged at some deep fascination with the things we leave behind. Something like curiosity. Like wonder.

I advanced slowly, leaving the entrance’s wedge of sun. It was messy. A mixture of moldering clothes, bottles, and empty bags littered the concrete floor—unworrying and unsurprising: it made sense that homeless people had used the place at some point, and none of the detritus looked recent. I focused on the floor, picking a path toward the nearby doorway: it looked brighter there.

In an abandoned building, light develops a magnetic pull; a response, maybe, to that small, insistent knowledge of things in the shadows that you can’t see. My phone flashlight was essentially useless, and the ground floor I moved through was very, very dark. But across the second threshold, light sprang back. Sturdy stairs, concrete like the floor, were lit by a window free of plywood, ushering daylight into the dusk and sweeping back the musty drapery of shadows. I stopped, my lifted camera a third eye against my face, and scanned the room.

The graffiti was most surprising. Not the smell, not the darkness, not the heaps of clothing colonizing the floor in dozens of lumpy, intersecting settlements. The abandoned houses I’d photographed had all of those things. The graffiti was something new. Had bored teenagers scrawled the words against the walls? The homeless people who once slept here? It didn’t seem like vandalism, meaningless and random. No. It seemed like messages. A face, spray painted in red, leered at me from the wall as I started up the stairs. The second floor seemed brilliant compared to the first; like a negative photograph, all darkness swapped for light. Sunshine spilled through the unboarded windows and a razored cross-breeze rushed through the space like water, cleaning the air. The hall was wide and lined with rooms, and every door hung open, a row of unhinged jaws. There was more graffiti up here too, easier to read with the influx of light. I gingerly forded a river of twisted cloth to enter the room that faced the stairs. A door rested facedown on the floor and a scarlet crate balanced on slabs of drywall, forming a shaky turret. Pale green paint chipped from the ceiling and dark letters spindled along the wall: Are you afraid of the dark? Help me. No. Plastic tatters fluttered from a window frame, and the unexpected memory of a high school Spanish class flitted to the forefront of my mind: Francisco Goya, who painted nightmares on his house’s walls.

I retreated, moving back down the hall until a wide metal door blocked my way, blanketed in thick, caking brown rust. A matching doorknob lolled above the misshaped keyhole, its neck broken. A threat, tattooed in glaring blue paint, bled from the door’s face: IF You ENTER, You Will DIE. Hooking my fingers into the gap by the hanging knob, I tested the pull of the door. It was heavy, but still secure in its hinges—not about to topple. Cautiously, I swung it open. I breathed a half laugh: the graffiti wasn’t wrong. This room must’ve led to the older half of the hospital, because the solid concrete floor ended a few feet past the threshold. Wood deals with time and dampness a little less handily than concrete. The floorboards were buckled and broken, some embroidered with the brilliant golden greens of rain-fed

lichen, others dusty gray and trimmed with multicolored paint chips. A forest of skewed supports still balanced most of the roof on their heads, slants of sunlight filtering in through the smattering of holes. Toward the middle of the space, the floor sloped gently down to a gaping sinkhole. My toes curled reflexively in my boots, intensely aware of the edge in front of me. I kept to the concrete, leaning around the doorway’s corner for a few photos before letting the graffitied warning swoop back into place behind me.

Back down the hallway, the door of the next room slanted in a crooked yawn. Red and black letters howled THEM & NOT ME from the wood. And inside, a half dozen dirty, staring dolls sprawled in dust and darkness: the pediatric department.

So little of the building’s contents called up its history. Its disease was a modern one, the symptoms aluminum cans and polyester jackets and plastic grocery bags. Any syringes would not have evoked medicine. Only the walls themselves had dredged up the hospital’s old identity. But the dolls conjured children. And there had been children here. My thoughts skittered to the images from a National Medical Association article on Wheatley Provident, written by Dr. Perry—one of only a handful scanned and online. A boy standing posed, face turned from the camera. A woman in a cloche hat, looking down at the baby held in her arms. A malnourished little girl with an oversized hair bow. Lives changed a lifetime ago, and all around me memory. Memory soaked into ceiling cracks, pressed into flaking walls, beaten into the concrete floors by a thousand pairs of feet like mine.

It’s a feeling you don’t get used to—that brilliant instant of realized history. Like flight interrupted by a spider's web, only you’ve been stuck in it all along. It’s not unique to abandoned places, or not for me; an old letter can do it, a photograph, a song. But the sheer unexpected embodiment, the here-ness of it—that’s what the buildings hold inside them.

But was it a luxury to find this beautiful? The glassless windows and peeling paint, the cracked ceilings and shattered floor? I was so removed from the people who lost themselves living here. Me, with my camera and college. My easy escape. Wheatley Provident was a triumph, and is a tragedy. I stood knee deep in history and human wreckage: apart, and a part.

In the complex dark of my own shuttered eyes, another of Dr. Perry’s articles swam to the surface. He ended it with a poem. His scholarly, surgical article, published in a medical journal. A personality quirk, an incongruity preserved, that I happened to find. This was a man who fought through an impossible system to become a surgeon, founded a hospital, and named it after a poet. A surgeon who quoted poetry in his medical reports. And the city had abandoned this building, and forgotten him with it. The place around me was one more splinter of uncounted fractured legacies. I couldn’t rebuild the people whose spray paint wept from the walls, today’s forgotten humans writing over the remnants of yesterday’s, just as I couldn’t stitch together the real Dr. John Edward Perry from a corpse of a building and a handful of articles immortalized on the internet. Not really. But I was, in a limited way, recreating some kind of simulacrum, however distorted and incomplete. And most importantly, maybe, was the act of trying. Attempting to comprehend someone, someplace, who had been rendered unknowable.

* * *

When I retraced my path back through the building, my legs ached from crouching for photographs and my neck burned tight and stiff from the camera’s weight. My skin had befriended the building’s coldness, and the still high sun beamed brashly past the arched doorway, gilding the unruly field. I slid a palm along the dark stone wall, breathed one last lungful of sullen air, and stepped out of Wheatley Provident’s quiet in-betweeness, moving back into the day.

The hospital echoed with a litany of ghosts. And as I left, the whisper of my passing joined their voices.