It was a controversial empty hospital. Now it's got a lot going on.

Good morning. It’s Friday, April 17th. You can expect a Graypril morning to give way to a clear afternoon, with highs in the upper 70s. (Calabasas and Agoura Hills up through Santa Clarita are under a wind advisory until 2 p.m., with gusts up to 50 miles per hour).

In today’s newsletter, we’ve got stories about federal investigations in Lancaster, Eric Swalwell’s Hollywood ambitions, high-profile departures from L.A. leadership and some things to do this weekend. But first, an abandoned hospital that’s coming back to life in some unexpected ways.

St. Vincent Medical Center, a seven-floor yellowish-white structure that looms over MacArthur Park, is the oldest hospital in Los Angeles. Or it was — the hospital closed six years ago, and the building has been vacant since. In case that wasn’t clear, the words “MEDICAL CENTER” on the facade have been covered up by a big white tarp.

But this historic complex, recently controversial for being inactive in a high-need neighborhood, is notable right now for the opposite reason. St. Vincent is preparing not just to reopen, but to take on several completely new identities at once — including a homeless shelter, a large supportive housing development, and an immersive, selfie-friendly pop-up art museum with 70 rooms.

St. Vincent, founded in 1856 and in its location on Alvarado Street since 1927, closed in January 2020 after its owner, Verity Health Systems, shut down the entire facility on short notice after a bankruptcy. Early 2020 ended up being a suboptimal moment to take hospital beds offline, and a few months after the closure, Los Angeles Times owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong purchased the complex to serve as a coronavirus research facility. Soon-Shiong immediately leased the building to the state to serve as a pandemic surge hospital, but the campus fell idle again after a few weeks, and the research facility hospital never came to fruition.

Eventually St. Vincent — empty but for the occasional film shoot — became a political flashpoint. In 2022, L.A. City Councilmember Mitch O’Farrell, who represented the area at the time, publicly called on Soon-Shiong to reopen the facility to serve the local homeless community. St. Vincent was even a topic in a mayoral debate that same year. 

But the complex remained inactive — until, last year, an interested buyer emerged. 

An ownership group, led by local developer Shay Yadin, purchased the entire St. Vincent campus from Soon-Shiong in late 2025 for a reported price of $66.5 million — about half of what Soon-Shiong paid for it. Then Yadin announced to an L.A. Times reporter in January that St. Vincent would soon reopen as an all-purpose behavioral health complex, combining treatment centers with a 205-bed shelter facility and an 170-unit permanent housing development serving people who were formerly homeless.

Not mentioned in the L.A. Times article: the massive immersive art exhibition the new owners will also soon open inside the hospital.

Yadin is also a partner at a company that puts on immersive event experiences. That company, Royva Inc., is producing “Hospital of Emotions,” a selfie-friendly walkthrough museum scheduled to open May 27th across four floors of St. Vincent’s main building. The exhibition will showcase the work of 70 different artists, each of whom has been given a room in the hospital to express a different emotion. A seemingly AI-rendered Instagram post calling for artist applications went out in December of last year, just as the sale of the building went through.

Las Vegas-based Heather Bellino, one of the 70 artists accepted out of a reported pool of over a thousand applicants, chose the theme emotion of Joy. She’s preparing to turn a surgery room into a simulated undersea experience, complete with a giant oyster shell and large, glowing pearls. Oysters make pearls, Bellino learned, as a “defense mechanism” against irritants: “I was inspired by the idea that you can take a difficult moment and turn it into something beautiful,” she told us.

Javiera Estrada, a Culver City-based artist, also chose Joy as her subject. She was given another operating room as her canvas, and said the space still has a record on the wall of the last procedure it hosted: a heart transplant. Her plans for the room are inspired by the party game Twister, and “coming back together to be physically present.”

David Kaiser and Tim Schwartz, meanwhile, are collaborating on a Love-themed exhibit in a former patient room. They’ll be filling it with stuffed animals — a concept aligned with a mobile pop-up Schwartz is currently operating out of a shipping container. 

The exhibition advertised a $4,000 stipend for artists and a production budget of up to $10,000, though most of the four participating artists we spoke to said their budgets were roughly half that. None of them had been informed of the shelter, housing, or treatment facilities in progress on the property.

Developers of the permanent housing, meanwhile, expressed confidence that it would move forward on schedule, with construction beginning in “three or four months.” Steve Sawicki, Executive Director of TPC Homes, the service provider behind the housing development, told us that the building was fully financed and would cost about $450,000 per unit — less than comparable developments in the region, in large part because it’s a conversion of an office building rather than new construction.

The 205-bed shelter facility, located in a separate building on the campus, is also scheduled to take in residents soon. Luana Murphy, Chief Strategy and Implementation Officer at Exodus Inc., the service provider for the shelter, confirmed that the facility is planned to open in “late May or early June,” and would serve unhoused individuals with mental health or substance use disorders.

How long will Hospital of Emotions last? No end date has been publicly announced and the artists weren’t given a specific one, but all four had been told that the timeframe would be “six months” from the May 27th opening, with the possibility of an extension.

After striking out on multiple attempts to speak to exhibition organizers, we were met with emotions like Confusion and Suspicion when attempting to check out the campus on Wednesday morning. As we attempted to summon Resilience and Hope, a manager told us that we “can’t just walk onto the property.” After leaving in Shame, we took pictures of the complex from the sidewalk.

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RAID’S ANATOMY: Two elected officials in Lancaster had their homes raided by the FBI on Wednesday, in combination with a search conducted by federal officers at Lancaster City Hall. The L.A. Times, citing unnamed law enforcement sources, reported that warrants were served at the homes of Vice Mayor Marvin Crist and Councilman Raj Malhi, along with a property in Bel-Air. Lancaster is currently counting votes in an election where Crist did not seek another term and Malhi is running fourth in early counts.

E.R. (IC): In the wake of Eric Swalwell’s cancellation of his gubernatorial campaign and resignation from Congress due to allegations of sexual assault and harassment, Page Six Hollywood reports that Swalwell had also been interested in getting into the entertainment business and "actively setting up projects around town" in recent months, including an A24-produced, D.C.-set legal drama in development at HBO. (Swalwell was both producing and doubling as an "authenticity consultant," per P6H.)

THE QUITT: Two prominent leaders of important L.A. companies announced that they were stepping away from their posts this week. Jaime Lee, CEO of family megadeveloper Jamison Properties, which has built about 7,000 units in the Los Angeles area, is leaving the role to be replaced by her brother, and Reed Hastings, co-founder and chairman of Netflix, will step down from the streamer's board after his term expires in June to focus on "philanthropy and other pursuits."

FLIP/STUCK: A blue Corvette drove off the 60 Freeway, flipped multiple times, and crashed into a Maserati dealership in City of Industry early Wednesday morning, proving once again that the second season of True Detective was onto something. Neither passenger in the Corvette was seriously injured.

DOOGIE BROWSER, M.D.: The L.A. Times Festival of Books, the biggest book festival in the country, is popping off all weekend at USC with 300 exhibitors, more panels than a solar farm, and talks from titans of the printed word like Lionel Richie, Larry David, and Sarah Jessica Parker.

NINJAGO HOPE: Earth Day is this Wednesday, but the Natural History Museum is celebrating on Sunday with live raptors (the bird kind), exhibitors like Friends of the LA River and Latinx with Plants, marimba performances, and of course a LEGO activity.

DOC ARTIN’: American Cinematheque’s “This Is Not a Fiction” documentary festival is running 45 films into next weekend at their three theaters in Hollywood, Santa Monica, and Los Feliz. A lot of the screenings are sold out, but you can still catch American Dream with a Barbara Kopple Q&A tonight at the Los Feliz 3, a Lilith Fair documentary with director Ally Pankiw at the Aero on Saturday afternoon, and two films plus a Q&A from extremely revealing autobiographical documentarian Caveh Zahedi on Sunday night at the Egyptian.

PAINT MENACE MEDICAL: Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope, the facepainted fifty-somethings from Detroit known as Insane Clown Posse, bring their hip-hop act to The Novo in DTLA on Saturday night. Prayers go out to the Novo staff, who will have to clean up the regional soda that the group sprays into the crowd at every show.

For today’s peek inside our subscriber-only Discord server, members shared some of their favorite root-destroyed sidewalks around the city.

AND FINALLY… A poem to pair with your morning coffee: “I’m Working on the World” by Wisława Szymborska, translated by Stainsław Baranczak and Claire Cavanagh. (This poem comes recommended by L.A. Material reader Clem Wright.)

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