Beatrice Community Hospital and Health Center in Beatrice, Neb., is coming down this year after serving the community for more than 50 years, according to an article on the Beatrice Daily Sun.

The building will come down after crews remove asbestos before the final demolition. In the meantime, workers exchanged memories.

“When I came in 1966, I don’t think you could have found a nicer building,” said Karen Wiebe, a former house supervisor at the hospital. “I thought the other day, how nice those patient rooms were set up. You had two people to a room and each one had a nice large window they could look out all day long. They could see each other and had a curtain they could pull in between if they wanted privacy and shared a bathroom with a sink. It couldn’t have been set up nicer.”

“I think with everything, there comes a point at which you try and figure out all sorts of ways to make an efficient, modern hospital, and it doesn’t work,” Dorothy Zimmerman, who was an assistant administrator and compliance officer at BCH from 1969-2008 said. “Finally, you just say ‘OK, we’re going to have to look elsewhere.’ In order to move on and become an excellent healthcare facility, the building had to go. The building was designed for in-patient care back in the mid-50s. That’s all we had and to try and put that into an out-patient facility with a few acute beds just doesn’t work.”

Read the article.