Maternity Hospital and Infant Home

Look just under the roofline on the north side of the pastoral center, and you can still make out the words “The Anthony N. Brady Maternity Home.”

Opened in 1915 and funded by a large donation from Brady, a wealthy local businessman, the hospital worked in tandem with a recently built facility next door, a home for the care of orphaned and destitute children from birth to age 6. Both the maternity hospital and the infant home were under the direction of the Sisters of Charity.

There were a few growing pains: Pine Hills neighbors complained to the bishop in 1914 that it was “annoying” to hear the babies crying at the infant home, and “that the weeping of the infants caused a depreciation of the property in the vicinity.” They asked him to find a way to make it stop. According to a newspaper report, the bishop “promised to take the matter under consideration.”

The Brady Hospital closed in 1966, when a maternity wing opened at St. Peter’s Hospital. The infant home, renamed St. Catherine's Infant Home in 1951, is now St. Catherine's Center for Children. The Brady property was dedicated as the Roman Catholic Diocese’s Pastoral Center in 1989.