Crescent Hotel

In 2019, work on the Crescent Hotel’s grounds brought an older chapter of its history back to the surface.

Bottles and specimen jars emerged from a buried disposal site associated with Norman Baker’s hospital. The hotel’s account describes an archaeological investigation that recovered hundreds of containers. For decades, the story had been told inside the building. Now pieces of it were coming out of the earth.

To understand why they were there, the story has to return to 1937.

By then, the Crescent had already lived several lives. It had opened as a grand hotel in 1886 and later housed a women’s college. Baker gave it another purpose. He turned the property into a cancer hospital and advertised a cure.