1915 Gothic Revival Hospital, Now Office and Pizza Pub
1010 N 12th Ave, Pensacola, FL 32501
Age
All Ages
Cost
$$
No formal admission. Visit O'Zone Pizza Pub on the lower level for casual dining; upper floors are leased office space.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Multi-story former hospital with elevator
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1915 · First Catholic Hospital in Florida · Late Gothic Revival Architecture · Daughters of Charity
When Pensacola Hospital opened in September 1915, it was the first Catholic hospital in Florida. The Daughters of Charity — a religious order founded in 1633 — had invested more than $400,000 in the project. Construction took roughly a year, executed by Evans Brothers Construction of Birmingham, Alabama.
The architect was A.O. Von Herbulis, an Austrian immigrant who specialized in Catholic institutional buildings. His Pensacola design used the vocabulary of late English Gothic — Tudor arches at the wings, stonework framing the front entrance, an embattled parapet capping the building. The result reads more as an academic Gothic college than as a hospital, and that distinction has shaped the building's afterlife.
In 1948 the hospital's name was changed to Sacred Heart Hospital, fulfilling the original wish of Mother Margaret O'Keefe. The institution operated in the Von Herbulis building for fifty years before relocating in 1965 to a new facility on Ninth Avenue.
The original structure was preserved and redeveloped as Tower East — leased to offices, businesses, and a basement-level restaurant, O'Zone Pizza Pub. The East Tower Group, run by the Ritz family, has owned the building during its commercial-reuse decades.
Sources
The reports collected at Tower East are concentrated on the upper floors — the fourth and fifth — where the former patient wards and the path between hospital and chapel ran. The most consistent account describes the silhouette of a Daughter of Charity sister, sometimes seen briefly in a corridor, sometimes felt as a tap on the shoulder from behind. Several published accounts trace this gesture to a specific sister whose habit it was in life.
O'Zone Pizza Pub occupies the lower level of the building and has accumulated its own folklore — glasses moving, kitchen sounds with no source, a presence in the storeroom. Atlas Obscura's coverage notes that the staff treat the activity as routine.
Not all of the building's lore holds up to scrutiny. Aaron Ritz, whose family owns Tower East, told Pensacola's WEAR-TV in 2017 that the building never housed a morgue, contradicting some of the more sensational stories. The Daughters, he noted, did not have facilities for keeping a body — funeral homes or families took the deceased away promptly.
Notable Entities
Media Appearances
Eat in the former lower-level service area of the original Sacred Heart Hospital. The pizza pub has occupied this space since the hospital relocated in 1965, and the building's Gothic Revival shell is fully intact above.
View the late Gothic Revival exterior — Tudor arches, embattled parapet, stone surrounds — from East Hill. The 1915 building is one of Pensacola's most distinctive surviving institutional structures.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
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