Franz Mayer Museum - The Building

The Building

It is located in the Plaza de la Santa Veracruz, next to the Museo Nacional de la Estampa . The building was originally built as a flour mill, then was used as a hospital for about four hundred years. This hospital was founded by Dr. Pedro Lopez in 1582, the first medical doctor to graduate from the Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico. The hospital attended people from almost all of New Spain’s social castes and called the Hospital for the Helpless. The hospital’s church was dedicated to the Three Wise Men. The hospital was run by the Lopez family then the Dominicans, than the Brothers Hospitallers of St. John of God, starting in 1604. The current structure was built over most of the 18th century with multiple adaptations and reconstructions since. In 1620, the complex was rebuilt as a church, hospital and monastery. The church's main altarpiece was inaugurated in 1650 and the infirmaries were completed in 1673. The order continued to run the hospital for the next two hundred years despite a fire in 176 and an earthquake in 1800. The Brothers wer forced to abandon the complex after Mexico’s Independence in 1821. It became a school run the by the nuns of the Teaching of the Indies from 1830 to 1834, than the Sisters of Charity occupied it from 1845 to 1873. It began caring for the sick again in 1865, taken over by the Public Benefits Office in 1875 with the name of Morelos Hospital. It remained a hospital under one name or another until the 1960s, when it was used to display handcrafts during the Olympic Games. It would keep this function through the 1970s but in dilapidated condition.

In the 1980s, the idea surged to make it into a museum. The Human Settlements and Public Works Ministry granted occupation of the building to the Franz Mayer Cultural Trusteeship, managed by the Bank of Mexico with the purpose of founding a museum. The current restoration dates from this time. The Franz Mayer Museum was opened to the public in 1986. The museum occupies the former hospital with three of the original rooms of the cloister: a dining hall, a storage room and a chapel restored to its colonial look.