Answer: As an overcrowded firetrap.
Step-by-step explanation: Lincoln Steffens was a reporter who published several investigative articles in the United States of America during the so-called Progressive Era. Reporters who wrote this kind of articles were known as muckrakers, a pejorative term for "investigative journalists." They usually focused their articles on attacking corrupted institutions and leaders. As doing so, they tried to raise common citizens awareness at prostitution, poor working conditions, poverty, and state neglection. The McClure's Magazine published in 1902 what many consider the first muckraker article, "Tweed Days in St. Louis" by Lincoln Steffens. In the article, Steffens depict the city as a prime example of everything wrong. He says that "a visitor is told of the wealth of the residents, of the financial strength of the banks, and of the importance of growing industries; yet he sees poorly paved, refuse-burdened streets, and dusty or muddy-covered alleys." About the city hospital, he says "He (the visitor) passes a ramshackle firetrap crowded with the sick and learns that is the City Hospital." In 1904, these articles were published as a book entitled "The shame of the cities", which earned Steffens a national reputation of the most famous journalist in the nation. Probably because of such repercussion, a year after Steffens' book came out the private City Hospital was replaced by a 120-bed one. It continued serving the population for many years and was still in operation when a month-long heat wave affected the central and southern America. By that time, the City Hospital proved to be, once more, the nastiest place to be in St. Louis.