Q. What is it supposed to be on the show? A. A hospital. Q. Where is it supposed to be on the show? A.  The fictional  address is “563 Cliff Row, Miami FL  33132.” But that address doesn't exist in real life. Q. When did we see it on the show? A. We see it first in Episode 1, of Season 1. After Harry has a heart attack, Dexter rushes him to Angel of Mercy emergency hospital, where he is later joined by by Debra, as they wait to hear news about their father. When Harry's health continues to decline, Dexter begins to notice some odd behavior on the part  of a nurse called Mary, who is treating Harry. She  secretly smiles while consoling the grieving family of a patient who was in her care, and Dexter later discovers but she is keeping a scrapbook containing news stories of all the patients who have died in her care. It soon becomes clear that Nurse Mary has a dark passenger of her own, and she has been murdering her patients with injections of potassium nitrate.  Her next victim is to be Harry, but Dexter stops her from injecting him again. He tells Harry what she is doing, and when deathly-ill Harry tells him to stop her, she winds up as Dexter's first kill. (We later learn from a document read by Harry that his wife, Doris, has been to the same Angel of Mercy Hospital for a pregnancy test.)

The doors of the hospital are seen again in a very brief shot during a flashback in Episode 6, when Harry rushes to the hospital after finding out that his wife, Doris, is giving birth to their daughter, Debra.

And fans of the original “Dexter”  series have seen Angel of Mercy Hospital before, way back in the 4th episode of the very first season of the original series.

Q. Where can I find it in real life?

A. This scene was shot in Community Hospital of Long Beach, at 1720 Termino Ave., in Long Beach, California. 

The hospital, which was founded in 1924, permanently closed in 2018, affording the perfect location to film medical scenes.

Q. How the heck did you figure out where it was?

A.  The first time we saw “Angel of Mercy Hospital” was in the first season of “Dexter”, and for that 2006 scene they used Linda Vista Hospital In East L.A.  But that large hospital looked nothing like the small building shown on “Original Sin” when Dexter delivers Harry to the emergency entrance.

So I had to start my search from scratch.

There are 88 hospitals in Los Angeles County, so to avoid looking at every single one of them, I decided to start looking in Long Beach first, where they they have always filmed most of the scenes from “Dexter”. 
I quickly found a list of Long Beach hospitals, and began checking them out.

First, I looked at St Mary’s Medical Center, where “Dexter” had filmed before, in the 5th season. But that wasn’t it.

Next, I looked at the Long Beach Medical Center on Atlantic, but that didn’t match either.

I wasn’t even aware of “Community Hospital Long Beach”, but it was on the list, so I checked it out.

For me, the  most memorable feature of the hospital seen as “Angel of Mercy” was a large, fancy window shaped like a stilted arch, which appeared in multiple shots in Harry’s hospital room. So I kept looking for that kind of window when I looked at the various hospitals.

At first glance, the attractive Spanish Colonial exterior of Community Hospital Long Beach certainly doesn’t match the plain building seen on the show. So I would have been quick to dismiss it, except for one feature that jumped out at me: a very large window shaped like a stilted arch. In fact, two such arched windows, one at each end of the hospital building.

I was certain that was the same window we had seen from the inside on the show, but I didn’t know what to make of the fact that the building otherwise looked nothing like the opening shot of the emergency entrance.

I was 99% certain that this was the correct location but I wanted to be 100% certain.

Fortunately the shots of that arched window on the show provided a glimpse of what was outside across the street. So I captured a screenshot and used Photoshop to diminish the glare, and ended up with a good view of the two-story building across the street.

And sure enough, when I used StreetView to check what was across the street from Community Hospital, the building at 1703 Termino was a perfect match for what could be seen outside Harry’s window.

But I still had the mystery of where they shot that opening shot. 

I looked at the Community Hospital building from all sides, but none seemed to match.
So my first assumption, which turned out to be wrong, was that they had filmed the interior scenes at Community Hospital but had apparently filmed that opening shot somewhere else.

It wasn’t until I resorted to Google Earth for a three-dimensional, rotatable view of the entire hospital complex, that I finally spotted it: In the very back of the original hospital buildings, directly behind the south end of the building, and facing the taller, more modern addition, I saw a tiny red awning that matched that opening shot. 
Hidden away behind the other buildings, it can’t be seen from any street, so StreetView is useless. It can only be seen from an aerial view using Google Earth and even then it’s tricky to spot.

I’m not sure exactly why they opted to use that tiny entrance way rather than the far more handsome exterior that faces Termino Ave. Perhaps it was an attempt to avoid shutting down that street for filming, since they could shoot that smaller entrance without disturbing traffic.

But the bottom line is that all of the interiors were shot inside the main original Spanish-style building that faces west (and Termino Ave.), while that one opening shot (when Dexter first arrives at the hospital with Harry), was filmed in the far back of the building, facing the opposite direction (east).

Here is a StreetView from Google:


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