Biography | Albert Einstein — Died in the Hospital That Stood on This Street

Albert Einstein died at 1:15 a.m. on 18 April 1955 in Princeton Hospital, at 253 Witherspoon Street. He was seventy-six. The New York Times reported a ruptured aneurysm of the aorta. He had been admitted the previous Friday after days of abdominal pain at 112 Mercer Street. The hospital on this block closed in 2012, when Princeton Health moved the wards to Plainsboro. The Witherspoon campus was sold in 2014 for housing. The pin marks the old hospital site, not a ward you can enter. There is no grave. The body went that afternoon to a Princeton funeral home, then to the Ewing crematory in Trenton. Otto Nathan scattered the ashes in a place that was not published. He had asked that 112 Mercer Street not become a museum. The Institute for Advanced Study later bought the house and kept it private. The public pin for the American years is Fuld Hall, a mile south, not the bedroom or the hospital room. What remains here is a street of later buildings and the fact of the hour. The last words were in German. The night nurse, Alberta Rozsel, did not understand them. Photo: Oren Jack Turner portrait of Einstein, Princeton, 1947, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons