Some of the roughly 300 students and other protesters said they feared the Doctors Without Borders-Spain clinic would bring more of the disease to their seaside town, which is one of the hardest hit in the week-old epidemic that has killed 284 people and infected 3,769, according to United Nations figures.
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Haitian health officials assured the crowd the clinic would not open in that neighborhood.
The 400-bed facility was intended to rehydrate and treat people with the severe diarrheal disease.
Doctors Without Borders-Spain country chief Francisco Otero said the group had consulted with local authorities and told them the clinic is important for stemming the spread of cholera. He said they would try to reopen it in another part of St. Marc.
"In the coming days we are going to start to work with this community, to explain that there is no risk for them to have such a facility," Otero told The Associated Press.
More than 420 new cholera cases were confirmed Tuesday, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Twenty-five new deaths were confirmed, bringing the total to 284.
OCHA spokeswoman Imogen Wall says the majority of cases occurred along the central Artibonite River with many new instances in Haiti's central plateau. St. Marc's main hospital was the first to widely alert the epidemic as it overflowed with the sick and dying.
Haitian television aired footage of emaciated patients and parents grieving for children lost in the epidemic over mournful music on Tuesday afternoon. The programs were reminiscent of montages from earlier this year about the earthquake.
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Aid workers, meanwhile, scrambled to contain the spread of the disease, which has not occurred in Haiti for generations.
Speaker trucks passed through neighborhoods in the capital, where a handful of cases have been confirmed in people who apparently contracted it in the countryside, advising the city's millions of residents to wash their hands.
The Dominican Republic, which borders the central plateau where many new cases are being found, announced that all people crossing the border must wash hands and complete a medical form. They also stepped up military surveillance and closed a twice-weekly binational market on Monday, sparking protests on the Haitian side of the border.
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