Developer To Turn St. Vincent's Hospital Into Condos
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork/AP) -- One of New York's most powerful real-estate families has teamed up with a health care provider to turn the historic St. Vincent's Hospital medical center into a walk-in emergency facility and hundreds of luxury apartments, according to a deal announced Thursday.
An affiliate of Rudin Management -- RSV LLC -- will spend $260 million to help cover debts of the closed and bankrupt Greenwich Village hospital.
The new facility, to be operated by the North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System, is scheduled to open by the fall of 2013.
Health-care activists say the plan leaves Manhattan's Lower West Side without a top-level trauma center.
"The population is exploding down there and they don't have a full-service hospital to go to," Eileen Dunn, a nurse at St. Vincent's for 25 years and head of the nurse's union, told 1010 WINS. "I don't understand how the politicians have allowed this to happen and continue to allow it to happen."
"The so-called comprehensive care center offered in this plan falls short of the full-fledged emergency room and hospital this community needs," said Dr. David Kaufman, a former St. Vincent's physician. "True medical emergencies will continue to require a long and life-threatening trip by ambulance to a hospital outside the community. This is the realization of our worst fear."
St. Vincent's, the city's last Catholic-affiliated hospital, filed for bankruptcy before closing in April and laying off more than 1,000 employees, citing a debt topping $1 billion. Its remaining assets -- including several nursing homes -- are being sold to pay creditors.
"The coalition for a hospital on the Lower West Side will rally the community against every one of these plans," Dunn said. "We will be out in the street, and we will be rallying against the poor decisions by the politicians of the city of New York and of the state of New York," Dunn said.
St. Vincent's opened in 1849 to treat cholera patients and other poor New Yorkers for generations. The hospital later pioneered AIDS treatments, while serving as a level-one trauma center, providing a full range of specialists and equipment 24 hours a day to severely injured patients.
Under the partnership, North Shore-Long Island Jewish will spend $110 million -- including $10 million from Rudin -- to transform the former hospital's O'Toole Building on Seventh Avenue into the 160,000-square-foot North Shore-LIJ Center for Comprehensive Care. The emergency facility will include an imaging center and an ambulatory surgery unit, and is expected to employ more than 300 workers.
The old hospital's emergency room, which treated victims of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attack, was in another building across Seventh Avenue -- one of four on the St. Vincent campus to be torn down. Five others are to be renovated.
About 300 apartments will be created on West 12th Street in former hospital property. The deal "will help restore healthcare services for thousands of people in the Greenwich Village community," the hospital said in papers filed Wednesday with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan.
However, severe trauma patients will only be stabilized at the facility, then transferred to nearby hospitals such as Lenox Hill Hospital on Manhattan's East Side -- owned by North Shore-Long Island Jewish.
The Rudin family also has promised to build a neighborhood school on 17th Street and renovate a public park at the corner of Greenwich Street and Seventh Avenue.
The deal is subject to bankruptcy court approval, as well as approvals from various city, state and federal agencies.
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