Published by: Larry Gage on 4/9/2010 12:11:40 PM
Whatever it is that has brought St. Vincent to the doorstep of extinction, it will leave a huge gap in New York's safety net—ironically, at a time when the whole area of the lower west side of Manhattan (Chelsea, the meatpacking district, etc.) has been rapidly gentrifying with $5 million lofts, art galleries, restaurants, chic new hotels—and presumably, paying patients.
I recall the time, back in the 80's, when this hospital had over 800 occupied beds–and was one of the most important HIV/AIDs centers in the country. St. Vincent's long and distinguished history was well summarized in a Feb. 3 article in the New York Times. Excerpt follows:
"For more than 150 years, St. Vincent's Hospital Manhattan has been a beacon in Greenwich Village, serving poets, writers, artists, winos, the poor and the working-class, and gay people.
It has treated victims of calamities: the cholera epidemic of 1849, the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, the 9/11 attack and, just last year, the Hudson River landing of US Airways Flight 1549. The poet Edna St. Vincent Millay got her middle name from the hospital, where her uncle's life was saved in 1892 after he was accidentally locked in the hold of a ship for several days without food or water.
But today the hospital is struggling, and last week, in what could mean the death knell of the last Roman Catholic general hospital in New York City, a chain of hospitals proposed to take over St. Vincent's, shut down its inpatient beds and most of its emergency room services, and convert it into an outpatient center tied to hospitals uptown and on the East Side."
What will this part of the city do without this hospital? And what will be the impact on others (especially Bellevue)?
Still waiting for my x-ray...