More than 100 people filled the sidewalk outside the former St. Vincent’s Hospital emergency room on Seventh Ave. Saturday afternoon, saying the plan for a free-standing emergency department across the street “Is not a done deal.”
Bankruptcy Court approved the sale of the main St. Vincent’s Hospital campus to Rudin Management last month, and Rudin intends to redevelop it residentially. Under the plan, North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System plans to create a free-standing emergency department — the state’s first — in the former hospital’s six-story O’Toole Building on the avenue’s west side. The facility would include a comprehensive care center. North Shore-L.I.J. says the stand-alone emergency department will be able to deal with most of the emergency visits St. Vincent’s E.R. used to handle.
But advocates for a full-service hospital, aren’t giving up.
Former St. Vincent’s doctor David Kaufman said the East Side, with five hospitals, has an overabundance of hospital beds. He suggested Lenox Hill Hospital move Downtown.
P.S. 41 fifth-grader Antonia Markowitz eloquently asked, “Since people are the most important part of a village, how can Greenwich Village really prosper without a full-service hospital?”
Tequila Minsky
Yetta Kurland of the Coalition for a New Village Hospital, right, and a young activist got fired up at the rally.
