By Lincoln Anderson
It was early Saturday morning, and the guard manning the front desk at the former St. Vincent’s Hospital on W. 12th St. was dozing soundly in his chair, his head lolled back.
Nearby, a couple of other guards were slumped down on some of the remaining couches, also asleep. At least they had someplace to crash. Couches in another section of the lobby had already been moved out.
In the background, a tinny-sounding radio softly played, “That girl is so dangerous, dangerous, dayn-ger-usss… .”
There were no other sounds.
The final person treated at the hospital had left Friday morning at 7:55 a.m. — a man from Florida who had walked in complaining of asthma, the guard at the front desk said, after awakening. Five minutes later, the hospital officially closed.
“The nurses said he is the last patient,” he said, his eyes bloodshot from sleep.
He and the other security were still there, “in case of, you know, fire,” he said, and also to keep burglars from stealing anything. After all, everything owned by the bankrupt Greenwich Village hospital — from its real estate to its couches — was now officially an “asset,” to be sold off to satisfy its creditors.
Virtually all of the hospital’s 3,000-plus employees were gone. The guards were from a private security firm. Over the previous week, the hospital’s last remaining patients had been transported to other area hospitals.
A man in white pants, white shirt and white hospital shoes with a St. Vincent’s ID tag quietly walked by on his rubber soles. He worked at the hospice, he said. Would those patients be transported? he was asked. He just smiled and shook his head slightly and walked off.
Those patients were terminally ill, the guard explained, saying, “A week or so — two or three days… .”
Other than a few maintenance personnel, the hospital’s sprawling campus on the east side of Seventh Ave. was completely empty.
St. Vincent’s O’Toole building (the one with the distinctive “porthole” windows) on the west side of the avenue is still operating, though. The hospital is running its AIDS/H.I.V. outpatient clinic in O’Toole, and there are also some private doctors offices there. St. Vincent’s is in talks with other healthcare providers to have them take over its outpatient clinics. It was on the O’Toole site that St. Vincent’s had hoped to build a new, 30-story, state-of-the-art hospital tower — before its lofty plans came crashing down in bankruptcy.
Outside on W. 12th St., some stray newspaper pages littered the sidewalk, but otherwise the street was desolate. In front of the hospital’s main door, set into the pavement in gold letters, were three words that had defined the historic, 161-year-old Catholic hospital’s mission: “Charity” “Science” and “Service.”
Around the corner on Seventh Ave., the doors of the emergency room’s ambulance bay were boarded up with plywood. A poster of the Virgin Mary was taped up, and a half-dozen bouquets of flowers and two burning votive candles were left on the bay. Next to them was a poster with the call names of the hospital’s five ambulances: “07A — 06C — 06K — 02V — 07W.” The poster had scores of farewells and thank-yous signed in magic marker.
First contact (last contact)
Sitting in an ambulance curbside was George Contreras, a St. Vincent’s paramedic. He made the poster. One of the most visible parts of St. Vincent’s, the hospital’s ambulance corps were, in many cases, the “first contact” with patients. Now, they’re among all that’s left of the former hospital.
Until May 14, Contreras and a skeleton crew of other St. Vincent’s paramedics will be manning two ambulances around the clock that will be parked on Seventh Ave. If someone comes to the now-closed E.R. with a serious or life-threatening injury, they’ll transport them to Beth Israel or another area hospital. But Contreras said, after the E.R. was boarded up last Friday — a clear visual signal that it’s closed — no one had come by, and they hadn’t had to transport anyone.
Under a plan funded with a $9.4 million grant from the state, the former St. Vincent’s E.R. will be operated as an urgent-care center by Lenox Hill Hospital, and the ambulances out front — to transport patients needing acute care to other hospitals — will be run by North Shore Long Island Jewish Health System. The urgent-care center reportedly will start operating in a couple of months, and eventually will be relocated to a permanent site somewhere else in the Village.
As recently reported in The Villager, Contreras and other St. Vincent’s paramedics traveled to Haiti to provide medical assistance in the wake of that country’s devastating earthquake.
Contreras is currently getting his doctorate in public health and hopes to be a hospital administrator.
“Hopefully I’ll run a hospital and not close it down,” he remarked.
He said he had always thought St. Vincent’s would be able to overcome its financial problems. Like others, he expressed shock at how the administration handled — or mishandled — things.
“What strikes me is that they said $700 million,” he said of St. Vincent’s yawning debt. “But it became $1 billion. I don’t know why they were trying to hide it, not be more transparent.”
What will happen to St. Vincent’s five ambulances?
“It’s an asset. Everything that’s an asset is held up in bankruptcy court right now,” he said, noting the newer ambulances are worth $100,000 apiece, but will surely go for less during the sell-off.
Contreras worked full time at St. Vincent’s since 2005, and also did his paramedic training there. The hospital offered one of the area’s top paramedic-training courses, and its 29th class is now finishing up its final one-year course, having moved it to NYU Downtown Hospital. Contreras also works part time as a paramedic at NYU Downtown, so at least he still has that job.
Treated OD’s to cardiac
Contreras’s shift was “7 Willy” midnight-to-8 a.m., posted at 14th St. and Ninth Ave., amid the bustling Meat Market nightlife scene. When the Meatpacking District’s bars and clubs would let out on weekends at 4 a.m., there would always be plenty of action to deal with, drunkenness or cocaine or GHB overdoses, he said.
Asked if he had any notable runs lately, he recalled one that, he said, showed the importance of St. Vincent’s and its ambulances being located in the West Village to provide quick response.
Less than six months ago, he said, he and his partner saved a livery cab driver who went into cardiac arrest on Christopher St. one morning around 2 a.m. The man, only 45, had called 911, complaining of chest pains. Contreras and his partner arrived and started talking to him, when the driver suddenly went into cardiac arrest.
“He just went out,” Contreras said. “We brought him back. He was very lucky. We shocked him, defibrillated him — he was clinically dead. Once you go into cardiac arrest, you can die within 6 to 8 minutes — no blood to the brain.” Between contacting the man, bringing him back to life and getting him to the hospital, the whole incident took 15 minutes, Contreras said. After a couple of days recovery at the hospital, the man was released.
As the paramedic related the story, a police car came speeding down Seventh Ave., lights flashing, siren blaring. Contreras instinctively turned to watch it.
What was the call for?
“I don’t know,” he shrugged. “I don’t have the radio anymore.”
The St. Vincent’s ambulances are no longer hooked into the city’s 911 system. Last year, they responded to 22,000 calls that were routed to them through the Fire Department E.M.S. system. The Fire Department is now covering the St. Vincent’s ambulance sectors.
‘I miss the ambulances’
Kate Weiss, who lives in a large apartment building just north of St. Vincent’s, came by, taking her dog, Goldie, for a late-night walk. She couldn’t get over how empty the street was with St. Vincent’s shut down.
“I miss the ambulances on the sidewalk. I miss my pal, Tommy,” she said, of another of the paramedics. Goldie really loved Tommy, too, she said.
On the other hand, Weiss added, “I had no love for this place. I had a lot of gripes. There was always a lot of mess,” she said, recalling the “operating-room gloves” left scattered on the sidewalk.
And she was vehemently against the 30-story hospital tower project, noting that fliers slamming the plan were still posted in her building lobby.
“I was very, very opposed to it,” she said. “It was going to be a massive, massive construction project — 15 years.”
She angrily blasted local politicians — “Glick, Quinn and Duane” — for backing the project.
“Carol Greitzer was the only one who spoke out,” she declared of the former city councilmember.
Yet, at the same time, Weiss said she missed the lively scene, the St. Vincent’s staffers hanging out on the sidewalk on their breaks, and all the rest.
She said she feared local delis’ business would be decimated.
“There should be an investigation” into the hospital’s failure, Weiss said, adding, “If this was a private business — there would be.
“What is ‘urgent care’?” she wanted to know.
Contreras explained it’s for non-life-threatening injuries.
“Oh my God, this is too spooky,” Weiss said, scanning the empty pavement. “I want to see people wearing blue shower caps on their heads coming down the sidewalk.
“When you’re used to a million people around, then nothing — it’s a little weird.”
Last call for ‘7 Willy’
Two other St. Vincent’s paramedics, Rhona Chambers and Kevin Edell, used to operate the “7 Willy” sector ambulance right before Contreras’s shift, from 6 p.m. to midnight.
Three weekends ago, they officially ended their runs. Edell had his camera around his neck that night. When you’re a paramedic, you spend a lot of time in your ambulance waiting for calls — and looking at buildings, he noted, and they chuckled. He was going to snap some mementoes of the Village landscape.
Edell warned that losing the hospital will create a void. He recalled how, because St. Vincent’s ambulances had been based near the World Trade Center, they were able to respond within the first 10 minutes of the attack, saving victims in elevators who had been burned by flaming jet fuel pouring down the shafts.
Like Contreras, the two paramedics were angry at the hospital’s administration.
“If we did our jobs as bad as they did, there would be a lot of dead people,” said Chambers, who was formerly a model.
Jake Dutton was getting ready to go out later that night on “6 King,” a St. Vincent’s ambulance covering another sector, based at Madison Square Park. Known as a “per diem,” he is a Fire Department paramedic, and was filling in on a shift for a hospital employee.
Dutton, who got his paramedic training at St. Vincent’s, said he came to New York from California because he wanted to work in the most challenging environment possible. And he said, in that environment, the St. Vincent’s ambulance crew was the best.
“I can say to anyone now, ‘Do you know what it’s like to work with the greatest E.M.T.’s and paramedics in the world?’” he said. “‘I do.’”
