St. Vincent’s Needs O’Toole Land

True or false: We need a modern, state-of-the-art community hospital serving the Village, Chelsea and the rest of our downtown neighborhoods?

Now that’s one of those, “duh,” questions, right?

We’re talking here, of course, about our neighbor, St. Vincent’s Hospital, which has a hardship application before the Landmarks Preservation Commission to allow it to demolish the O’Toole Building to make way for a new hospital.

St. Vincent’s is a vital health care institution in our community and it is in our best interest to have a state-of-the-art medical center serving Greenwich Village and its surrounding neighborhoods. You’d have to look long and hard to find someone who disagrees with that statement.

Most everyone living downtown knows at this point that St. Vincent’s plans to build a new 366-bed hospital, something that it desperately needs to do if it is to be configured physically and programmatically to serve the health needs of our community with the latest medicine and technology, not just today but through the coming decades.

To do this effectively and efficiently and to adhere to its community mission, the hospital needs to re-use its property, specifically the land upon which the O’Toole Building sits west of Seventh Avenue.

My perspective on this comes from several directions – as a former state health planning official, as the former chair of the regional advisory council for the state’s Commission on Health Care Facilities in the 21st Century, as a community health care partner with St. Vincent’s and as the CEO of an organization that has recently faced the same challenges as the hospital, although on a smaller scale.

At Village Care of New York, our project to replace Village Nursing Home is a microcosm of St. Vincent’s undertaking.

The current Village Nursing Home is housed in a 1908 building, which was designed as a women’s hotel. Just as in the case now facing St. Vincent’s, there was no way for us to modernize this old building. It is woefully inadequate by today’s regulatory standards as well as by modern-day concepts of care, and could not be re-used because it is in a historic district. Consequently, we were forced to find another site. Indeed, New York State officials told us we should find a new site. Not an easy task.

Locating property in the lower West Side was nearly impossible within our financial constraints, but by a stroke of good luck we found a suitable location. In St. Vincent’s case, they already have property, which saves time and money and reduces the hardship of finding and buying a site. In Village Care’s case, the State also wanted us to “rightsize,” reducing in the end our nursing home capacity from 200 to 105 beds. Similarly, St. Vincent’s seeks to reduce its size to be more efficient.

Village Nursing Home is the only nursing home south of 86th Street on the West Side of Manhattan, a community with some 55,000 older adults. St. Vincent’s is the only hospital and Level 1 Trauma Center on the West Side south of 58th Street, For Village Nursing Home, the State also demanded that we build a state-of-the-art facility requiring extensive planning and design to meet modern requirements. These include offering more private rooms than most nursing homes, using the latest technology to create a totally wireless facility permitting efficient communication and data transfer, and employing the latest in medical rehabilitation technologies to meet the demands of post-hospital discharges. The cost per bed is extraordinary, which has required Village Care to sell its existing facility in order to support such a cost.

We faced an arduous certificate of need process for this project with state health officials and agencies. That is what St. Vincent’s has in front of it

At Village Care, it took well more than two years of planning and close working with the State to get to the construction phase that is now underway with the ongoing demolition of a structure on the new site, which began a few weeks ago. It needs to be understood by all that, unlike many commercial buildings, health facilities must go through a complicated process of state Department of Health approvals in addition to meeting local requirements. Village Care also had to meet several zoning requirements to use its community bonus to build at our new Houston Street location.

To put a very fine point on this process, Village Care, similar to St. Vincent’s, had to incur enormous up-front costs over several years leading up to final State approval for the project. Make no mistake, such costs are a tremendous burden for most all charitable organizations.

In the end, after looking at St. Vincent’s project from all perspectives, it is clear that the hospital’s hardship application should be approved in order for it to continue to meet its charitable purposes and mission. By being able to use the property now occupied by the O’Toole building, St. Vincent’s will be able to efficiently meet New York State requirements and to continue to serve the acute health care needs of our community.