If you’ve ever wanted to see life-size origami, although it’s pretty hard to imagine why you would ever, then you’re in luck.

photo courtesy of AIDS Memorial Park

Say hello the new St. Vincent’s AIDS Memorial.

In a full overhaul of the memorial’s original plan, which basically called for a 17,000 ft. sq. “infinite forest”, the new plan is a 1,600 ft. sq. ivy-covered canopy at the corner 12^th St., 7^th Ave., and Greenwich Ave. that resembles a giant version of the Japanese paper-folding practice. (Actually, don’t watch that. It’s terribly boring.)

According to Architizer, the canopy’s design won the endorsement of the Greenwich Village community board on July 19, and will hopefully break ground next summer. The plan is for the memorial to open by 2014 and to cost around $2 million.

The shrub-ravaged, oversized decoration designed by Studio a+i will “honor New York City’s 100,000+ men, women and children who have died from AIDS, to commemorate and celebrate the efforts of the caregivers and activists who responded to fight the disease, and to recognize the ongoing crisis,” the AIDS Memorial Park’s website says.

The organization has been nobly pulling for the memorial’s construction since 2011.

The canopy will have a circular opening in the middle of its roof, with a circular stone on the ground beneath it. Inscribed around the stone will be poetry and other writing.

Archrecord has an informative slide show of the plans.

Currently standing in the way of the memorial is a defunct branch of St. Vincent’s which will be razed before construction begins, the New York Times says.

To one NY Press writer, the design is an aesthetic abomination. He understands the impracticality of the original plan’s prodigious square footage, but a canopy that looks like someone played Jumanji under it is an unworthy substitute.

–Nick Gallinelli

Dr. John Andrilli Consults with Denis Tejada, RN

by David Gibbons

For many observers, the closing of St. Vincent’s Hospital—one of the oldest community hospitals in the nation and a New York City icon throughout the 20th century—was a disaster, a disgrace, a moral failure, an avoidable tragedy. After its demise at the end of April 2010, professionals in other downtown medical centers noted a surge in ER visits and ambulance runs. Now, just over two years later, the question is: Have the others been able to fill the gap?
The two major area players are Beth Israel Medical Center, part of Continuum Health Partners (CHP), and the North Shore-LIJ Health System. Beth Israel had already doubled the size of its emergency room after the closing of Cabrini Medical Center in 2008, so it was well prepared for the St. Vincent’s surge; other local hospitals also expanded and adapted to pick up the slack. Meanwhile, both CHP and North Shore-LIJ, as well as several independent partnerships of doctors, have begun to offer more options for urgent care.
In March, 2011, North Shore-LIJ partnered with VillageCare to open an urgent care center at 121A W. 20th St. Around the same time, North Shore-LIJ announced its trump card; plan to convert the O’Toole Building—the white wedding cake-like landmark on 7th Avenue between 12th and 13th streets that was part of the St. Vincent’s complex—into “the first stand-alone emergency and ambulatory facility in the New York City metropolitan area.”
“We developed what we felt was a realistic proposal to restore comprehensive health care to the West Side,” said Terry Lynam, a North Shore-LIJ spokesperson. “We’re investing $110 million to build a true community resource that will go a long way toward giving people access to health care that has been lacking since the closing of St. Vincent’s.” It is scheduled to open as The Lenox Hill Hospital Center for Comprehensive Care in early 2014.
“North Shore is doing a commendable job trying to rebuild some services,” said Dr. Fred Hyde, clinical professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and an expert on management and policy. “Still, the closing of a hospital is irrelevant to the utility of urgent care centers, since hospitals were never much good at outpatient care in the first place. Urgent care is a substitute for available primary care physicians, of which we may have too few—local, state and national.”
Hyde estimates that an individual physician, depending on how “muscular” a schedule he or she is willing to tackle, can serve a primary care base of
2,000 to 2,500 patients. These figures, together with a projection from the Urgent Care Association of America of one clinic per every 40- to 50,000 people, suggest that roughly 50 hardworking doctors staffing urgent care clinics in an area the size of southern Manhattan
could have a significant impact.
“If St. Vincent’s was like a lot of hospitals, it had an ER half-full of non-emergency patients who could have been treated in an urgent care clinic,” said Lou Ellen Horwitz, the Urgent Care Association’s executive director. “So while urgent care can’t replace hospital beds, it can create access for a lot of patients who would have gone to an ER.”
CHP’s strategy is to build neighborhood primary and specialty care practices that accept walk-ins, one of the many ways it strives to meet the needs
of the community, according to spokesman Jim Mandler. Marked by their familiar awnings with the blue Beth Israel logo, they are currently located in the West Village (222 W. 14th St.), Chelsea (202 W. 23rd St.) and lower Midtown (55 E. 34th St.).
The Chelsea practice is expanding and will relocate to the northwest corner of 23rd Street and 8th Avenue on Sept. 1 with 12,000 square feet of space on two floors.
Tom Poole, vice president of Continuum Medical Groups, who oversees development and operation of CHP’s community medical centers around
Manhattan, calls it “our newly renovated state-of-the art facility for walk-in primary and specialty care, one-stop shopping sorely needed to serve Chelsea and Penn South,” a neighborhood development with a large elderly population.
In November, Continuum will open another new Beth Israel facility on 8th Street in the West Village, able to handle 36,000 patient visits per year at full capacity.
“Our model for the future is easy, open access,” said Poole. “We’ve found this is what patients increasingly expect; they don’t want to wait six weeks to see their doctor. We aim to treat patients who need immediate or urgent care and create an environment that provides a satisfactory experience for everybody. To put it simply: We want happy patients, happy physicians and happy staff.”
“We’re able to see this with our practice on 14th Street, and we hope it will continue with the new locations on 23rd and 8th streets,” Mandler added. Poole says he feels a year from now will be a good time to re-evaluate the success of this new model; he also expects the increasing demand for urgent care to grow hand in hand with new housing development along the West Side.
(For more information on Beth Israel’s practices, visit www.bethisraelmedicalgroup.com or www.wehealny.org.)
At CityMD (www.citymd.net), they are equally bullish: “From our perspective, we see a major need for quality urgent care throughout the city and
particularly in the downtown area,” said COO Dr. Nedal Shami, adding that business is good. The company opened its new Flatiron branch at 37 W. 23rd St. on May 8 of this year, has another scheduled to open on 67th Street in the fall and is actively seeking a location in Tribeca or the Financial District for the near future.
Other private partnership practices along the lines of Beth Israel’s primary care walk-ins are opening up, among them the One Medical Group (www.
onemedical.com), which has five locations, including in the West Village, at 408 W. 14th St., and the Wall Street area, at 30 Broad St.
Additional urgent care options in Manhattan’s Lower West Side include New York Doctors Urgent Care, 65 W. 13th St.; Emergency Medical Care, 200 Chambers St. (www.emcny.com), and Medhattan Immediate Medical Care, 106 Liberty St. (www.medhattan.com).
According to rules of thumb and guesstimates from several experts, it appears that southern Manhattan’s urgent care needs are being addressed, and that the closing of St. Vincent’s, in the cold light of history, may one day be considered more of a transition than a
debacle.

The Coalition has put forward a plan for the site that would provide for a 200 to 300 bed hospital.

Yetta Kurland, the attorney for the Coalition said that “the community has made clear, all of the data and needs assessments have made clear, the law makes clear, and even the NYS Department of Health has admitted we need a hospital.  Now we need the Rudin corporation to hear this.  As we know, power concedes nothing without a demand, and as our elected leaders have turned their back on the community, unable to stand up to powerful interests like the Rudin real estate corporation, the community is making our voice heard.”

For more information go to: http://demandahospital.blogspot.com/

On Oct. 19, Community Board 2 rejected the St. Vincent’s rezoning proposal put forth by the Rudin Management Company. The official statement released by the board said that unless the concerns of the community, including height and bulk, health care delivery and affordable housing, among others, were addressed, the board would “deny each applicant.” The board further decided that “no upzoning, based upon the allowable bulk for community facilities, be granted to Applicant, and that only the allowable bulk for residential development be considered for this project at the site.”

Until it was forced to close in 2010, St. Vincent’s was Greenwich Village’s only hospital. The property is divided in three parts—the East Site, the Triangle Site and the O’Toole Building—bordering Seventh Avenue between West 13th Street and West 11th Street. Rudin Management, run by one of the oldest real estate families in New York, bought the hospital earlier this year for $260 million and have proposed a redevelopment plan to revamp the site.

Under the proposed plan, the site would be developed as a luxury residential complex, a health care center, a two-bed hospital and emergency center, a 564-seat elementary school and a 15,000-square-foot park. The residential complex would comprise seven buildings and five townhouses for a total of 450 housing units.

Although the Rudins plan includes a health care center, the Coalition for a New Village Hospital claims this facility will not be a full-service hospital. “It is just a Duane Reade on stretchers,” wrote Barbara Reuther, 76, a member of the coalition and a resident of the Greenwich Village since 1956, in an email. The Coalition has submitted a petition with 3,500 signatures to the New York City Planning Commission to oppose the proposed plans.

The Coalition for a New Village Hospital, an umbrella organization with around 8,000 members is demanding a full-service, 24-hour acute care, community-based hospital with a Level I trauma emergency center.

Residents are also worried about real estate prices, as new luxury condos in the market could inflate prices in the area.

“The plan ignores affordable housing. The neighborhood continues to cater to the wealthy. I have no rent control and I will not be able to afford the increased rent,” said David Alex Andrejko, a 24-year-old artist who resides in Greenwich Village.

Another group comprised of parents and parent-teacher associations, the Live and Learn Coalition, wants Rudin Management to contribute to the acquisition of 75 Morton St. for local public school space. Although Rudin has proposed a school on the property, the coalition says it would operate at full capacity as soon as it starts due to the influx of new residents in the proposed apartments.

The Queer History Alliance (QHA), a grassroots organization that supports the preservation and exhibition of New York LBGT history, wants an AIDS memorial to be built at the Triangle Site on 76 Greenwich Ave., a 26,000-square-foot open space.

In an interview before the hearing, QHA co-founder Paul Kelterborn argued that the history of St. Vincent’s, the “ground zero” of the epidemic in the 1980s, should be commemorated. The Community Board, in a resolution passed Oct. 20, supported this proposal.

Also at the hearing, however, were some groups that supported the Rudin proposal. Tammy Rivera, of the New York City District Council of Carpenters, said the Rudin plan will create jobs. Cheering her on were around 20 members of the Council of Carpenters.

John Gilbert, chief operating officer of Rudin Management, said the proposal would foster small businesses in the area. “We want to have a conversation with this community and we hope we can continue to have it,” Gilbert added. Rudin expects the project to create more than 500 permanent jobs—including 400 in health care.

Rudin Management is proposing a a small healthcare center and a school at the former St. Vincent’s site. Community members want a full-service hospital.
PHOTO BY ANDREW SCHWARTZ