Hospitable!

Village residents totally consumed by the issue of overdevelopment are even starting to turn on critical infrastructure:

Although St. Vincent’s has had meetings with a community working group for the past few months, no specific development plan has yet emerged. The current hospital includes a maze of eight connected buildings between 11th and 12th Sts. on the east side of Seventh Ave. S., including the Coleman tower on Seventh Ave. S. at 11th St., completed in 1970.

On the west side of Seventh Ave. between 12th and 13th Sts. is the three-story O’Toole building, the former National Maritime Union hall, now used as St. Vincent’s community health facility. A triangular property between 12th St. and Greenwich Ave. on the west side of Seventh Ave. is where the hospital stores oxygen tanks.

St. Vincent’s, with Rudin as a development partner, intends to demolish the O’Toole Building and erect a state-of-the-art hospital that could rise 20 stories or higher. On the east side of Seventh Ave. S., Rudin would have the option of demolishing all or part of what is there and constructing market-rate apartments, which would pay for the new hospital. Rudin would also have the option of adapting existing buildings on the east side of the avenue for residential use.

The project would be staged to allow St. Vincent’s to provide full hospital service throughout the construction period.

In the wake of the Berger Commission report on hospitals in New York State, Cabrini Medical Center on E. 19th St. and St. Vincent’s Midtown — formerly St. Clare’s — on W. 51st St. between Ninth and 10th Aves. will close, leaving St. Vincent’s in the Village as the only West Side hospital between Lower Manhattan and W. 59th St., Kingham said.

But critics, like Philip Schaffer, of 144 W. 11th St., insisted that the project is driven by real estate concerns, rather that medical ones.

“This is not a philanthropic operation,” Schaffer said. Questioning the need for a major hospital in the low-rise residential Village neighborhood, he suggested that St. Vincent’s move to the Hudson Yards in the West 30s, “where the stadium was supposed to be.”

. . .

Christopher Cormac, a W. Eighth St. resident whose family has lived in the Village since 1938, said, “We’re talking about building a 21st-century medical center for most of Manhattan in a residential neighborhood — in the Greenwich Village Historic District.” Despite the proximity of the Seventh Ave. S. subway, “This is not the most accessible place in the city,” he said.

Kingham replied that St. Vincent’s owns the property where it is now and added, “We’ve been here for 150 years.” The remark only provoked groans from the audience.

The flexible 21st-century hospital that St. Vincent’s wants to build is especially appropriate in New York City in an age of terrorism, Dr. George Neuman, St. Vincent’s medical director of perioperative services, told the forum.

“Our emergency room needs to be able to deal with four times the number of patients it can treat ordinarily,” he said. Rooms have to be built that take air in, rather than let it out, when doors are open, in order to prevent respiratory syndromes like SARS to spread, he added.

But some audience members took offense at references to terrorism and bio disasters.

“Fear mongering is not the best way to present the project,” said Chris Bianchi, a second-generation Village resident who lives on W. 13th St.