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St. Vincents Hospital Site Plan

St. Vincent's Hospital held a public meeting last night to unveil its plans for a new hospital building to rise on the site of its O'Toole Building on the northwest corner of Seventh Avenue and 12th Street and the plans of Rudin Family Holdings to redevelop 8 of the hospital's buildings on the western portion of the block bounded by 11th and 12th Streets and Sixth and Seventh Avenues.

The proposed 21-story hospital building, which has been designed by Ian Bader of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, would have a 4-story base and a setback curved tower. The tower would be about 300 feet tall.

Across the avenue, the residential development would consist of a 21-story building on the avenue that would be about 260 feet high including roof-top mechanical spaces and townhouses with stoops on the two side-streets. Dan Kaplan of FXFowle is the architect for the Rudin project.

In addition to these two sites, the hospital owns the triangular block that used to be occupied by the Loew's Sheridan movie theater just south of the O'Toole Building. That block is now used by the hospital mostly as a "loading dock."

The planned buildings are in the Greenwich Village Historic District, but the hospital has not yet submitted a formal application for a certificate of appropriateness from the Landmarks Preservation Commission. The proposed projects will also require numerous other public approvals relating to zoning.

At the meeting in the hospital's auditorium, Bill Rudin, the CEO of the Rudin organization, said that his company has agreed to pay the hospital about $500 a buildable square feet for its residential development, or about $300 million, under the current building plans. The hospital's building is anticipated to cost about $700 million. It will contain 365 beds, one to a room, a substantial reduction from its present size of about 635 beds.

The plan calls for the demolition of the four-story O'Toole Building, which was erected in 1961 and was designed by Albert Ledner and is notable for its white-ceramic-tile facades and its nautical motif. Once the new hospital is built and opened on this site, eight of the hospital's 9 buildings across the avenue will be demolished to make way for the Rudin's residential development.

Mr. Rudin said that although his company's residential projects have always been rental, the more than 400 apartments will be built as condominiums. In addition to the 21-story building on the avenue and 19 townhouses, the Rudin project includes a mid-rise, mid-block building, 15,000-square feet of retail space, 22,500 square feet of medical office space and a garage.

The design of the new hospital building's tower, shown at the left in the illustration at the right, resembles in its elliptical lenticular shape with "cutting edges" the famous "Boat Building" designed by Max Abramovitz in 1963 for the Phoenix Mutual Life Insurance Company in Hartford, Conn. Mr. Bader indicated that the new building would be masonry- rather than glass-clad and probably of a reddish color.

Mr. Kaplan also indicated that a similar palette was likely to be employed in the residential buildings, emphasizing that the new townhouses will be set-back about 10 feet from the building line to permit owners to have front-yard gardens that will add to the "green" component of project.

In answer to a question from the audience about past promises from the hospital to create an attractive open space on the triangle block, Mr. Bader also emphasized that plans call for landscaping improvements to the "triangle" block.

No one in the audience asked why the new hospital could not be erected on the triangle block and the very unusual, interesting and idiosyncratic O'Toole Building saved, or used as a base for a new tower similar to what the Hearst Corporation did recently on the southwest corner of 57th Street and Eighth Avenue.

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CityGuy

Are they still working on this project?

And what exactly are they doing to St Vincents hospital?