Saint Vincent's Catholic Medical Center - History

History

St. Vincent's Hospital in Manhattan was founded as a medical facility in 1849. Its namesake was St. Vincent de Paul, a seventeenth-century French priest, whose religious congregation of the Daughters of Charity inspired the founding in Maryland in 1809 of the Sisters of Charity by St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, a native New Yorker and Roman Catholic convert. Forty years after its founding, four Sisters were dispatched to New York City to set up a charity hospital in the city to meet the demands of the poor and disadvantaged. What began as a humble thirty-bed hospital in a small brick house on West 13th Street of Greenwich Village expanded over time to become a major medical and research center. It maintained its connection to the Roman Catholic tradition, and was sponsored by the Bishop of Brooklyn and the President of the Sisters of Charity of New York. St. Vincent is the designated patron saint of charities, hospital workers, hospitals, and volunteers.

The SVCMC network was formed in 2000, when St. Vincent's Hospital in Manhattan, formerly the St. Vincent Hospital and Medical Center of New York, merged with Catholic Medical Centers of Brooklyn and Queens and Sisters of Charity Healthcare on Staten Island, which included St. Vincent's Hospital (Staten Island), Mary Immaculate Hospital in Queens, St. John's Queens Hospital, Saint Joseph's Hospital in Queens, St. Mary's Hospital of Brooklyn, and Bayley Seton Hospital in Staten Island. In 2003 St. Clare's Hospital was affiliated, and renamed St. Vincent's Hospital (Midtown), but it was closed on August 1, 2007. St. Mary's Hospital of Brooklyn closed on Sept 23, 2005; Mary Immaculate and St. John's closed on March 1, 2009.

In 2005, under financial pressure from its charity involvements, burgeoning administration costs, and rising health care costs, the SVCMC system filed for bankruptcy. The system launched an aggressive reorganization effort, selling or transferring its money-losing facilities and focusing development on its main hospital, which allowed it to emerge from bankruptcy in the summer of 2007. In the name of modernizing and restructuring, it also announced plans to build a new Manhattan hospital across the street from the current facility, with a planned opening set for 2011. The plan had been a source of contention with several neighborhood groups, such as the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation and the Municipal Art Society, but the Landmarks Preservation Commission approved the residential components of the plan in July 2009.

On January 27, 2010 it was announced that the hospital's financial situation had soured further and desperate measures would be required to keep the hospital open. The hospital entered discussions with Continuum Health Partners (parent corporation of Beth Israel Medical Center, St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center, and New York Eye and Ear Infirmary) and to Mount Sinai Hospital to consider taking over ownership of the hospital but both ultimately declined. Senators, city council members and congressional representatives all got involved in attempting to save the hospital. However, On April 6, 2010, the board of directors voted to close inpatient care services at St Vincent's Catholic Medical Center, and to sell its outpatient services to other systems. The emergency room stopped accepting ambulances on April 9, 2010 and the last baby was delivered on April 15, 2010. On April 30, 2010, at 8 am, the emergency room at St. Vincent's closed, officially shutting down the hospital after 161 years of service to the residents of New York.

In October 2011, it was announced that the former main campus at 7-15 Seventh Ave was sold to Rudin Management Company for $260m. CBRE Group represented the seller, Saint Vincent's Catholic Medical Centers. Eyal Ofer's Global Holdings assisted the buyer in the sale.