St. Vincent's

St. Vincent’s Hospital in the West Village presented its application for hardship status to the Landmarks Preservation Commission today to get permission to demolish the O’Toole building on Seventh Avenue and construct a new facility in its place.

The hospital set out to convince the LPC to reverse its decision to forbid the demolition of the 1964 building, on the grounds that the physical limitations of the current facility between 11th and 12th streets is preventing it from carrying out its charitable mission to area residents. A trio of health care professionals testified at the hearing, painting a bleak picture of the current conditions at the hospital.

In May, the LPC pushed back against a $1.6 billion development proposal submitted by St. Vincent’s and its development partner Rudin Management that would have demolished nine buildings owned by the hospital and replaced them with a 329-foot-tall hospital and 265-foot luxury condo tower.

In keeping with the LPC’s recommendations, Rudin’s revised proposal would preserve and renovate four of the buildings it wanted to demolish on the east side of Seventh Avenue and reduce the scale of the condo tower by 60 feet in height and 30 feet in width.  read more »

The first public hearing on the Rudin Management Company's plans for the site of St. Vincent Hospital in Greenwich Village will be this evening at 6:30 at P.S. 41 at 116 West 11th Street. Andrew Berman, executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, emailed us the announcement on Monday night.

He called Rudin's plan "almost unprecedented in its scope, especially in the Greenwich Village Historic District."

Rudin last year bought eight buildings at 12th Street and Seventh Avenue that St. Vincent Catholic Medical Centers is vacating as part of a consolidation. Bill Rudin, president of Rudin Management, talked to The Observer's John Koblin in June about the plans, which would include an apartment complex on the east side of Seventh:  read more »

Today, Saint Vincent Medical Centers announced that I.M. Pei’s firm Pei Cobb Freed & Partners has been chosen to design Saint Vincent’s new Greenwich Village hospital. The internationally renowned architect will be teaming up with Philadelphia-based Ballinger, a firm known for its healthcare design, according to a press release.

According to the release, the new hospital at 12th Street and Seventh Avenue will be “a technologically advanced, green institution that will provide top-notch healthcare to New York residents and businesses from Midtown Manhattan to the Battery.”

Founded by I.M. Pei in 1955, Pei Cobb Freed & Partners has been involved in some monumental design projects over the years including the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the expansion of the Louvre in Paris.

Full release after the jump.  read more »