Operation For more than 150 years, St. Vincent's Hospital served a wide range of New Yorkers, especially in its neighborhood of Greenwich Village, including poets, writers, artists, homeless people, the poor and the working class. It treated victims of the cholera epidemic of 1849 and of the Hudson River landing of
US Airways Flight 1549 in 2009. It was the designated provider for New York and New Jersey members of the U.S. Department of Defense Health Plan. Over time it expanded 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.
19th century St. Vincent's was the third oldest hospital in
New York City after
The New York Hospital and
Bellevue Hospital. It was founded as a medical facility in 1849 and named for
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. St. Vincent de Paul is the patron saint of charitable societies. In 1817, four
Sisters of Charity from
Emmitsburg, Maryland at the request of
Bishop John Connolly established an orphanage in
New York. As the congregation grew the sisters opened more orphanages and began to staff parochial schools. In 1846, the Sisters in New York incorporated as a separate entity from the Sisters of Charity based in Maryland. They set up a charity hospital to meet the demands of the poor and disadvantaged. It began as a thirty-bed hospital in a small brick house on East 13th Street. St. Vincent's served the poor as one of the few charity hospitals in New York City. The hospital opened on November 1, 1849, during a cholera epidemic under the direction of
Sister M. Angela Hughes, sister of
Bishop John Hughes. With almost every room occupied by patients, the sisters ate, slept, and rested in a single room or had their beds at the ends of the halls. A typhoid epidemic in 1852, filled the hospital to capacity. After outgrowing those quarters in 1856, the sisters moved to a former orphanage at the then undeveloped corner of West 11th Street and
Seventh Avenue. In 1859, a fair was held at the
New York Crystal Palace to raise funds to renovate the former orphanage and erect two additional wings. In 1870, the hospital introduced its first horse-drawn ambulance. In October 1892, it launched its School of Nursing.
20th century The school received its certification from the Board of Regents of the University of the State of New York in 1905, one of the first such schools to be so recognized. In 1911, St. Vincent's Ambulance, manned by hospital interns, responded to the
Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in
Manhattan, where the attendants watched helplessly as those trapped in the fire jumped to their deaths onto the street below. In 1912, St. Vincent's received and treated victims after the sinking of the , while mourning the loss of attending physician Francis Norman O'Loughlin, who died in the disaster. A plaque honoring his memory stood in the hospital's main entrance as a reminder of his dedication and sacrifice. In 1968, under William Grace, Director of Medicine at St. Vincent's, and his associate John A. Chadbourn, the hospital established the nation's first Mobile Coronary Care Unit (MCCU) following an example in Ireland. It was configured on a white over red 1968 Chevrolet Step-Van and utilized a portable battery-powered defibrillator/monitor; a battery-powered electrocardiograph,
I.V. kit, resuscitation/oxygen kit, and a drug kit. The success of the St. Vincent's MCCU project inspired the development of the "HeartMobile" in
Columbus, Ohio and similar programs in
Marietta, Georgia,
Montgomery County, Maryland, and
Los Angeles in 1970. The hospital "became synonymous" with care for AIDS patients in the 1980s, particularly poor gay men and drug users. It became one of the best hospitals in the state for AIDS care with a large research facility and dozens of doctors and nurses working on it.
ACT UP protested at the hospital one night in the 1980s due to its Catholic nature. They took over the emergency room and covered crucifixes with condoms intending to raise awareness and to offend Catholics. Instead of pressing charges, the sisters who ran the hospital decided to meet with the protesters to better understand their concerns.
21st century 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 the 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. The mergers were intended to reduce costs by improved efficiency and elimination reductant administration, however, it also brought increased debt with the member hospitals. St. Vincent's was the primary admitting hospital for those injured in the
September 11 attacks on the
World Trade Center. A physician who worked at St. Vincent's,
Sneha Ann Philip, was declared missing on September 10, and later declared as the 2,751st victim of the
collapse of the towers. Pictures of the missing collected in such large numbers that the hospital dedicated an entire outside wall to protect them. The Wall of Hope and Remembrance was maintained for years. Many of the hospitals closed after September 2001. In 2003
St. Clare's Hospital became an affiliate and was renamed St. Vincent's Hospital (Midtown), but it closed on August 1, 2007. St. Mary's Hospital of Brooklyn closed on September 23, 2005; Mary Immaculate and St. John's closed on March 1, 2009, after being sold to
Wyckoff Heights Medical Center in 2006.
Closing In 2005, under financial pressure from its charity involvements and rising 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, with a planned opening set for 2011. Part of the redevelopment was to include construction of a billion-dollar residential condominium by the
Rudin real estate family. The plan was a source of contention with several neighborhood groups, such as the
Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation and the
Municipal Art Society. The
Landmarks Preservation Commission approved the residential components of the plan in July 2009, but by then residential development financing was no longer available because of the
Great Recession. The New York State Department of Health has said there was no need for an acute care hospital in Greenwich Village. The hospital began discussions with
Continuum Health Partners (the parent corporation of
Beth Israel Medical Center,
St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center, and
New York Eye and Ear Infirmary) and with
Mount Sinai Hospital to consider taking ownership of the hospital but both declined. 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 delivered its last baby on April 15, 2010. On April 19, 2010, more than 1,000 staff, representing approximately one-third of the hospital workforce, received notice of lay-off. On April 14, 2010, St. Vincent's Hospital Manhattan filed for
Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The petition, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, showed liabilities of more than $1 billion. Saint Vincent's largest unsecured creditor was the
PBGC which is a federal pension insurance agency that was insuring the "Saint Vincent Catholic Medical Centers Retirement Plan" which was a
defined benefit pension plan. The pension plan on September 14, 2010, which was the date of termination for the plan had 9581 participants. On April 30, 2010, the emergency room at St. Vincent's closed, officially shuttering the hospital after 161 years. Hospital administrators said that the vote to close came after a six-month-long effort to save the financially troubled institution, but August 21, 2011, prosecutors with the Manhattan District Attorney's Office were reported to have launched an investigation to determine whether administrators intentionally ran St. Vincent's into the ground. The remaining parts of Saint Vincent Catholic Medical Centers including its nursing homes, home health agency, St. Vincent's Hospital
Westchester, and U.S. Family Health Plan, were to continue to operate without interruption, but these entities were sold to other providers' systems.
Post-closure In October 2011, the former main campus at 7-15 Seventh Avenue was sold to
Rudin Management Company for $260 million.
CBRE Group represented the seller, Saint Vincent's Catholic Medical Centers of New York.
Eyal Ofer's Global Holdings assisted the buyer in the sale. At the time of its closure, St. Vincent's occupied a large real-estate footprint in Greenwich Village; it consisted of several hospital buildings and a number of outpatient facilities, had more than 1,000 affiliated physicians, including 70 full-time and 300 voluntary attending physicians, and trained more than 300 residents and fellows annually. As a Catholic hospital, St. Vincent's was officially sponsored by the
Sisters of Charity and the
Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn. St. Vincent's was the last Catholic general hospital in New York City. The St. Vincent de Paul stained glass window from the hospital was donated to
St. Joseph's Regional Medical Center in
Paterson, New Jersey in honor of its legacy of charity. It is on display in the main lobby of the medical center. The building was demolished by early 2013. New York City announced a deal which preserves a historic building and creates a new school on the site. Former
City Council Speaker
Christine Quinn said that the plan also calls for a reduction in the number of new apartments, funds for affordable housing and arts education in local schools. ==Medical education==