At North General Hospital, a Closing and Openings - NYTimes.com

North General Hospital Is Closing, but Clinics Are Ready to Take Its Place

By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS

Barely two months after the closing of St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village, North General Hospital, a potent symbol of the city’s political and philanthropic commitment to Harlem, announced Monday that it was declaring bankruptcy.

The 200-bed North General will close by next week, hospital officials said. But while St. Vincent’s closed abruptly with only the distant promise of an urgent care clinic in its place, the North General building will immediately be occupied by a large government-subsidized walk-in clinic for Harlem residents, state and North General officials said.

The city’s public hospital system will also move two of its facilities, a nursing home and a 200-bed long-term rehabilitation center, to the North General site from Roosevelt Island, officials said.

North General got 36,000 visits a year to its emergency room, but officials said that nearby hospitals and the walk-in clinic would pick up those patients.

The carefully structured deal was hammered out with the help of Gov. David A. Paterson, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Representative Charles B. Rangel of Harlem, hospital officials said.

“Having gone through what we experienced with St. Vincent’s, we were really happy that we were able through the governor’s leadership to pull together the city, the state and the Department of Health and of course North General to come up with a plan that not only keeps that platform in Harlem devoted to health care but actually expands health care in Harlem,” said Paul Williams, president of the state Dormitory Authority, which helped finance the hospital’s construction, and still holds $117 million of its outstanding debt.

In a joint statement Monday, the governor and the hospital said the hospital planned to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

The Rev. Calvin O. Butts III, pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church and chairman of the hospital’s board, said Monday that the hospital was about $200 million in debt and had been in debt almost continuously since its inception in 1979. “The hospital opened on borrowed money,” Mr. Butts said. “This just couldn’t go on.”

But the union that represents North General employees, Local 1199 S.E.I.U., lashed out at the plan, saying that the Institute for Family Health, which will operate the new clinic, had told the union it would not be able to hire all the current employees. The union said it had filed unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board.

Mr. Butts said he expected that Harlem would gain from the new arrangement. There will be jobs created by the construction of the nursing home, he said. And he said he expected most of the 900 hospital employees to find jobs at other hospitals or with the replacement facilities.

As a so-called federally qualified health care center, the new clinic will receive Medicaid money and other grants to provide primary care, mental health care, dental care and school-based care to 80,000 patients a year, state officials said. Its doctors will also be available to privately insured patients, officials said.

The new clinic is scheduled to open just when North General closes. The Institute for Family Health runs family health centers in the Bronx, Manhattan and the Hudson Valley, and Dr. Neil Calman, the institute’s president, has a reputation as an activist doctor in poor neighborhoods. He got his start in the Bronx about 30 years ago as the first medical director of the Soundview Healthcare Network. He left that organization years ago, however. Dr. Calman did not return a call for comment. Soundview was founded by Pedro Espada Jr., the state senator now accused of looting the clinics of millions of dollars.

Kenneth Raske, president of the Greater New York Hospital Association, a trade group, said, “The death of a hospital is always difficult, but the plans that have been laid out for the re-emergence of health care services in that portion of Harlem is absolutely outstanding.”

The hospital was founded by Randolph Guggenheimer, a Manhattan lawyer, and Eugene McCabe, a management consultant, to replace the Hospital for Joint Diseases when it moved from Madison Avenue and 124th Street in 1979.

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