New York State Senator Tom Duane has sold out the community of the Lower West Side of Manhattan. He has turned his back on the citizens, who depended on St. Vincent's Hospital. And to think he used to be an AIDS activist ?
St. Vincent's Hospital activist bird-dogs billionaire Bill Rudin over controversial luxury condo conversion plan.
Artist and political commentator Suzannah B. Troy confronts Bill Rudin on West 12th Street. Community anger towards Mr. Rudin has inspired many protests, including a sustained protest and vigil outside the sales office of the new luxury condos. Mr. Rudin has ruthlessly ignored the community’s need for a full-service hospital. Mr. Rudin paid pennies on the dollar to buy St. Vincent’s real estate, and Mr. Rudin now stands to sell luxury condos and townhouses that, once constructed, are expected to have a combined fair-market value of over $1 billion.
Peninsula Hospital Center - Protesters Take Over Lobby - Hospital Closings in NYC
Approximately 200 union employees, residents of Far Rockaway, in Queens, and local officials, gathered in the rain outside Peninsula Hospital Center, across the bay from JFK Airport. Peninsula Hospital Center has filed a plan to shut its doors. The hospital’s owner is embroiled in a political and financial scandal, but employees and residents are worried about the threat to public health, should the hospital’s closure plan be approved.
Attendees of the rally braved the rain, then, once the rally had ended, stormed into one of the lobbies of the hospital, until hospital officials called the police, to clear the lobby of its own employees.
This week, President Obama agreed to severe budget cuts to social safety net programs, that underpin the social contract we make with our government and amongst ourselves. More budget cuts to Medicaid and Medicare will lead to a further collapse of our healthcare system. Is Christine Quinn in Bermuda with Mayor Michael Bloomberg each time a hospital closes in New York City ? Is President Obama surfing in Hawaii each time a hospital closes in America ?
If we obediently listen to people, who are in power (the same people who work for us, the very same people who are closing our hospitals), telling us to leave the lobby of a closing hospital, then it just makes it that much easier for the New York State Department of Health/Christine Quinn to keep closing hospitals.
Queens' Peninsula Hospital Center set to close ; New York Downtown Hospital putting patients on stretchers in the hallway to accommodate unmanageable influx of emergency patients.
"Sources say the Far Rockaway, Queens, hospital will shutter after owing millions to vendors and falling behind on its union benefits funds payments; the closure would cost the area about 1,000 jobs," reported Crain's.
Meanwhile, following the illegal closing of St. Vincent's Hospital last year, there reamins only one hospital south of 16th Street in Manhattan, New York Downtown Hospital, which The New York Post has reported as being ''overwhelmed,'' and is leading to an ''emergency-care crisis,'' the newspaper reports.
Bankruptcy Judge Cecelia Morris has let the management of St. Vincent's avoid Freedom of Information requests and has let the Rudin Family to gut St. Vincent's and is about to let the Family take a wrecking ball to it. Now, Judge Morris is going to let the Management and the Family destroy evidence.
Management of St. Vincent's Asks Bankruptcy Court to Approve Document Destruction, So That No Investigation Can Ever Determine Why the Hospital Closed Abruptly And Without Any Legally-Mandated Closure Plan.
No politician -- not CB2 Chair Brad Hoylman, not City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, or Senator Tom Duane -- is willing to do anything to prevent the luxury condo conversion of St. Vincent's. With the shredding trucks about to pull into the ambulance bays of St. Vincent's, the obstruction of justice will be complete : there may be no more hope to ever investigate the shady decisions that lead the hospital to close on April 30, 2010. It's exactly as Sarah Jessica Parker said : ''The community needs a hospital — and I think there’s been some clever obfuscation.''
Under the cover of darkness, over a holiday weekend, and in usual opaque fashion, Community Board 2 announced with very short notice a meeting for tomorrow that will keep pushing a first aid clinic to replace St. Vincent's Hospital.
JOINT LANDMARKS & PUBLIC AESTHETICS & ST. VINCENT’S OMNIBUS : Tues., 7/5 @ 6:30 PM– NYU Silver Building, 32 Waverly Pl. Room 208 - 30 Seventh Avenue (O’Toole Building) - Application for façade changes and new entrances. For more information go to: http://bit.ly/iNUSWj
