Plan for New St. Vincent's To Meet Village Community Board

A partnership of health care officials and private developers shepherding a new $800 million hospital and 400 units of luxury housing in Greenwich Village will face off against opposition groups today at the first in a series of public hearings.

The project pits preservationists who oppose what they call an "unprecedented" development in a historic district against leaders of the cash strapped St. Vincent's Hospital who are seeking to fund a new state of the art health care facility through a deal with one of the city's most active developers. "If the public sector will not create the capital for these institutions that serve the public then there is only one other choice and that is the private sector," the executive vice president and chief operating officer of Rudin Corporation, John Gilbert, said. "The reality is St. Vincent's needs $800 million. So do you allow that institution to grow and to flourish? That is the seemingly competing public policy that needs to be discussed tomorrow night."

A senior vice president for strategy and planning at St. Vincent's, Bernadette Kingham-Bez, said that she sees only little wiggle room in the proposed financing of the new hospital. "It is a very unique situation because we are the only hospital that we know of that exists in a historic district," she said.

In a sign of the public interest generated by the proposal and what some see as the historical precedent at stake organizers are expecting a packed auditorium at a hearing tonight in front of Manhattan community board 2.

The rub with some opponents is not so much the desire by St. Vincent's Hospital Manhattan to replace its current facility on Seventh Avenue with a new 21-story hospital on a site between 12th and 13th Streets but the way in which it proposes to finance the project, by selling buildings to the Rudin Corporation for $310 million. The developer is planning to raze the buildings and build 650,000 square feet of high-end housing, along with street-level retail space, underground parking and medical office space.

"We are extremely concerned about the precedents this could set for historic districts around the city in which structures can be demolished for economic gain. This would be a huge red flag that those rules are no longer in play," the co-chair of Greenwich Village community task force, Zachary Winestine, said in a telephone interview. Residents also say the construction plans are out of scale with the low-slung neighborhood. One of the questions heading into today's hearings is how much room there is to downsize the residential development or the hospital.

The community board will make a recommendation on the proposal to the Landmarks Commission, which must sign off on the project before it proceeds to the city's uniform land use review process.