Massive Medical Expansion on Manhattan's East Side

At a time when the city’s public hospitals are struggling and facing possible closures, top-tier East Side institutions — including the Hospital for Special Surgery, NYU Langone Medical Center, Lenox Hill Hospital, Weill Cornell Medical College and Mount Sinai Medical Center — could dramatically reshape the city's landscape over the next five years as they expand their footprints, modernize and adapt to upcoming health care reforms.
       
A 16-story medical facility could soon soar over York Avenue between East 61st and 62nd streets, adding 179,000-square-feet of outpatient services to Memorial Sloan-Kettering's fight against cancer.   

But residents in the co-op next door at 440 East 62nd Street are saying the 172,000-square-foot, 261-foot-tall facility would be so close to them it would block daylight.

They say it's too big, and adds to a neighborhood already jammed with new or proposed medical facility expansions. 
       
NYU Langone Medical Center's Kimmel Pavilion on East 34th Street will create 800,000 square feet of new space next to Tisch Hospital, freeing up the hospital to create all single-bed rooms. 
     
Some projects are changing the faces of existing hospitals.
  
At the same time, the Hospital for Special Surgery has added five new floors on top of its eight story building on East 70th Street, and the Manhattan Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital is gearing up for a four-year renovation of its East 64th Street facility.
 
Other projects are in the works, with East Side hospitals gobbling up land.
  
Sloan-Kettering recently bought the former Hertz rental car facility at 327 East 64th Street for $19 million and paid more than $83 million for the former Cabrini Medical Center buildings on East 19th Street. Unlike the York Avenue site, they don't have plans to immediately develop these sites.
    

Mount Sinai recently paid $25 million for a 15,000-square-foot parking lot on East 103 Street next to its main campus, but hasn’t announced development plans.
 
Hospital construction around the country is dead;  The fact that new construction is flourishing in Manhattan is amazing.
  
A $240 million cancer treatment center, to be run by NYU and Sloan-Kettering, is the anchor tenant for a new tower being developed by Related Companies. The controversial residential tower is slated to rise at Ruppert Playground on East 93rd Street.
 
NYU is creating a new ambulatory care facility on 13 floors of the former Verizon building at 240 E. 38th Street. The Hospital for Special Surgery is gearing up to open its Center for Pain Management at East 75th and York.

The Belfer Research Building will more than double Weill Cornell’s 400,000 square feet of research space, enabling them to recruit more top-tier scientists working on cures for cancer and neuro-degenerative disorders.

Other East Side construction has been spurred by competition for federal research grants. Sloan-Kettering, Mount Sinai, Rockefeller University, NYU and Weill Cornell Medical College have all got projects ready for construction.