St. Vincent's E-mail Campaign

Take action now to establish a full service hospital for Lower Manhattan.

Please copy and paste the addresses and the suggested message into an e-mail. Make any modifications, to personalise your own communication.

To :

mayor@nyc.gov; speakerquinn@council.nyc.gov; dohweb@health.state.ny.us; duane@senate.state.ny.us; GottfriedR@assembly.state.ny.us; arroyo@council.nyc.ny.us

Subject :

Coalition for a New Village Hospital

Suggested message :

Ladies and Gentlemen :

We need a hospital on the Lower West Side of Manhattan. The proposal to replace St. Vincent's Hospital with an 'urgent care center' is insufficient ; such a center will not be able to provide Level 1 trauma care, emergency rooms, critical healthcare attention, or hospital beds. Such a center would also be unable to adequately address any real public health or safety issues, were they to come up. Right now, there is no Level 1 Trauma Center below 14th Street in Manhattan, which we all know is a high risk security area. Everyone in our community is worried that people's lives are now in jeopardy, because of the longer time it will take them to be transported to the emergency rooms of alternative hospitals. There is no value we can put on human life. I am writing to you to let you know that our community is organising, and we demand a hospital in lower Manhattan.

Yours sincerely,

( If you think of new addresses to be included, or any changes that should be made, please post a comment on this blog. )

Greed and Politics destroyed St. Vincent's Hospital

"It's like a funeral inside."

New York State Assemblymember Richard Gottfried criticised New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg last night, during a town hall meeting of Chelsea and Greenwich Village residents. The mayor, who likes to get involved in issues that are important to New York City, did not participate in trying to save St. Vincent's Hospital, the Hon. Gottfried said.

Separately, as was reported by the Associated Pressin an article published yesterday on The Kansas City Star's website, Mayor Bloomberg was unmoved by attempts to save St. Vincent's.

"It's very sad. I wish the hospital could stay open. But the bottom line is, it's not going to," Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Friday on his weekly radio show.

The same AP report also included the following information :

Since it opened in 1849, the famed Manhattan hospital has treated cholera victims, survivors of the Titanic and hundreds of victims of the Sept. 11 attacks. It also was at the forefront of the early response to the AIDS epidemic.

St. Vincent's was the last Catholic-affiliated hospital in New York City. The nearest top-level trauma center is now Bellevue Hospital, more than two miles away.

During a "last mass" inside the hospital's chapel, the former St. Vincent's employees became emotional, the AP added.

"There's a lot of heartbroken people inside the ER. ... They have been the heart and soul of this hospital for many years," said Eileen Dunn, a St. Vincent's nurse for 24 years. "I think on 9/11 we saw what hatred could do. We're seeing today what greed and politics can do to a hospital.

"It's like a funeral inside," she said.