LICH: Ruining Your Life For You
Long Island College Hospital is back doing what it does best: selling off its real estate holdings so they can be turned into eyesore condos.
The geniuses who can't make the only hospital that serves Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill, Boerum Hill, Carroll Gardens and Red Hook work as a business proposition ("Gosh, we've got a monopoly on five Brooklyn neighborhoods! Now, how do we make money?") is going to sell 97 Amity Street and the Pholemus building across the street. (Above, courtesy of Brownstoner.)
LICH has already sold the Lamm Building at 110 Amity Street and Carroll Gardens' International Longshoremen’s building at 340 Court Street, which is becoming The Collection, a hideous-looking condo complex, plus a bunch of buildings on the west side of the BQE near Congress and Warren, of which all but one have already been demolished. Condos will follow there, as well.
Doctors at LICH continue to cry out against Continuum Health Partners, LICH's parent company, saying this is all part of their plan to dismantle and close LICH. The corporation, of course, keeps saying "No, no, no, no, no. That's not our intention at all!"
The transaction will involve not only the selling off of property, but of LICH history. 97 Amity Street was the original core hospital, and the Polhemus building was once a medical school.
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The bold faced selling of two properties with enormous significance for the history of medicine in the United States is a measure of the arrogant disregard of anything but the quick buck by Continuum Health Partners. The Polhemus building housed the medical school until 1955 when the school relocated to Downstate and became part of SUNY. The interior contains two ancient medical amphitheaters of the type seen in the works of Thomas Eakins. The building also contains impressive conference rooms and office suites in which some of the early luminaries of American medicine taught and practiced.
Continuum Health Partners has managed LICH for 10 years from it's perch in the BMW building in Manhattan. They have stripped LICH of it's local board of regents and made disastrous financial decisions
with no input from LICH's Brooklyn based medical staff. CHP's administration never allowed Rita Battles the recently ousted CEO to function as a true CEO. When she refused to implement their'restructuring' plan she was terminated abruptly.
Continuum's plan is to sell off as much of LICH's almost billion dollars worth of real estate and convert a once superior academic institution into a little medical center with no cutting edge technology surrounded by high priced condos and coops.
The organized medical staff of LICH is dead set against Continuum's strategy. How can the Department of Health allow CHP to restructure LICH while still investigating the medical staff's allegation that mismanagement and worse by Continuum over 10 years has brought LICH to it's current state of distress? The medical staff has asked DOH and the AG to sever LICH's relatioship with Continuum
It certainly seems that conditions at LICH have deteriorated since control was taken over by Manhattan-based Continuum.
Isn't there anyting that can be done to bring control of LICH back to the local Brooklyn community?
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