In the 1910s, the governors of the New York Hospital spent a fortune to acquire a complete city block in the upper West Side between Fifty-Fourth and Fifty-Fifth streets, Eleventh and Twelfth Avenues. The site’s long-term access to open air seemed unbeatable—it was adjacent to the waterfront to the West and to Dewitt Clinton Park to the South. The governors hired S. S. Goldwater and McKim, Mead and White, Architects (who had just collaborated on the influential new Bellevue Hospital complex) to design a cutting-edge new facility that would “surpass any similar group in the city.” The resultant 1912 plan and perspective show a facility similar in overall layout to the new Bellevue Hospital facility, but with wards more like those of the private Mount Sinai Hospital.
This proposed facility for the New York Hospital was never built. While the plans were being finalized, the city’s intention to develop the adjacent waterfront into commercial wharves and to run a railroad track down Eleventh Avenue became public. Since both of these alterations would have provided a source of noise and pollution rather than fresh air, the governors put the plans for the new facility on hold, and then abandoned them. Within a decade, the governors sold that site and bought a different site, two full city blocks in size, adjacent to the East River and just north of the Rockefeller Institute (and its enormous open, landscaped campus). On the middle of that Upper East Side plot (which was surrounded by five-story structures) they erected a twenty-five-story high-rise structure that rose above any surrounding future development into the sunlight and fresh air.