Hospital building committees that could not afford waterfront sites or sites adjacent to parks; often took the risky chance of relying on existing adjacent low-rise surrounding buildings to provide access to fresh air. The biggest danger of such transitional surroundings was that future development would be high-rise and choke out the hospital’s access to fresh air and sunlight. Existing, stable, low-rise residential neighborhoods, which were less likely to undergo drastic high-rise construction in the near future, offered more stability, and a number of hospitals were built in the middle of residential blocks. This ‘air’ grab did not go unnoticed by the neighboring landowners,who were not always pleased, and who could fight back in unexpected ways.
For example, in 1894 the new seven-story Post-Graduate Medical School and Hospital opened in its new surroundings: on the corner of Twentieth Street and Second Avenue. It rose above the surrounding three-story row-houses, guaranteeing fresh air and sunlight to the upper floors where the patient rooms were concentrated. Mrs. R. Scanlon owned a three-story building that backed up against the new Hospital. In 1899, Mrs. Scanlon became tired of the noxious smells and of the hospital inmates purportedly throwing refuse into her back yard. She built a 100-foot high blank brick wall within an inch of the hospital windows at the back of her lot. This ‘spite wall’ effectively ended the refuse, but also severely curtailed the hospital’s access to ‘light and air’.[i] In the end, the hospital bought out Mrs. Scanlon’s site, and much of the rest of the block for an enlargement.[ii]
For more information on the spite wall, see: “Plans for Big ‘Spite Wall,” New York Times, 6 Aug 1899; “Hospital Where Spite Wall Stood,” New York Times, 16 April 1910, p. 7. In an odd twist, the architect of the spite wall was A. W. Brunner, the architect of the new Mount Sinai Hospital.