Group wants hospital to be redeveloped

Mount Carmel Health System plans to demolish Mount Carmel West hospital in Franklinton after it opens its new hospital in the Grove City area.

But the Columbus Landmarks Foundation has talked to hospital officials about saving the building for housing or some other use.

“Preservation is the ultimate recycling tool,” said Becky West, Columbus Landmarks executive director.

Still, Mount Carmel officials told her Thursday that the hospital complex — five buildings built between 1908 and 1986 — is too expensive to remodel and reconfigure for another use.

“Trying to repurpose those buildings for future uses was just not practical or financially feasible,” said C. Brett Justice, Mount Carmel’s senior vice president of strategy and system development.

West said she understands it would be a very complex undertaking. But she believes Mount Carmel officials still have time to reconsider.

“Are we moving too fast to clear the site?” she said.

Mount Carmel plans to begin demolishing the 250bed hospital in Franklinton by spring 2019. It plans to open its new 210-bed Grove City hospital this November.

The $46 million transformation of the Mount Carmel campus includes an expanded College of Nursing and a Healthy Living Center. The emergency department will be moved across the campus by the end of December 2018. The four parking decks will remain, with the hope of attracting developers for affordable housing or other uses.

“There certainly is a huge real-estate opportunity in Franklinton,” West said.

Brad Westall, planning manager for Columbus Recreation and Parks, said part of the Franklinton Loop Trail the city is developing in the neighborhood includes a $2.4 million section that connects Dublin Road across the Scioto River to West Broad Street near the Mount Carmel West

“Trying to repurpose those buildings for future uses was just not practical or financially feasible.”

— C. Brett Justice, Mount Carmel’s senior vice president of strategy and system development

campus. That includes a new 12-foot-wide bridge for pedestrians and bicyclists over the river.

Other cities have saved their central city hospital buildings after they closed.

On the east side of Cleveland, the old St. Luke’s Hospital, with its Georgian architecture and 333,000 square feet, has been converted into low-income housing for seniors — 137 units with 150 residents and a waiting list — as well as a charter school and offices.

St. Luke’s Hospital was built in 1927 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2005. The hospital closed in 1999 and reopened as St. Luke’s Manor in 2012.

It was financed mostly with historic, low-income and New Markets tax credits, where individual and corporate investors receive credits against their federal income taxes in exchange for investments in projects.

It wasn’t cheap: $63 million.

“It’s always a design challenge. The corridor widths and common spacing are designed for a hospital, not an immediate accommodation for housing,” said Lasserre Bradley III, regional vice president for Pennrose, the project’s developer.

“It’s very hard to repurpose a hospital,” said Joel Ratner, president and CEO of Cleveland Neighborhood Progress, a community development funding group that led the project.

But it has helped to spur $52 million more in development, including market-rate housing and a new Rapid Transit rail station, he said.

“It has been a very successful project,” West said.

Others in Franklinton, meanwhile, have long been resigned to the fact that the Mount Carmel West hospital building will be no more.

Trent Smith, the executive director of the Franklinton Board of Trade, said he recalled the topic of saving Mount Carmel West coming up at community meetings. “The theme was that building was so old, so expensive to retrofit,” he said.

Dewey Stokes, the former Franklin County commissioner who owns rental properties near Mount Carmel West, said he understands Mount Carmel is making a business decision, and it would be expensive to keep the hospital building for another use. He just wants to make sure Mount Carmel remains committed to Franklinton.

“My concern is they do what they say they are going to do,” Stokes said. “That they’re not going to abandon the community.”