Ink-stained transformation

First look: The CA’S former building is now hospital for virus patients

In roughly one month, the Army Corps of Engineers and contractors have turned The Commercial Appeal’s former building at 495 Union Ave. into a 401-bed hospital for COVID-19 patients. A media tour of the building Monday showed a space that’s massively transformed.

A fourth-floor space that formerly served as an industrial “mail room” for preparing and shipping out newspapers is now a sterile-looking, low-ceilinged vast plain of individual hospital rooms, each with its own cot, IV stand and plugs for various medical functions, including oxygen.

Metal frames and fabric curtains separate the rooms, and each room is equipped with its own bag of toiletries. This fourth-floor space alone has 254 beds.

Part of the third-floor newsroom has been turned into a space for unusually sick patients. Thirty-three specially designed negative pressure rooms with glass walls aim to keep the contagion from spreading uncontrolled in the area.

Very sick patients who don’t improve quickly would be transferred to other hospitals, organizers have said — the overflow hospital is largely a backup hospital for patients who need support but aren’t so sick that they need top-level care.

Beds are in other areas of the building as well,

including the first floor, which formerly housed the newspaper’s customer service and human resources offices.

Unlike standard hospital rooms, the individual patient spaces are not equipped with bathrooms.

Patients will be able to get up to go to bathrooms nearby, said Dr. Manoj Jain, the infectious disease specialist who is advising the city of Memphis and who has visited the new hospital several times. Jain said that in most cases, COVID-19 patients need oxygen, but are not so debilitated that they can’t move.

In addition to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Tennessee National Guard and a wide range of contractors worked on the project.

Officials have expressed hope that the hospital will never be used. For now, its 401 hospital beds will sit vacant,

ready to serve as overflow space in case the pandemic sends a big wave of sick patients to area hospitals.

The build-out of the structure is costing $51.3 million in state and federal funding, said Jim Pogue, a spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers. That’s not including other costs, including furniture, equipment and medical staffing.

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee toured the building Monday and addressed journalists outside. “What this is, is a representation of how a community can come together in the midst of a crisis and integrate, cooperate, coordinate and execute,” Lee said. “That’s exactly what’s happened and that’s what this building, in the form that it now stands, represents, an incredible amount of partnership and coordination.”

Many speakers came to the podium and noted the extremely fast time frame for construction.

Lt. Col. Nathan Molica, who led reporters on a tour, said the contract for the project was finalized April 16, barely a month ago. Officials have said hundreds of people have worked on the project seven days a week, 24 hours a day.

Workers were still doing cleanup and putting finishing touches on the building on Monday, including hanging a sign that read “Tennessee Alternate Care Site Memphis.”

Other signs in the building read “Hot Zone,” “Cold Zone” and “Warm Zone” and aim to remind workers of infection control precautions as they enter various areas.

Some remnants of the building’s former purpose remain, including one of the building’s old printing presses.

Patients and supplies will be transported among the building’s floors by freight elevators. One elevator is labeled on hospital diagrams as “clean,” the other as “dirty.” The “dirty” elevator will transport sick patients and items such as dirty linen, the other will transport fresh supplies.

A massive oxygen tank system has been constructed outside the building. And one part of the building has been rebuilt to allow ambulances to drive in.the tour experience was disorienting for reporters in the group who had formerly worked in the building. Spaces where they worked for years are now completely changed and unfamiliar.

The Commercial Appeal left the space at 495 Union Ave. in May 2019 and now occupies a smaller office on South Main.

An investment group called Twenty Lake Holdings now owns the building — its main office is in Connecticut and in Tennessee it operates as 495 Union Avenue LLC. The state of Tennessee had agreed to pay Twenty Lake Holdings a monthly lease sum of $70,000, plus utilities and other expenses.

The contract runs until at least April 20, 2021, and can be extended for another six months.

PHOTOS BY MAX GERSH/THE COMMERCIAL APPEAL Memphis Commercial Appeal | USA TODAY NETWORK – TENNESSEE Army Corps of Engineers Lt. Colonel Nathan Molica stands outside a treatment room Monday on the third floor of the former CA building at 495 Union Ave. in Memphis.

Gov. Bill Lee talks with Maj. Gen. Bob Whittle of the Army Corps of Engineers outside the former Commercial Appeal building.

PHOTOS BY MAX GERSH/THE COMMERCIAL APPEAL Intensive care unit rooms on the third floor of the former Commercial Appeal building in Memphis.

Gov. Bill Lee, left, Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland, center, and Col. Zachary L. Miller with the Memphis District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers enter to tour the new COVID-19 overflow hospital on Monday.

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Lt. Col. Nathan Molica during a tour of the former CA building.

PHOTOS BY MAX GERSH/THE COMMERCIAL APPEAL A row of treatment rooms on the fourth floor of the former Commercial Appeal building in Memphis.

Preparations are made outside the former Commercial Appeal building prior to a visit by Gov. Bill Lee as the overflow hospital is handed over from the Army Corps of Engineers following renovations.