Brooklyn’s Borough Park began seeing some major changes last week as crews began converting a 140,000-square-foot building into the new location of New York City’s Maimonides Medical Center.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the $100 million facility was custom-designed by Gensler Architects, with the intent of “[improving] communication between doctors, nurses, and staff” by providing one unified space where multiple medical teams can provide outpatient care.
The problem of receiving immediate medical care in New York City is an unusual one, due to the city’s high population and lack of available real estate space. As the Wall Street Journal notes, “having health problems [in New York City] often means spending a lot of time on subways or in taxi cabs going from place to place for tests, procedures, and to see various specialists.”
To make matters worse, medical centers in big cities often need to close down and completely renovate their space, rather than expand or move into new facilities, simply because there is no available real estate.
Consequently, a lack of regular and preventative medical care leads to more patients seeking treatment at hospital emergency rooms or urgent care centers — and this particular problem is actually something that is occurring across the country, albeit usually because medical centers don’t have enough money to continue operating at all.
The Maimonides group had been using multiple three-story brownstone houses as makeshift office buildings, all of which are located on Ninth Ave. between 48th and 49th streets and which have been demolished to make space for the new facility.
According to Dominick Stanzione, the chief operating officer of Maimonides, the medical center made a conscious decision to rent its new facility rather than buy it, in order to invest more money in newer technology and medical equipment.
The Maimonides Medical Center project is reportedly one of multiple construction and renovation projects in NYC serving the healthcare industry, totaling about 3.4 million square feet of office space and costing $1.8 billion.