The Jewish Hospital. - The Shaboss Raid. .01.02.2003

New York is a city that is infamous for redevelopment. Real Estate here is of far too high a value for it to sit unoccupied and disused for long. This hospital campus is just such an example of this. It was once a privately owned hospital that merged with another, and then eventually consolidated their services into the newer buildings, leaving this block of 4 or 5 buildings, ranging from 5 to 12 floors high, vacant. Not even their advanced age or location within a deplorable crime infested part of the city could keep this massive amount of structure unoccupied for long. Scoping out the inspection ticket on a fire extinguisher inside one of the buildings, one can find that it was last checked in february of 2002. Barely 2 years later, and my how times have changed. Indeed, Reconstruction here is in full swing, On any given day you can walk past and witness massive wrecking crews driving bobcats around the buildings and carpenters putting up new walls from the top down in each building. Many apartments here will likely be available for rent come spring or summer. And so the renewal cycle goes... Either surf it's crest or miss the wave entirely...

SHABOSS! When better than a friday night to check out a building like this?
And when the main building is this fucking big, how can you not take a look???
Need more convincing? The campus consumes nearly an entire city block. No, you are not seeing things - that big monster is closed.
Well, closed to the public... here, we see a long hallway that connects all 4 - 5 buildings that compose this structure. Most urban hospital campuses that are composed of several buildings contain a 'tunnel' system such as this one. There is at least one NYC hospital with tunnels that cross below city streets. There is even a location where two neighboring hospitals have (but do not use) a tunnel connecting their buildings.
This campus is, of course, in the middle of being converted to Condos. Here we see a long hallway where much of the new walling has been installed, with plenty more dry wall ready to go up. Electricity is still, obviously, coursing through the veins of this seemingly lifeless campus.
The penthouse apartments are going to be nice. Duplexes with roof access.
And once you access the roof, at least from this 5 floor tall structure, you get to view the entire city, as well as the main building, awaiting your entry...
Strangely, doors have been reused in odd places - this door faces the roof. Another door into an apartment from the roof is labeled "patient bathroom"
Speaking of bathrooms. We got tubs, but no toilets yet... What the F?
Scratching across a catwalk high above the ground between the buildings...
The main building.
Empty and stripped down to the basic bricks, it was impossible to tell what used to transpire on each floor, although there were occasional left over signs and tile work such as that found around the main elevator shaft.
Out the window. Some floors had lots on, others did not.
Down in the basement, the building still looked like a hospital. Here we see the post office - with the boxes on the right used to drop main for each department (unlike modern corporate offices where the mail room delivers the mail to each department, many hospitals simply have an interior post office where someone has to come to get and send the mail.
A room was found down here that the construction staff who is rebuilding the campus uses for an office/lounge. Tools, boots, clothing, radios - everything you'd expect from a construction crew was to be found in these rooms, right down to the pornography on the walls. It was just plain eerie - as if a smelly, dusty crew would round the corner at any second.
A strange old reel to reel machine with a reader (or splicer?) between was to be found in this fish bowl...
No admittance? too late now...
'Free at last' - what this graffiti is about, who knows? It is also found all around the construction fencing around the buildings.

The final building was once a nursing school and is the last building here not under reconstruction yet. The rooms are, for the most part, empty... well, except for a few odd items
One classroom still contained a wall full of bone diagrams. Soon come the building itself will be but a skeleton of it's former self.
And finally, we must ponder the question of this flyer, found upon a wall of the Nursing School portion of the campus. A trained eye will recognize the parallels between it's style and those once used by the CLUEPATROL so many years ago. One can only wonder what the connection may be...