The New York City Council unanimously approved plans for the expansion and modernization of Lenox Hill Hospital at 100 East 77th Street in the Lenox Hill district of Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Designed by Ennead Architects and Ewing Cole and developed by Northwell Health, the new $2 billion structure is expected to rise 370 feet tall along the eastern half of the city block. The existing 160-foot-tall medical complex is more than 150 years old and is bounded by Lexington and Park Avenues and East 76th and East 77th Streets.
The above rendering looks south from the corner of Lexington Avenue and East 79th Street showing a bulky massing clad in light-gray stone paneling and floor-to-ceiling glass. A setback is located around the midpoint of the tower, and a mechanical bulkhead caps the structure above its flat roof.
According to Northwell Health, the modernization will be the campus’ first in more than 50 years, and will address its issues of undersized rooms, inefficient layouts, and aging infrastructure. The planned modifications and expansion will yield 475 single-occupancy patient rooms, 30 new operating rooms, an expanded emergency department, and a new off-street ambulance bay to prevent traffic congestion. The project will also include a $7.5 million investment in the surrounding community.
Plans also call for a $20 million revamped subway entrance for the 77th Street station on the northeastern corner of the city block, complete with a new elevator for improved ADA accessibility. The following rendering depicts this located within a perimeter of steel columns clad in reflective aluminum paneling, alongside the double-height ground-floor frontage.
Lenox Hill Hospital Expansion. Rendering courtesy of Northwell Health.
The below rendering of the building from the corner of Lexington Avenue and East 76th Street offers a closer look at the fenestration, which features protruding bronze-hued frames surrounding the grid of floor-to-ceiling windows.
Lenox Hill Hospital Expansion. Rendering courtesy of Northwell Health.
Plans for a redevelopment date back to March 2019. The original proposal consisted of a 516-foot-tall medical skyscraper and an adjacent 490-foot-tall, 200-unit apartment tower. This plan would have required the demolition of every building on the city block.
Due to neighborhood opposition, the project was scaled back significantly to its current scope.
Lenox Hill hospital expansion proposed in 2019. Rendering by Ennead Architects.
Lenox Hill hospital expansion proposed in 2019. Rendering by Ennead Architects.
Lenox Hill hospital expansion proposed in 2019. Rendering by Ennead Architects.
The first revised iteration involved a 436-foot-tall tower that would spare the demolition of the buildings along the western half of the city block, detailed in the below diagram. The scope was subsequently reduced further to a 395-foot-tall structure, then again to the current 370-foot-tall plan.
Lenox Hill Hospital expansion proposed in 2023. Diagram by Ennead Architects.
Lenox Hill Hospital expansion proposed in 2023. Diagram by Ennead Architects.
“After years of planning and collaboration, today’s City Council vote to approve the revitalization of Lenox Hill Hospital represents a major milestone for New York City,” Northwell Health announced in a statement. “We also appreciate the input from the community. We look forward to building a modern hospital that will deliver exceptional care for generations of New Yorkers, while continuing to be a trusted partner to our neighbors.”
Lenox Hill Hospital currently serves 144,000 patients per year, employs 5,000 healthcare workers, delivers over 4,000 newborns annually, and sees over 55,000 people use the facility’s emergency room each year.
Council members also voted to ensure that 95 percent of the new expansion will for hospital use, 20 percent more than Northwell Health’s proposal.
The closest subway from the site is the 6 train at the 77th Street station along Lexington Avenue.
Construction is expected to take approximately nine years, including six for the new construction. The project will now move to a vote before the full council later this week, followed by a review by Mayor Eric Adams, and will also require approval from the state Department of Health.
Subscribe to YIMBY’s daily e-mail
Follow YIMBYgram for real-time photo updates
Like YIMBY on Facebook
Follow YIMBY’s Twitter for the latest in YIMBYnews
Hospital buildings likely have the shortest lifespans before becoming obsolete. The rapid advancement in medical technology creates needs not previously envisioned.
It’s both technological and financial obsolescence. Insurance used to pay more lump sums for things like office visits and, in the case of hospitals, in-patient stays. So, in the 80s, many hospitals built new buildings with lots of operating rooms and two-patient rooms. Think of those brown and dark red brick modern architecture buildings at Mount Sinai, St. Vincent’s, Long Island College Hospital, Roosevelt, and most other hospitals in the city. Then, in the early 90s, insurance and Medicare started splitting up the payments into separate reimbursements for each and every separate thing by code. So, the hospitals renovated to have outpatient radiology and endoscopy suites and provide outpatient surgeries and procedures, only to have to then compete with private, for profit outpatient facilities. So, they ended up with a bunch of empty beds and underused outpatient facilities. Now the trend seems to be single patient rooms and ultra-modern faculty practice buildings with large medical practices and outpatient procedures to try to compete with the private ones, hence all of the NYU Langone buildings in the East 30s as well as scattered around the city and this Northwell/Lenox Hill plan. By the time this expansion is complete, who knows how obsolete it will be.
Medicare, Medicaid, and insurance reimbursements are plummeting just like college research and related cost funding. Hospitals are going to have to downsize.
Yeah. Remember when Mt. Sinai tore down every one of their Beaux Arts buildings? Remember the original St. Vincent’s in the Village? If they have to replace fine old buildings, why does it always have to be with architectural garbage?
The cranky, rich old people on Park Avenue have been so salty about this.
Is this where all the robots and AI doctors will work? After all Medicaid just cut for huge tax breaks for wealthy.
Good perhaps for Northwell- in the economic battle of health system titans- but better for medical care to sell the current locations for residential and use the funds to build where needed in Manhattan I.e. South of 23rd st.
Bird in hand.
Also people around here are still human with medical needs – I think.
Manhattan has a ton of hospitals, and a relatively healthy population. If we are actually trying to build where it is needed there are large parts of the Bronx which are very underserved. The fight for preserving the Mount Sinai is centered around people not wanting any change, and not around actual community needs, and the whole schtick around the no hospitals under 23rd centers on being deliberately misleading.
The expansion is a good idea in a city where more hospitals are closing: Beth Israel, St. Vincent, just to name two in lower Manhattan alone. We have an aging population, more complex but treatable diseases to combat, more research needs, etc. More hospitals are a good idea. I am a YIMBY on this.
Agree completely.
Not sure why the UES needs another massive hospital with New York Hospital, Memorial, and Mount Sinai meer blocks away.
Why will this take nine years to complete? That sounds ridiculous. I suppose that hospital construction is a lot more complex than residential and commercial, but that timeline seems really excessive?
The current Lenox Hill Hospital is old and obsolete, but building complex hospital infrastructure and architecture takes time. So it ain’t easy, it’ll take time, and shouldn’t be that disruptive. Go with it.
Related to hospitals, NYC needs to enact and enforce (lol) a new policy for emergency vehicle sirens. I live next to a hospital and why is the siren blaring at 3:00am on an empty street? Flashing lights should be more than adequate. Blaring sirens in completely clogged traffic just makes everyone nearby miserable. There must be a better alternative to an angry ambulance crew enjoying making BIG noise.
Yeah, that’s right. I live on 45th and 10th ave, and the loudest sirens are always Mount Sinai ambulances going up 10th ave to Mt Sinai at all hours…Mt Sinai of course is where Moses received the Ten Commandments from God, there should have been an eleventh commandment; “lower your damn siren!”
A 9-yr duration for construction of a new hospital to replace an existing one sounds optimistic. The existing hospital has to operate continuously while being precisely deconstructed in parts/sections. As parts are demolished and built anew while the existing hospital remains operational, make sure no one dies from an infrastructure demolition mistake. BTW., the building is full of friable asbestos. Then when a completed new section is available, existing facilities can migrate into it. This is an extraordinarily complex logistical liability project of tightl and precisely coordinated phased demolition and phased construction.
Lenox Hill is just another large corporation intent on getting richer, it has zero to do with the health of New Yorkers. Their initial plan was never what they wanted, it’s an old real estate trick to ask for more size / floors for any new structure. I hope it doesn’t get done, it’s an ugly eyesore in an area already saturated with clinics, hospitals, and, doctor’s offices.
those who live on the UES will benefit but so will the communities outside of it. Those rich old people are mostly Caucasian, who are going to need the services at Lenox Hill, so the fact that they are in their granny panties and depends over this is WILD