The Landmarks Preservation Commission held a meeting today to consider the appropriateness of the plans of St. Vincent's Hospital to build a new hospital building on the site of the nautically-styled O'Toole Building on the west side of Seventh Avenue between 12th and 13th Streets, shown at the right, and demolish nine of its existing buildings on the east side of Seventh Avenue between 11th and 12th Streets.

The hospital wants to erect a new, 21-story, hospital building designed by Pei Cobb Freed & Partners on the O'Toole site and is selling Rudin Family Holdings the rights to develop about 500 housing units on its sites across the avenue. The Rudin plan, designed by FXFowle, calls for a 21-story building on the avenue that would be about 260 feet high and townhouses with stoops on the two side-streets.

Expecting a huge turn-out from civic activists opposed to the plans, the commission held the meeting in a 913-seat theater at the Manhattan Community College at 199 West Street rather than in its own small meeting room in the Municipal Building.

The hospital lies within the Greenwich Village Historic District and the commission must rule on the appropriateness of the proposed demolitions as well as the appropriateness of the designs for new structures.

A coalition of neighborhood organizations, including the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, has proposed an "alternative" plan that would lower the height of the proposed new hospital building from about 330 feet to about 190 feet and calls for a second new hospital building on the east side of the avenue that might be connected to the one on the west side by a tunnel under the avenue.

On February 20, 2008, Henry Amoroso, president and CEO of Saint Vincent Catholic Medical Centers, wrote to Brad Hoylman, the chair of Community Board 2, whose committee on the plans unanimously voted in opposition to them, that the hospital had reviewed the "alternative" plan and found that it "is not feasible and lacks the tools necessary to ensure that this community has proper healthy care infrastructure."

"The existing hospital assemblage...has so many significant architectural, mechanical, and structural systems issues that no amount of renovation work can satisfy the demands of 21st Century healthcare," he wrote, adding that the alternative plan "divorces inpatient beds from emergency, surgical, and imaging services, violates health policy, would not receive Certificate of Need approval from the New York State Department of Health, and would cause a complete shutdown of hospital operations during demolition and reconstruction."

Furthermore, the letter continued, the alternative plan "is not a financially viable model" and "severable connections under or over 7th Avenue and 12th Street are very risky and unattainable." In addition, it also stated that the Smith and Raskob buildings "cannot accommodate the latest medical technologies nor accommodate the beds necessary to operate a hospital" and that "construction phasing of the plan would cause a 2-3 year suspension of health care service."

In today's edition of The New York Times, architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff criticized as "most troubling" the hospital's plan to tear down "the 1963 O'Toole Building, one of the first buildings in the city to break with the Modernist mainstream as it was congealing into formulaic dogma."

"Designed by the New Orleans architect Albert C. Ledner, it is significant," Mr. Ouroussoff wrote, "both as a both of architecture and as a repository of cultural memory. It was built to house the National Maritime Union" and "its glistening white facade and scalloped overhangs, boldly cantilevered over the lower floors, were meant to conjure an ocean voyage....This is not simply a question of losing a building; it's about masking those complexities and reducing New York history to a caricature."