The Board of St. Vincent's Catholic Medical Centers voted last night to close its Greenwich Village facility.

Alfred E. Smith IV, the chairman of the 160-year-old institution. said that "the decision to close St. Vincent's Hospital Manhattan inpatient services was made only after the board, management and our advisers exhausted every possible alternative."

In an article in today's edition of The New York Times, Sharon Otterman wrote that "Gov. David A. Paterson said Tuesday he would work with the board and the Department of Health to preserve some of the hospital's most important community functions, perhaps by scaling it down to an urgent care center that could take patients with conditions ranging from ankle sprains to heart attacks."

"That plan would also try to maintain some outpatient services, like those that provide H.I.V. treatment and primary care, but it remains at a conceptual stage and would require finding a partner, people close to the process said," the article continued.

"To satisfy its creditors, the hospital my sell or lease much of its valuable Greenwich Village real estate, as it drastically reduces its staff of doctors, nurses and others, to repay its estimated $700 million of debt," the article said, adding that "with vastly reduced services, it would no longer be a Level trauma center, so patients with high-level emergencies would be routed to full-service hospitals."

Continuum Health Partners and Mount Sinai Hospital both separately studied potential partnerships recently with St. Vincent's but withdrew their proposals.

St. Vincent's had been planning a major expansion that would have replaced most of its buildings on the east side of Seventh Avenue between 11th and 12th Streets with residential condominiums and replaced its Edward & Theresa O'Toole Medical Services building, noted for its nautical motifs, with a major new hospital tower.