About the Hospital Now Working Group

We are a working group of private citizens, dedicated to the re-establishment of a medical center for the Lower West Side of Manhattan. We are disappointed in the unresponsiveness of our elected officials to the public health crisis which has followed the closing of St. Vincent's Hospital.

We perceive that there has also been a vacuum in the community's response to the crisis caused by the large scale of the problem and the lack of leadership by our elected officials and public health officials. Passivity and resignation are widespread where there should be proactive planning for a new medical center. We want to help energize our community with initiatives intended to re-establish what we have lost.

Our first action was to provide a way for people to report their hardships caused by the closing of St. Vincent's. We have set up an automated system for people to share experiences. If you have experienced a hardship due to the closing of St. Vincent's Hospital, please send an email (preferred) describing it, or leave a voice recording at (646) 389-1279. For more information and our privacy policy, please go to our write-in page.

The Lower West Side encompasses the financial district, Manhattan's three tunnels, and a growing population of new families with children and senior citizens. An area of this scale (even if it didn't contain the country's foremost terrorist targets) cannot be without a trauma center. The large patient population may itself lure established hospitals to take over the existing facilities at Seventh Avenue and West Twelfth Street. We aim to accumulate information here that will be invaluable to existing health organizations who would re-establish our full-service hospital.

We also hope to inspire the support of private philanthropic sources which could expedite the re-establishment of the hospital when the time comes. We are seeking like-minded community activists, donors, fundraisers and planners to join us in this initiative. But we won't stop there.

We'll also develop a plan for a new medical center based on Open Source philosophy and practice. This philosophy is more open, less antagonistic and more capable of determining what is in the public interest than the usual political process. Information technology to facilitate communication challenges is key to the practicality of the process and we will be adding collaborative knowledege management systems to this website for that purpose in the near future.

Please check back to this website as we bring our technological solutions for community collaboration online.

To join our mailing list, send an email to newsletter@hospitalnow.org with subscribe as the subject and your email address as the message.

We are all volunteers. To join our team, please call project leader Jonathan Slaff at (212) 924-0496 or email us at hospitalnow.contact "at" gmail.com.

Jonathan Slaff
Barbara Reuther
Elizabeth Adam
Helaina Hovitz
Ollie Piantieri
Celia Wu
Ira Hyman