Replacement opens for Charity Hospital lost in Hurricane Katrina
NEW ORLEANS – Ten years after the levees and floodwalls broke during Hurricane Katrina and flooded New Orleans, the Big Easy finally has a full-scale hospital again.
At 6 a.m. Saturday, the new 2.3 million-square-foot University Medical Center New Orleans, built with $1.1 billion of federal, state and private rebuilding money, ambulances and medical staff began the transfer of 131 patients into the new hospital for its first day of operation. Orchestrating the move required closing down streets as ambulances took patients into the facility.
In addition, the system’s 2,000-strong staff of doctors, specialists, nurses and office workers will move in, too.
Since Katrina, medical services have been scattered across the city. Thus, the opening of the UMC complex – an artfully designed state-of-the-art hospital – signals a return to top-notch medical care.
The hospital will serve anyone, whether they can pay or not, the hospital has promised.
“It will be a safety net hospital,” said Dr. Peter DeBlieux, UMC’s chief medical officer and director of emergency services.
The UMC complex is the successor to the towering 1930s-era Charity Hospital, a 1 million-square-foot Art Deco downtown institution much loved in New Orleans. In tandem with the UMC campus, a new adjacent U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs hospital is slated to open next year.
The move to not reopen Charity – over the objections of many – and build a new hospital district was anything but easy. City, federal and state officials forced hundreds of homeowners and businesses to relocate from neighborhoods founded by a mix of European immigrants – Jews, Germans and Eastern Europeans – and African-Americans. Angry protests, allegations of wrongdoing, lawsuits and evictions ensued.
Although blighted, the neighborhood was famous for several notable landmarks, including the Deutsches Haus, the Dixie Brewery and its Nick’s Bar, numerous elegant homes and its Jazz-era lore. Pockets of resistance held out until the bulldozers came in.
Even before Katrina struck Aug. 29, 2005, developers had tagged the area as prime for redevelopment into a biomedical corridor. With a price tag at $2 billion, the hospital corridor is among the largest public works projects undertaken during the reconstruction from Katrina.
Today, anger over Charity’s closing has subsided, and the city has mostly embraced the project.
The UMC complex is as much a hospital as an architectural endeavor and civic statement. It is a lavish expression of glass chandeliers, space age-like furniture and silent Buddhist-like ponds – all under soft lighting and splashed with soft colors. Critics have said its exteriors do not fit in New Orleans.
New Orleans has a long and distinguished medical history, and the city’s university-run hospitals attract medical students by the thousands. As Charity was before, the new hospital will function as a teaching hospital, too.
DeBlieux said having the new hospital open will “raise the standard for health care across the region.”
While the nonprofit hospital will serve any person off the street, it also aims to attract paying customers. The new medical center is being run by LCMC Health, a private, not-for-profit health care system that includes Children’s Hospital, Touro and New Orleans East Hospital.