By Deon Roberts, Online Editor
What to do with the Charity Hospital site continues to inspire debate more than three years after the facility was shuttered because of Hurricane Katrina damage.
Planners envision the area around the hospital becoming a development of hospitals, homes, offices and shops catering to the medical industry, according to a story today by CityBusiness reporter Ariella Cohen. Under that plan, Charity would be redeveloped into apartments or condominiums.
But some don’t agree with that vision. Preservationists, for example, say redeveloping Charity makes no sense from a preservation perspective.
“If it was kept as a hospital we wouldn’t bulldoze the entire historic neighborhood around it,” Walter Gallas, of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, said. “This is a backwards, suburban plan masquerading as progress. We are clearing a historic urban neighborhood to build new buildings and a sea of parking lots.”
On Thursday, the opposing sides of the fight over the fate of Charity gathered in a Louisiana State University Medical Center conference room to discuss how Charity could be reused if the health care facility is not reopened, Cohen reported. But, according to the news story, “the conversation, however, barely moved beyond its starting premise that the hospital would not be reopened as the two sides grappled to reconcile conflicting visions of the site’s future.”
Kurt Weigle, president of the city’s Downtown Development District, said he has “a lot of confidence that Charity could be used for housing.”
The DDD has heard from some developers who are interested in redeveloping the hospital into housing, he said.
“These are developers who have created housing in historic facilities like Charity, and they are interested in Charity,” he said.•
2 responses so far ↓
charitynomore // Monday, September 22, 2008 at 10:21 am |
Re-opening charity as a hospital is the biggest mistake that New Orleans could make. First off, we would lose the VA to jefferson. Second and more importantly, building a new hospital will be an economic engine for the region that New Orleans has not seen in 40 years. And Charity wont be destroyed–the preservationists will be ok when its converted into condos.
Get your voice heard in NOLA policy decisions:
http://www.PolicyPitch.com
Brad // Tuesday, February 3, 2009 at 2:22 pm |
My reading of the Cooperative Opportunities Planning Group [COPG] documents from LSU and the VA indicate that the VA will go to wherever LSU will go. Hence, the VA could indeed be located across the street from the LSUHSC on Tulane Avenue, as proposed by RMJM Hillier at the Foundation for Historical Louisiana — with the relocation/not demolition of twenty homes. See http://www.FHL.org for details.