The Little Known Miracle of Downtown Hospital

Downtown Hospital Today

On 9-11, I remember watching live local news coverage with a television reporter parked out in front of St. Vincent's Hospital, where a small army of volunteer doctors, nurses. EMTs, etc were waiting for the expected onslaught of wounded to pour in from downtown. And then...nobody came. The impression you got was that, aside from the over 2,600 dead at the World Trade Center, most everyone else escaped with minor injuries.

The story that later emerged was quite different. It turns out that hundreds of injured people had been rushed to another local hospital, one much closer to Ground Zero. It's a tiny hospital which most of us, including most New Yorkers have never even heard of: NY Downtown Hospital. This little outpost in lower Manhattan had been created out of the merger of several other small hospitals as a response to the Wall Street anarchist bombing of 1920. On 9-11, the little hospital received an influx of patients greater than any American hospital in history: 350 patients in the first two hours, 1,500 total. Burns, broken bones, lacerations, and lots and lots of eye injuries and breathing problems from the dust. Furthermore, they dealt with all of this with a tiny staff of 10 emergency room doctors.

I watched a terrific show on the Discovery Fit and Health network the other day that told (among many other amazing stories) the miraculous treatment of American Express employee Debbie Mardenfeld (initially known as Jane Doe #1 because she'd been brought to the emergency room without an I.D.). One of the first victims to be brought in, she'd been nearly cut in two by part of the landing gear from one of the planes when it fell on her. The only doctors on duty (or available) that day were a plastic surgeon and a hand specialist. They not only saved the woman, but they restored her legs -- and with a blackout interruption in the middle of the 12-hour surgery. (Their names are Dr. Gerald Ginsberg and Dr. Nelson Potwinick). The woman not only lived, but she lived to dance at her wedding. 

Another amazing story: a woman had broken several ribs when the elevator she was riding in fell a couple of stories to the ground, its cables cut by one of the planes as it plowed through the building. She had just been put into an ambulance at one of the triage centers when the South Tower fell. She survived the collapse, but it was now impossible to drive the ambulance out. So she walked the six blocks or so over to Downtown Hospital, broken bones and all. (I retraced her steps a few days ago, and took the photo above. You have to admire her feat. The hospital is close to South Street Seaport).

A few months ago, Downtown Hospital was in serious financial trouble. They'd expanded services in the wake of 9-11, and doubled in size, but couldn't handle the expansion. Fortunately, unlike St. Vincent's before it, which went unrescued, Downtown was bailed out by NY Presbyterian and is now part of its constellation of medical centers. But...can you imagine? If it had folded, there would be NO hospital south of 14th Street. To say it has proved its worth is putting it mildly. If we let hospitals fail, where do we go when we need them -- the M &Ms store?

A 9-11 Memory From the Top of the Woolworth Building

Adapted from a post published earlier this year.

Sometime in 2001, I was working at the New-York Historical Society in the fundraising department (I had not yet switched to public relations). At the time we had an exhibition up about the work of Cass Gilbert, architect of the Woolworth Building. And in that capacity I had the rare privilege to go somewhere few people have gone -- the top of the Woolworth Building. I only recall a few of us on the junket: myself, a pair of elderly, eccentric philanthropists, a lady from one of the state or city arts agencies, and our guide, a man who worked for the real estate company that managed the building. And he gave us a very well-informed tour of the building, showing off its Gothic elements, the ornamentation in the lobby, describing its structural peculiarities (it has several owing to the fact that such a large building had never been built before).

But the memory I have of being on that top floor in an empty apartment. It had been used as a dentist office. We had the opportunity to get in because they were between tenants at the moment. But you know the eerie feeling you get in the upper floors of a very tall skyscraper, the constant moaning and crying of the wind, the feeling of isolation and distance from the city so far below, and the slight swaying motion under your feet. Just the handful of us in this remote place, the room empty of furniture. And there was an observation deck we could go out on - -I thought the wind would throw me overboard.

And just across the way, just a couple of blocks distant, but it felt closer, almost close enough to touch, was the sheer metal and glass striped face of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. I'd never seen it from this perspective -- few people ever had. At close to 800 feet, we were at something approaching 2/3 of the way up. Really only helicopters ever saw the building that high that close. Looking southwest it nearly filled one's field of vision. And while we stood there looking at it for what seemed like hours, we inevitably got on to the subject of the 1993 bombing and the likelihood (really the inevitability) of such a thing happening again.

After September 11 happened a few months later, I thought of that day so many times. I put myself in the shoes of the the people trapped in the North Tower, remembering what that perspective at the top of the building was like. And remembered that conversation with the strange old rich couple that seemed so eerily prescient. I also remember the man telling us about the elevators -- the Woolworth Building has very few of them and they're very narrow, in order to accommodate what for a time was thought of as redundancy in the structural elements. But in light of the collapse of the Twin Towers due their own engineering innovations, the construction of the older building didn't seem so unwise all of the sudden.

Anyway, this is what I'll always think of when I think of the Woolworth Building. It was almost as though that moment of time, and that perspective, had taken place in some other dimension. As though we had climbed into some weird dreamspace. Now that it's only a memory, and that perspective (both physical and temporal) is just a memory, it is natural for it to seem like it was a dream. The weird thing is, it felt like a dream even when it was happening.