Sarandon Fights Hospital Expansion. Next up: Orphanages
Filed under: buildings and construction, cars-houses, green and famous, movies — joe @ 9:11 am
July 18th 2008
We’re almost always on the same page as Susan Sarandon, especially when she’s taking on the likes of Bill O’Reilly, but this one might leave even the biggest Bull Durham fans scratching their heads.
The outspoken New York greenie, along with longtime companion Tim Robbins, has recently expressed concern with the expansion plans of Greenwich Village’s St. Vincent’s Hospital. The couple have a home in the area and are concerned with the impact that development will have on the neighborhood. That’s right, she’s now fighting sick people.
The couple lives just three blocks away from the proposed structure. While she admits that changes need to be made at the facility, she is asking the planners to consider some proposed alternatives. Let’s hope that the family’s health insurance covers emergency room visits at other hospitals.
While we New Yorkers are always concerned with the perils of expansion (not to mention collapsing cranes), we might want to look at something like NYU’s attempted urban domination before going after hospitals.
http://www.dosomething.org/celebsgonegood/Susan_Sarandon_Tim_Robbins
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Tagged: susan sarandon, tim robbins
Expansion of a hospital isn’t an unqualified good. I live a block away from the expansion of a hospital in another major city, and for the last 15 months we’ve had to deal with unexpected street closures and traffic hazards when the streets are open. Our kids cannot go to the neighborhood park alone any more because it’s not safe for them to go through the construction zone. The constant stream of heavy equipment and trucks has left the streets of the neighborhood (not designed for that load) pockmarked with new holes and fissues that the city won’t address until construction ends.
We’re treated to constant loud, clanging banging construction noises from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. every weekday and humming generators 24/7/365. In the winter months, we also had huge high powered lights on every evening to extend the working hours on the site, and yes, we could see them a block away.
There’s a huge crane looming over our neighborhood. Even without the NYC accidents, it’s a scary thing to contemplate. I’m looking out my window at it now. Yuck.
And then there’s the dirt. Months and months of dusty dirt that’s on my windows and windowsills, sidewalks and house. The neighborhood is coated in a film of filth that is only somewhat abated by rain, and when it rains muddy gunk runs in the gutters for days. And there are bits of debris, pieces of plastic sheeting, random ends and odds that get blown away or carried away and end up where they don’t belong.
And after it’s all done, yes, we’ll have a hospital with much greater capacity — which means that many more people and that many more cars, and that many more ambulances with sirens blaring all coming through our neighborhood at all hours of the day and night.
There may be times when my family benefits from having a hospital nearby, should someone fall ill, but there will be many more times when the hospital poses an impingement on our lives in some fashion.
Should St. Vincent’s (which is already huge) expand, no doubt Ms. Sarandon and Mr. Robbins will face many if not all of these same issues. Having lived through it, I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t complain.