“GIVE ME YOUR GREEDY, YOUR RICH…YOUR DROOLING BROKERS YEARNING TO BREATHE AIR RIGHTS” March 25, 2014 [email protected] Leave a comment I think it’s official to say that The New York Times is engaged in a full-throated campaign to ensure that no hospital serves downtown Brooklyn and that the one currently in its death rattle be disemboweled to the tender mercies of the Corcoran Group, Thor Equities or its ilk. Either that, or one Anemona Hartocollis’ columns on the LICH closing issues are the ones which she is turning in to Times’ brass for a second opinion after getting failing grades from any self-respecting 10th grade journalism instructor. Previously, the Brahmin illustrated the obvious bias in Hartocollis’ piece putting a negative spin on what (at was at the time implied) to be the sole bidder to keep the current Long Island College Hospital open as a medical facility after the May SUNY-Downstate pullout date expires, as well as implying that local residents were simply anti-developer as opposed to nitpicking trivial details like having a hospital facility within three zip codes. But if you compare that article with the one Hartocollis ran today nytimes/2014/03/25/nyregion/5-bidders-face-hurdle-to-save-hospital.html?_r=0 , with her previous piece, you are forced to conclude that if the writer has ever bothered to visit LICH and its surrounding community, she would have no doubt done so in tandem with an outpatient lobotomy clinic visit. Either that, or her copy was so brutally mutilated that it either came on orders of the real estate lobby, or perhaps was red-inked by a real estate executive him/herself. The article starts off with the dour lead: Five bidders have come forward with proposals to keep the distressed Long Island College Hospital in Brooklyn running as a hospital, but none of them have licenses to run hospitals in New York, which could prove a significant hurdle, hospital experts said Monday. In other words, where last week there was one bidder, that was bad news. Now there are five, so…it’s worse news. I suppose if there was some sort of work stoppage within the State Health Department bureaucracy affecting its inability to confer hospital licenses, we might have a story, but read the article. There appears to be no such problem (I can’t quote what isn’t said). I love the “hospital experts said” stinger…right out of the Fox News “People are saying” playbook. Then, this memorable motto of journalistic excellence: The hospital has views of the Statue of Liberty and is more valuable for residential than for hospital development. Ah……HA!!!!! I wonder whether Hartocollis is up for a raise after breaking this exclusive that LICH is proximate to New York Harbor, and has been for…well, over a century. Or maybe the Times thinks she’s Pulitzer material that any front row plot of real estate might fetch a prettier penny as condos than….a facility performing a critical community service. I wonder when Hartocollis or her colleagues will ever apply this devastating economic truism to places like Columbia Presbyterian or NYU Langone Medical Center and their river views. Oh, did you say NYU Langone Medical Center? So did Hartocollis, in what reads as one of the most pained, held-at-gunpoint paragraphs in the history of beat reporting. Naturally, it comes in the very last paragraph: The other four proposals come from Brooklyn Hospital Center in partnership with Mount Sinai Medical Center and the Related Companies, a major real estate developer; Fortis Property Group, in partnership with NYU Langone Medical Center and Lutheran Medical Center; the Peebles Corporation, partnering with North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System and Maimonides Medical Center; and LANA Acquisitions, which said it had begun discussions with a health care partner. So, if you’re keeping score, here’s the Hartocollis/Times take on LICH so far: 1) Only one entity has bid for LICH, but they can’t be trusted, and the natives only care about stopping real estate development and not having community access to emergency care. 2) Actually, there are nine proposals in the works, but we’ll choose to focus on the five who thus far haven’t gone through the bureaucratic formality of obtaining licenses, and we’ll bury at the end the other four, three of whom clearly have health care intentions for the site; two of which are tied to major local hospitals, and one of which – Fortis – was the one we told you before can’t be trusted and which…oh, is tied to NYU Langone. AND… 3) What a travesty these guys have been operating a hospital with views of the Harbor all this time? We need to build luxury real estate there. LIBERTY VIEW CONDOMINIUMS AND SUITES…. …BECAUSE EMMA LAZARUS WOULD HAVE WANTED IT THAT WAY. – bb
Posted on: Tue, 25 Mar 2014 17:43:34 +0000
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