There are 6 hospitals within a six mile radius of downtown Trenton – four “regular” hospitals, a children’s hospital, a prison hospital and a psych hospital. If you expand that radius just a little, you can pick up two university hospitals and another children’s hospital also. So either the people of this area are really sick or are paying too much for health care that they can support this many hospitals. So there are also two hospitals under construction and one more being talked about. These will replace existing hospitals and not add to the count, but in this economy, that’s a lot of dollars going to construction!!!
Now before I take this post into a rant about health care and insurance, let’s steer it back to architecture – both ongoing and potential.
Capital Health is relocating one of it’s two hospitals in Trenton out to Hopewell (the suburbs) for all the usual reasons – parking, highway access, keeping the suburbanites from having the horror of going into the city. Here is an image of the project as of April 2010. Click the image to see the project’s website.
Captial Health Hopewell as of April 2010
The University Medical Center at Princeton is currently located in Princeton and is both landlocked and having issues with access (narrow roads, lots of university traffic), so they acquired a large plot of land just off Route 1 in Plainsboro and are under construction with hopes of opening in 2011.
Artists Rendering of the new Princeton Hospital
Another hospital, St. Francis, has been talking about a construction project, although it’s still just in the planning phase now.
So, the two hospitals have their own architectural significance, but in addition, there will now be two old hospitals in dense urban areas that need to be re-purposed or redeveloped. Now’s the time for these two communities to help steer the projects that will fill the voids left by these two hospitals (and their associated medical offices around them). Princeton has a school of architecture that may play a role in the exploration of their site (at least as a studio project) and a thriving downtown that will help naturally fill the gaps, but Trenton doesn’t have those advantages. Maybe The College of New Jersey’s Municipal Land Use Center can explore the potential of Trenton’s space.
Anyone familiar with these locations have any development ideas / suggestions for the redevelopment?
Tags: hospital, redevelopment