What ever happened to St. Mary’s Hospital? And what about Baptist Medical Center?

Eye On Real Estate

October 29, 2014 By Lore Croghan Brooklyn Daily Eagle

This is shuttered St. Mary's Hospital, which is reportedly being turned into a nursing home. Eagle photos by Lore Croghan

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The derelict hulk at 170 Buffalo Ave. housed St. Mary’s Hospital, which was Brooklyn’s last Roman Catholic hospital when it closed in 2005.

Long-shuttered St. Mary’s is quite a sight, and not in a good way. Its grimy concrete facade is covered with graffiti. Weeds grow atop the front entrance.

But a makeover of the Crown Heights property is in the works. The other day we saw construction crews at the rear of the building filling bins with debris. A truck parked there had a logo on it that said “NorthEast Interior Demolition.”

A recent purchaser has leased the property to Prospect Park Nursing Home, Brownstoner.com reported.

City Finance Department records reveal that Daryl Hagler is a managing member of the LLC that bought the property for $19.5 million in February.

Those records also indicate that the most recent seller of the St. Mary’s building had bought it for a higher price — $21.2 million — in a U.S. Bankruptcy Court-approved sale in December 2006.

Shloime Karpen and Yehuda Backer were members of the LLC that paid big bucks for the shuttered hospital’s property in that earlier transaction, the Finance Department filings show.

That was when St. Vincents Catholic Medical Centers of New York, which owned St. Mary’s, was in bankruptcy.

The St. Mary’s building that’s now being renovated was constructed in 1979. The St. Mary’s building that stood on the site before that had been constructed in the late 1870s.

BAPTIST MEDICAL CENTER

And the St. Mary’s property isn’t the only one that has nursing home written all over it.

There’s Baptist Medical Center, too, in East New York.

The Baptists’ former hospital building is gone now from 2749 Linden Blvd., having been demolished a while ago.

There’s just a weedy lot with some parked cars and tossed trash.

Brooklyn Queens Nursing Home, which occupies a building thisclose to the hospital site, plans to construct a new facility on the lot, a BQNH worker told Eye on Real Estate.

Baptist Hospital of New York Inc. bought the property in 1980, city Finance Department records indicate.

Baptist Medical Center filed for Chapter 11 in 1981 and closed in 1987, according to a document related to the bankruptcy proceedings. The hospital building was later used as a skilled nursing home facility.