Some projects have the dual benefit of looking good and doing good at the same time. We recently completed a project that transformed a formerly bleak, unused space into a new medical clinic that now brightens the prospects of its neighbors.
RAND is proud to have designed and administered the build-out of the new Floating Hospital location in Long Island City, which serves more than 7,000 low-income residents of the 26-building Queensbridge Houses, the largest public housing complex in the country.
The new Floating Hospital facility in Long Island City serves more than 7,000 residents from the nearby Queensbridge Houses.
The Floating Hospital gets its name from a series of vessels and barges that began plying the New York waterways in 1866, providing medical care to the city's indigent, many of them immigrant families, orphans, and homeless child laborers afflicted with diseases ranging from cholera to smallpox. The ships served as a mobile health clinic as well as a retreat and entertainment venue for children, the elderly, and the disabled for most of the 20th century. The hospital was eventually moored to a pier along Wall Street in 1980, where it continued to provide medical care until the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, after which it found a land-based home in Long Island City.
This second Long Island City location, at 10-29 41st Avenue, is a 1,391-square-foot walk-in community medical clinic. The space, on the ground floor of a six-story residential building owned by New York City Housing Authority, was formerly a medical clinic operated by Wyckoff Hospital. It had been closed for several years and was in a deteriorated condition when RAND was hired to convert it into the new Floating Hospital facility.
The new design entailed a major renovation of the facility, including three examination rooms; a laboratory with space for phlebotomy; a waiting room and registration office; patient and staff handicapped-accessible restrooms; storage rooms for computer servers and patient files; and a hallway. RAND also designed a new central air conditioning system.
Visibility from room to room was part of the open design concept, not only to give the sense of expanding the limited space but also to increase patient and staff comfort and awareness of activities in the clinic. Interior partitions are floor-to-ceiling glass panels in aluminum frames using both clear glass and translucent glass for privacy. The interior finishes, such as the solid wood oak doors with stainless steel hardware, are both durable and high quality.
One of three examination rooms that were part of the new design.
To make the clinic look more inviting from the exterior, we removed a solid metal entrance door, a roll-down metal security gate, and two street-facing windows covered with concrete masonry blocks and metal security bars. The metal door was replaced with a new aluminum frame unit with a security grille installed behind clear glass so the entrance and signage are visible to passersby. Two new exterior wall lights are installed at each side of the new door. The windows were replaced with new aluminum frame ones with translucent and clear glass sashes. The glazing is laminated to resist impact and shattering.
The clinic, which opened with a ribbon-cutting ceremony on October 19, is a welcome addition to what the federal government has called the "medically underserved" Queensbridge community over the past decade. This project was a very rewarding one for all of us on the RAND project team (Michael Simeone, AIA; Michael Langwell; Young Suh, PE; Sam Kemp; and Santia Valerio), not only from a design perspective, but also from a humanitarian one by providing affordable health care to New Yorkers in need.
(Photos by Grace Davies.)
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