Reuse planning forges ahead for former St. Elizabeth and Faxton St. Luke’s hospitals

UTICA — Projects to repurpose Mohawk Valley Health System’s (MVHS) two former hospitals — St. Elizabeth Medical Center and Faxton St. Luke’s Healthcare — are moving forward as the communities surrounding both facilities provide input on what should happen to them. Both facilities were active hospitals until October 2023 when they closed as MHVS transitioned to its new Wynn Hospital in downtown Utica. Since then, MVHS has partnered with several municipalities to navigate the reuse possibilities for each campus. For Faxton St. Luke’s, that group includes Oneida County, Mohawk Valley EDGE, and the Town of New Hartford partnering with MVHS to undertake a master-planning effort for the 53-acre property. The partners hired Fu Wilmers Design to lead the team of consultants developing a reuse plan with a timeline running from January through September. “I think they’re going along well,” Oneida County Executive Anthony J. Picente, Jr. says of the planning efforts. The project held its third community meeting on June 26, and public input has been a key part of the plan, he says. Each meeting has averaged between 70 and 80 attendees. An advisory group of community members and other stakeholders also contribute to the project. In its initial phase, the project is looking at a variety of factors from environmental concerns to the condition of the existing buildings as it factors in community input to develop conceptual reuse plans including market analysis, potential budget, and environmental and community concerns. The property is a unique one, Picente notes, which spans four municipalities — the city of Utica, the villages of New York Mills and Yorkville, and the town of New Hartford. “It presents a lot more opportunity than the naked eye would see,” he says. “It presents a lot of opportunity for a lot of different things.”

One thing it wasn’t attractive for was serving as the site for the new hospital, he points out. While large, there was no way to build a facility as large as Wynn Hospital on the site without impacting the existing hospital operations. The same was true for the St. Elizabeth campus, located in Utica, where the campus is mostly surrounded by residential neighborhoods except where it fronts Genessee Street. The City of Utica is working with MVHS on the reuse planning and has held several community meetings. With a new mayor in office, the process has changed slightly with the focus moving from developing a concrete reuse plan to curating a list of possible reuses designed with community input. “We restructured the process,” Utica Mayor Michael Galime says. He wanted to get away from the notion that the city was going to decide what happened with the property and encourage the community to truly get involved in the process. The most-recent meeting, held in May, went over the ins and outs of four possible reuses from demolishing it all to build new single-family homes to housing plans that included adaptive reuse of the hospital building. “The vast majority of all of the input has been a request for residential use,” Galime says. A development group led by Buffalo-based law firm Rupp Pfalzgraf is leading the reuse-planning project. While Galime didn’t share a timeline, some of the next steps include more public meetings and conducting a general environmental impact study (EIS) and a general State Environmental Quality Review (SEQR) they can present to potential developers. “Once that is done, all that public input can be used to guide a developer,” he says. More information about both reuse projects is available online at www.reimaginestlukes.com and at www.cityofutica.com/departments/urban-and-economic-development/planning/St-Elizabeths-Re-Use-Master-Plan.