St. Joseph’s finishes steel placement for new surgical suite

SYRACUSE  —  A 285-foot crane raised the last steel beam into place this morning for a new surgical suite at St. Joseph’s Hospital Health Center.

Crews still have work ahead before completing the expansion. But construction has proceeded more quickly than anticipated, according to Marylin Galimi, director of engineering and construction at St. Joseph’s.

“It’s about eight weeks ahead of schedule,” she says. “So we are now scheduled to open the first week in July.”

Favorable weather has helped work proceed quickly, Galimi says. But she attributed much of the project’s rapid pace to a three-dimensional modeling system that allowed conflicts and issues to be anticipated and corrected before any steel was put in place.

St. Joseph’s broke ground on the new surgical suite at the end of April 2012. It will total more than 70,000 square feet and comes as part of an expansion that will later add a 104,000-square-foot patient tower. The patient tower is slated to open in September 2014. The tower and surgical suite have a combined price tag of $140 million.

Financing comes from a combination of bonding from Onondaga County, hospital fundraising, hospital cash reserves, and a $2.5 million economic-development grant from New York State. Hayner Hoyt Corp. of Syracuse is the project’s general contractor. King + King Architects, LLP, also of Syracuse, was responsible for the design.

“This is one of the best projects we’ve done at St. Joseph’s,” says Kathryn Ruscitto, the hospital’s president and CEO. “It’s on time. It’s on budget.”

St. Joseph’s is a 431-bed hospital at 301 Prospect Ave. in Syracuse. It serves patients from Onondaga County and 15 surrounding counties.