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The landlords of the 37-acre, 127-year-old Michael Reese Hospital announced they will be pulling the plug on operations, citing ownership changes, increasing competition, and the rising number of uninsured patients who can’t pay their bills. The closure is anticipated to happen some time this fall, making way for the property to be redeveloped for the 2016 Olympics.
The closing will bring to an end a vibrant life for a historic medical facility on the city’s south side:
Louis Katz, the Medical Research Institute's first full-time investigator and former president of the American Heart Association, was one of the first to explore the relation of coronary heart disease to cholesterol concentration in the blood. Cardiovascular Institute researchers Dr. Alfred Pick and Dr. Richard Langendorf, perfected the use of the electrocardiograph. Leonidas Berry was a pioneer in the development and use of the gastroscope. Dr. Samuel Soskin and Dr. Rachmiel Levine made important discoveries about the "gatekeeper" action in insulin, which is of fundamental importance to the understanding of diabetes. Dr. Albert Milzer and his research team were the first to kill the polio virus and make an effective vaccine against this debilitating virus.
Recently, we were walking through the tired looking facility and snapped the photo above. More snapshots after the jump.
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I did some part-time work there several years ago. It was a unique place, like a big, half-empty haunted house with leaking pipe. Sort of like an aging movie star.
Kind of sad, I guess, but times change. It was a great hospital in its heyday. And they better save the four nice older buildings on the campus. The other ten-or-so should be leveled.
Whenever I see that place, I have an uncontrollable urge to hum the "St. Elsewhere" theme...
Not suprised by this news at all. Went there after a car accident a few years back and they were so disorganized and unattentive that i left out the door and someone chased me out begging me to come back. The equipment was near ancient and the staff was rude and inexperienced.
The hospital does serve one decent purpose...I work in the film industry and they have an entire wing dedicated for film and television set use. I believe "Stranger than Ficton" and several other films have been shot there. Shot a television commercial there and a couple of crew members snooping around found a room with just a mattress on the floor with a pile of dirty hypodermic needles in the corner. Creepy.
Why does a parking meter in front of Reese, on the South Side have a Zone 6 sticker on it?
Rogers Park, Edgewater, Uptown & other North Side communities are in Zone 6.
Looks like an idiotic mistake by a typical city employee.
scooter, the zoning stickers have nothing to do with location in the city, only to do with pricing. zone 6 meters cost 25 cents an hour, zone 5 meters cost 25 cents for 30 minutes (i think), and-so-on-and-so-forth. there are zone 6 meters all over the city.
Whenever the equipment wouldn't work, I claimed that it was sabotage by the ghost of Michael Reese. That statue is acually his ghost that comes alive at night.
How else could all that stuff be broken in there?
I hope this isn't just land speculation for a payday that may never come. The City of Detroit leveled an entire riverfront neighborhood in the 80s or 90s in anticipation of building casinos there. The casinos never built there, and that neighborhood is still empty years later, having been clearcut by city bulldozers, all for nothing.
Olympic Stadium to go "here"
I went to Nursing School at Michael Reese. I was in the class of '77, one of the last to graduate from that wonderful institution. It breaks my heart to hear that such a wonderful place has been devastated. Looking at the pictures, I remember some of the best times in my life. Chicago will not be the same.