The Philadelphia Historical Commission recently voted against placing the Police Administration Building  (aka the Roundhouse) on the local register of historic places to protect it from demolition. That decision opens the door for redevelopment of the site. Will the Historical Commission’s decision be repealed? Will there be a redevelopment of the site and will that project seed a positive transformation of the area? Or will it be a typically insensitive Philadelphia cash-grab high rise? 

While the Roundhouse has become the center of a preservation battle, its golden twin across the street to the north remains quietly ignored. That building is a condominium complex known as the Metro Club. It was obviously designed to resemble the style of the Roundhouse, but what isn’t transparent to motorists exiting or entering the Vine Street Expressway is that the building was the fifth and final home of Metropolitan Hospital, an osteopathic institution that was a not-always-silent witness to the transformation of Center City

The history of Metropolitan Hospital is a tangled mess. City directories from the 1920s show a Metropolitan Hospital at 1433 Poplar Street and a Stomach Hospital at 1903 Green Street. By 1930, the Stomach Hospital on Green Street became the Metropolitan Hospital, and the Metropolitan Hospital on Poplar Street became the Metropolitan Apartments. Got that? Both buildings were relatively small and were typical of the kind of facilities that served as hospitals in those days–one or two lots, three or four stories, and scattered in neighborhoods throughout the city. The hospital’s neighbors included the Dolan College of Embalming, the Highway Mission Tabernacle, a Dominican convent, Spring Garden AME Church, and lots of three-story row houses.

In 1944, the hospital came under the direction of a group of 50 osteopathic physicians. According to the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine, currently located on City Line Avenue, “Osteopathic medicine is a ‘whole person’ approach to medicine–treating the entire person rather than just the symptoms. With a focus on preventive health care, Doctors of Osteopathic Medicine (DOs) help patients develop attitudes and lifestyles that don’t just fight illness, but help prevent it, too.” Then, as now, osteopathic medicine is considered an alternative therapy. In addition to the college, there were hospitals in West Philadelphia and North Philadelphia at the time Metropolitan Hospital reinvented itself.

Metropolitan Hospital immediately began expanding with a new lab and an x-ray department. It soon needed more space and started looking for new home. In 1949, it purchased the YWCA building at 1800-1812 Arch Street. The facility would have a large, closed-circuit television screen broadcasting from the operating theater, 200 beds, a floor for psychiatric patients, and an outpatient clinic. There was also room for 150 doctors plus residents and nurses as the hospital would continue to serve “any person, regardless of race, creed, color, or economic background.”

The Women’s Auxiliary got busy raising money, but this may have been a bigger project than anticipated. The Hospital Planning Agency felt that “the old YWCA building is not a desirable location for a hospital. The building is too old to modernize and, in the minds of many people, it is a ‘firetrap.’” The hospital’s administration changed direction and, in the summer of 1950, sold the YWCA building and purchased the Joseph Price Memorial Hospital at 241 N. 18th Street for $70,000. Price was a noted physician from the turn of the century, and the hospital was another of those small, local hospitals, this one serving the Fairmount area. The old YWCA found its way into the hands of the Philadelphia Bible Society, but it was eventually condemned to make way for the Comcast Technology Center.

Meanwhile, Metropolitan Hospital’s new location allowed it to expand services, but its tenure in the new building was not long. The Schuylkill Expressway had been under construction since 1951, the same year that Vine Street was expanded to 10 surface lanes. Not long after, plans were developed for the Expressway to connect to a depressed section of Vine Street between 17th and 21st Streets. The new Metropolitan Hospital was sitting right where the eastbound surface lane of a new Vine Street would became an onramp for the Schuylkill Expressway, so it was taken by eminent domain. The hospital needed a new home. Again.

In 1954, hospital officials closed a deal on an eight-story building at 300 Spruce Street in Society Hill that was previously served as a cigar factory, a textile factory, and a Coast Guard quartermaster depot. It had the construction, air-handling, and parking that would be important to a hospital. At that time, a factory converted into a hospital in Society Hill was not out of place.

Metropolitan Hospital moved into its new quarters in 1955 and began expanding as intended. It was the center of osteopathic care for Center City and South Philadelphia as well as a neighborhood hospital. In 1963, it received a federal Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) grant for $2 million ($20 million today) to build a three-story service building and convert an existing storage floor into space for hospital beds. By this time time, however, there was a constituency that considered a hospital definitely out of place in the neighborhood. Society Hill had been in decline for several decades, becoming one of Philadelphia’s most blighted neighborhoods. That began to change in the 1950s, when, under the leadership of city planner Edmund Bacon, the Greater Philadelphia Movement, the Redevelopment Authority, and the Old Philadelphia Development Corporation (among others), began a revitalization project that would transform the entire area. This meant that when Metropolitan Hospital applied for Zoning Board of Adjustment (ZBA) approval for the project, it was met with strong local opposition in the first act of what would become a dramatic, contentious, and disruptive eight-year drama.

Initially, neighbors were concerned over the loss of open space and parking as well as increased traffic. The hospital began to scale back the project to eliminate the need for a variance, but, without a ZBA decision, HEW pulled the grant. The hospital revised its plans and satisfied the need for a variance, announcing plans to resubmit its application to HEW.

At the same time, Cuthbert Latta, attorney and a resident of Society Hill, filed a petition with HEW urging it not to renew the grant on the grounds that using federal funds for the hospital expansion was at cross-purposes with federal funds being used for the revitalization of Society Hill as a residential neighborhood. Later in the fall, Governor William Scranton, Mayor James Tate, and Senators Joseph Clark and Hugh Scott wrote their own letters to HEW echoing Latta, but adding that they would support expansion for the hospital anywhere, but its current location.

With the backing of state and local government in place, HEW rejected Metropolitan Hospital’s application. Recognizing the needs of the hospital for expansion, the City provided it with a list of possible sites. By the summer of 1964, Metropolitan Hospital decided on a 350 bed, $6-8 million site at 8th Street between Race and Vine Streets, just north of the new Philadelphia Police Department headquarters and part of the Independence Mall Urban Renewal Area project.

The Independence Mall project, also known as Independence Mall IV, was another slum clearance initiative, this time tied to transportation improvements chiefly connecting the Vine Street Expressway to the Benjamin Franklin Bridge. All of the buildings bounded by 7th, Vine, 9th, and Arch Streets would be demolished except for the Roundhouse and three buildings associated with St. Michael’s Zion Evangelical Church. The concept of transforming the area around Independence Hall and the other historic Colonial-era buildings of Old City and Society Hill, in conjunction with transportation improvements, had long been a part of the agenda for renewing mid-century Philadelphia. Independence Mall IV would eliminate Skid Row’s mixture of cheap hotels, disreputable saloons, and underutilized industrial buildings in favor or new light commercial and industrial users, such as Metropolitan Hospital.

The Redevelopment Authority announced in July that the new 350 bed (later scaled back to 250 beds) hospital would be located at 201 N. 8th Street. Funding for purchasing the land and constructing the facility in the image of the Roundhouse would be cobbled together from federal and state government, the City of Philadelphia, and the hospital itself.

The relocation of the hospital would then allow the Redevelopment Authority to acquire and demolish the old Metropolitan Hospital on Spruce Street to advance the renewal of Society Hill. Cypress Square, a cooperative effort of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the Redevelopment Authority, and the Old Philadelphia Development Corporation, was dedicated in 1980. Today, Cypress Square is legally protected within the Society Hill Historic District and the properties are all valued at well over $1 million each.

Once an agreement was reached on relocating the hospital, demolition of 144 buildings and 27 acres of land commenced, obliterating the entire Skid Row district, including the much beloved Bijou Theater, a former home of burlesque. When the bulldozers left the area, the only remaining building was St. Michael’s Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church (also known as Old Zion Church). The church had played a large role in Philadelphia’s German speaking Christian community since 1742 and was initially spared destruction. Eventually, finances and a dwindling congregation caught up with it. In 1971, the decision was made to relocate to a new building on North Broad Street. The church was demolished, making way for Metropolitan Hospital’s parking lot.

The decision to relocate the hospital took some time to be realized. Plans for a Roundhouse lookalike on the site of the old Bijou Theater for the hospital were announced in 1967, but increasing construction costs and labor difficulties slowed down the project. The new $11 million hospital with six operating rooms, 250 beds, 11,000 feet of emergency space, and the latest in pediatric and cardiovascular care opened in April 1971.

The Daily News described the new Metropolitan Hospital as “the most modern structure on the Philadelphia skyline.” However, despite the good vibes created by moving into a new building, the next few years for the hospital were difficult.

Initially, the problem was labor. Most hospitals were experiencing staffing difficulties in the 1960s and 1970s. Metropolitan Hospital’s shortage was exacerbated when a security guard shot and killed a picketer in a scuffle in 1972. The labor issues were resolved following the shooting, but resurfaced throughout the medical industry between 1988 and 1992.

The hospital also had serial accounting problems. In 1984, a leading physician was convicted on charges of defrauding Medicare and two insurance companies. In 1987, a former accounting supervisor was charged with forgery and theft amounting to nearly $500,000.

More important were economic pressures in the hospital industry as a whole and a decision to expand Metropolitan Hospital by buying two other medical enterprises in 1979. Today, the University of Pennsylvania, Jefferson University, and Temple University operate large clinical, teaching, and research medical facilities, but this was not how it worked 50 years ago. Small neighborhood hospitals, like Metropolitan Hospital, provided services to their communities, however that economic model was becoming precarious.

Throughout the 1980s, The Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News featured stories on the sketchy finances of hospitals, labor problems, hospitals going into receivership or closing, and a decline in care and increase in mortality rates. Metropolitan Hospital was invariably included with the medical facilities in trouble. The list of hospitals that have disappeared, either through closing or being absorbed by one of the survivors, is long and includes Mount Sinai, St. Agnes, Methodist, Giuffre, Philadelphia General, St. Mary’s, St. Joseph’s, Hahnemann, John F. Kennedy Memorial, and many, many others.

While dealing with these problems, Metropolitan Hospital also had the burden of financing its decision to buy two area osteopathic hospitals in 1979. Humana sold the Tri-County Hospital in Springfield, Pennsylvania and the Park View Hospital in Kensington to Metropolitan Hospital for $37 million. Administrators stated at the time that “the two hospitals are profitable, but not to the extent that we would like.” The sale was contingent on Metropolitan Hospital obtaining financing (they issued $59 million in tax-exempt bonds), regulatory approval, with plans to convert Humana’s two for-profit hospitals to Metropolitan’s non-profit status. All hurdles were cleared in 1981. Former CEO Wayne Byerly said at the time, “The decade of the 80s will be a decade of consolidation of health care facilities and in order to provide better health services and contain patient costs, competition between hospitals must be eliminated.”

The purchase did not work out as intended. In November 1988, Metropolitan Hospital agreed to new management in response to a request from the Philadelphia Hospitals Authority. The Authority was concerned about the hospital’s future $65 million in debt obligations related to the purchase as it was down to $1 million in cash reserves. Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s had downgraded Metropolitan Hospital’s status to “non-investment grade.”

Six months later, after failing to find a buyer or merger partner, the hospital declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy following another reduction in its credit rating. It didn’t take long for this chapter of the story to end.

In January 1990, Metropolitan Hospital sold the Tri-Valley Hospital and the Park View Hospital for $19.5 million, while continuing to operate the 8th and Race Streets facility. The hospital also changed its name to the Benjamin Franklin Medical Center to show that this was “a fresh start… a new identity to go with the new thrust” according to a spokesperson at the time. Three weeks later, it rescinded the name change as there already was a Benjamin Franklin clinic near Washington Square.

In May, Metropolitan Hospital affiliated with Cooper HealthCare of Camden, with Cooper making clear that this was not a sale or a merger. As the hospital in Philadelphia continued to operate under bankruptcy protection, former Mayor Wilson Goode announced that his preferred site for a new courthouse was the location of the hospital if it didn’t emerge from bankruptcy. While that drama was playing out, a judge approved the sale of Metropolitan Hospital to a new group, the Franklin Square Hospital and Hampton Hospital Group, the only bidder for the debt-plagued medical center. Franklin Square Hospital would continue to operate there until the bankruptcy judge could evaluate the division of the remaining assets.

And yet, the problems continued to pile on. In August 1991, Great Western Funding sued the Franklin Square Hospital for fraud, alleging that it provided capital to Hampton Hospital Group, but weren’t properly repaid. In June 1992, the State of Pennsylvania sued the hospital for failure to make payments to its unemployment fund. By November, Cooper HealthCare reemerged to take over operations of the Franklin Square Hospital. Three months later, the FBI announced a probe into the hospital’s finances. On August 6, 1993, Cooper mercifully closed the hospital.

There were a few attempts to revive the building, including an assisted living facility, a “supermarket of ministries,” a long-term care facility, and, finally, residences. After several years of neglect, MetroClub condos was announced in 2005 and has occupied the building ever since, putting a final CLOSED stamp on the epic saga of Metropolitan Hospital. However, depending on what happens to the Roundhouse, the story of the building at 8th and Race Streets may enter yet a new chapter.

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