By Richard J. Bayne – Times Herald-Record
July 21, 2014 – 2:00 AM
MIDDLETOWN — Developer Tony Danza remembers how people said he had gone crazy back in 2009, when he announced plans to buy the old Horton Hospital building and turn it into a medical school.
Horton had evolved into Orange Regional Medical Center. It was set to desert the Horton building for a brand-new, $350 million facility on East Main Street in the Town of Wallkill.
Middletown was faced with the possibility of watching its hilltop health care anchor turn into a white elephant.
But Danza, joined by Dr. Ron Israelski, now director of academic affairs at Orange Regional, embarked on a quest to land a medical school for the old Horton building.
Then Mayor Joe DeStefano signed on. They eventually convinced Touro College, which operates medical schools in Harlem and in California and Nevada, to open Middletown as a branch campus.
Danza bought the building for $3 million in 2011. The state came through with $1 million for the project in 2012. The Danza Leser Group has signed Touro to a 20-year lease.
“It gathered steam, and as more people came on board, it became less and less crazy,” Danza said. “They saw the economic impact and the jobs it’s going to create.”
Classes are set to officially begin Aug. 5 when the school welcomes 135 first-year medical students. In four years, the number of students will swell to about 500. Tuition is about $45,000 a year.
“The fact that we’re opening a medical school seems almost surreal to me, in that we have been working on programs like these for almost eight years,” Israelski said.
The school will have 60 full-time employees, about 50 part-time workers and about 250 adjunct faculty members. But various studies point to the school creating between 800 and 1,000 jobs through joint efforts with the local medical community.
Drawn by Middletown location
Danza, who has done projects in Blooming Grove, Cornwall and Montgomery, among others, said he saw a crying need for doctors in the Hudson Valley, and converting the old hospital into a medical school would help ease an impending doctor shortage.
Studies back him up, pointing to an increasing need for physicians as baby boomers age, but younger doctors aren’t filling the ranks quickly enough.
“We need doctors, I understood that. But I didn’t understand what a job it was going to be to get a medical school,” Danza said. “I knocked on every door I could.”
Talking about why Touro decided to open the Middletown branch, the school’s dean, Dr. Ken Steier, said they saw a “perfect storm” of opportunity in Middletown: the Horton building, local support, an underserved community and hospitals that were wiling to sign on as students move into clinical settings. And, lately, he said, there’s been a national trend to locate medical schools in smaller communities.
Plastic skull models will be used by medical students at Middletown’s new Touro medical college.
High-tech facilities
The old Horton Hospital on Prospect Avenue opened March 29, 1929. Touro spent about $25 million to turn it into a 110,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art school of osteopathic medicine. It includes:
- One anatomy lab features mannequins of all ages that can simulate a variety of conditions via computer hookup.
- The cadaver lab is ready to go, with 10 cadavers, kept at a constant 60-degree temperature.
- The next step beyond cadavers: a $500,000, 3-D holographic body image lab is in the works.
- One lab features plasticized, preserved cross-sections of body parts: key structures like lungs, hearts and brains.
- A $1 million recording studio allows professors to record lectures that can be transmitted to all Touro campuses.
- There are 12 objective structured clinical examination rooms where students can be monitored via TV hookup to make sure they conduct exams properly. Actors come in to simulate patients’ specific ailments.
Danza plans to turn the old emergency room suite into a clinical area and to renovate the old cafeteria. Workers knocked out the back wall of the lobby to open up access to the courtyard garden. The lobby is getting a new coffee shop.
The fourth and fifth floors, formerly patient rooms, have been converted to student dormitories. About 85 students will be housed there.
DeStefano said the “initial shock and anger” over ORMC’s decision to leave Middletown “turned into a multiyear effort to make this (medical school) happen.” The new school, DeStefano said, is a “top-notch facility” and will “promote a general good feeling within the community.”
For those who remember the old hospital as a bustling center chock-full of personal histories, the long hallways seem eerily empty. But that will change quickly once the students move in, said library director Sue Ben-Dor, who worked at the old hospital for 15 years.
“It won’t be quiet much longer,” said Ben-Dor. Both her parents died at the old hospital. Her grandchildren were born there.
Through all the renovation, Danza is determined to preserve the history of the building and what it has meant to the community. He plans to put a special plaque in the renovated garden.
“I can’t tell you how many people have told me, ‘The last time I saw my father, he was in this room,'” Danza said.
“This building has been an anchor for the community and my hope is future history will be made here with these doctors who are learning here,” he said.