The Circle Has Closed: Photos of the now closed hospital I was born in, from August 2025
in april of this year beth israel on the east side closed due to budget cuts. this is the continuation of a long process of hospital closures that began under the quasi literate hobgoblin the world knows as andrew cuomo(whose incompetence and general incuriosity about the world is closer to that some someone's dipshit nephew than someone's dipshit son, which is an anomaly). this process is at least partially responsible for the surge in covid deaths at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. what was that line curtis sliwa had? "slapping fannies and killin grannies"? he sucks but that was a bar. probably why he made it to math hoffa's podcast. then again dumbass rfk jr was on there which is still one of the strangest moments i remember that no one talks about. memory is a gift and a curse honestly.
hospital closings are always terrible, especially in a country where health care isn't even reserved for regular rich people. but this one is special to me because it's the hospital i was born in. it's the reason why i can claim to be a native new yorker two times over.
that was a terrible joke. my mom(who got a hysterectomy in this hospital) would smack me for that if she were still here. i'm sure she actually did for making that exact same joke once.
but the place i was conceived(tower records on broadway) and the place i was born are no longer here. banished to the land of wind and ghosts in order to satisfy the whims of finance capital. well in the case of the former the finances were rolled up and used to snort things. at least in america. they seem to be doing quite well in japan. when i go there i plan to visit a tower. visit tower, see some puro, do some shopping and go to hakone because that's where tokyo-3 was. maybe osaka?
i have no idea what they're going to do with it. probably condos. everything is fucking condos now. maybe some shitty food hall that will close after a year.
occasionally someone i know from northern ontario will post pictures of a closed hospital in their adopted city that's covered in street art. not graffiti(if you're here i assume you know enough to know the difference). i don't think anyone has wasted their youth tagging that building in a while to be honest. apparently it's an effort by the city to provide accessible art and creative whatnot, that richard florida type shit where they cargo cult cultural markers in the hopes of luring in white collar tech workers. maybe beth israel will just end up like that, an even more gentrified version of five pointz before they tore that down.
i don't get people that rent or buy apartments in abandoned hospitals. its fuckin creepy! in crown heights there's a luxury apartment complex that used to be the jewish hospital over on prospect and classon. that sounds scary as fuck! it sounds haunted. you're trying to sleep and you hear a ghost that sounds like bernie sanders telling you to turn the heat up to a balmy seventy two degrees so that he can rest his immortal soul more easily.
which fair. if you're stuck on an earthly plain despite being dead you might as well be comfortable, right?
