New Yorkers looking to purchase a “starter” apartment would be wise to stick to the East Side. Citing Streeteasy.com research, New York magazine reported that competition for selling studios and one-bedroom apartments in the Upper East Side, Lenox Hill, Turtle Bay and Murray Hill is so strong that more than one-third of those units have had their asking prices cut.

Apartments in those neighborhoods linger on the market for 33 to 42 weeks, on average, so owners “have to make their listings more compelling,” said Sofia Song, vice president of research at Streeteasy.com. [more]

Lenox Hill single-family mansions have become some of the city’s most in-demand properties, the Wall Street Journal reported, but they’re rare and often pricey.

The median asking price for a Lenox Hill home is $1.2 million, or $1,045 per square foot, according to data from Streeteasy.com, compared to $1,020 a square foot in the Carnegie Hill neighborhood and $999 a square foot on the Upper West Side. Closing prices for townhouses in Lenox Hill have ranged from $8 million to $48 million since 2008, data shows.

“It’s rare to find a house in Manhattan” that is the size of the single-family homes in Lenox Hill, said Susan Greenfield, senior vice president at Brown Harris Stevens. [more]

As part of the rescue plan for St. Vincent’s Catholic Medical Center, developer Bill Rudin and North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System are planning a $110 million gut renovation of the six-story O’Toole Building, on Seventh Avenue between 12th and 13th streets, that would build a new Comprehensive Care Center and emergency department, operating as part of North Shore other recent takeover, Lenox Hill Hospital. The Villager has a comprehensive roundup of the plans, which include a 19,000-square-foot emergency department — larger than the St. Vincent’s emergency room that closed a year ago and the first free-standing emergency department in the metropolitan area. [more]

Facing $1 billion in debt and the loss of an additional $10 million a month, St. Vincent’s Hospital in the West Village closed last spring, having treated more than 50,000 people per year and hundreds of thousands more in its clinics and outpatient facilities. Its collapse was the first sign of an ongoing financial emergency facing the city’s five dozen remaining hospitals, New York Magazine reported, referring to St. Vincent’s as “the Lehman Brothers of the local hospital industry: an institution whose dramatic disappearance, once unthinkable, raises dire questions about the viability of the entire system.” The financial quality of New York City’s hospitals has been deteriorating for years and other hospitals are following St. Vincent’s example. Weeks after St. Vincent’s closed in April, Lenox Hill, burdened by operating losses and debt, agreed to a takeover by North Shore”LIJ. A month later, North General in Harlem announced that it was shutting down. Since 2000, 17 hospitals have closed in the city. New York’s hospitals carry twice as much debt in relation to their net assets as hospitals around the country, a fact that constrains their ability to continue borrowing money. [NY Mag]

[more]

The competitive pool for a partnership with cash-strapped Lenox Hill
Hospital shrunk to one yesterday, when NYU Langone Medical Center
withdrew from negotiations, leaving only North Shore-Long Island
Jewish Health System in the running. NYU had been seeking a complete merger
with Lenox Hill, which would have removed control from the bulk of
Lenox Hill’s current administrators, while promoting many Lenox Hill
clinical department heads, but Lenox Hill declined to consider such an arrangement.
North Shore-LIJ’s proposal, which would affiliate the two facilities
while leaving Lenox Hill administrators in place, would not save the
hospital as much money. Lenox Hill had a $20 million operating loss last year. Nearby Mount Sinai Hospital had also expressed interest in a
merger with Lenox Hill but was never invited to submit a proposal
[Crain's]