Brooklyn Heights attorney Peter Flemming has penned a guest letter for the Brooklyn Eagle with his take on the potential sale of SUNY Downstate’s Long Island College Hospital (LICH).
Flemming writes, “It is inexcusable not to maintain this fabulous medical facility serving over 120,000 Brooklynites every year and hundreds of Brooklynites every day (and every night). Not to do so would be a ludicrous waste of millions of dollars spent building and rebuilding, and equipping and re-equipping this facility to be the state-of-the-art hospital it is.”
He proposes that if LICH’s patient population “does not require the number of beds, floors and staff it was built to serve,” an equitable alternative would be to utilize extra upper floors for “an upscale assisted living facility, (which) would work perfectly to take advantage of the hospital downstairs, the network of practitioners in our neighborhoods, the Cobble Hill Health Center down the street and the increasingly affluent residents all across the waterfront and Downtown Brooklyn.”
Update: Peter Flemming writes us regarding a previous version of this post:
Appreciate your sharing my letter to The Eagle re LICH: but I’m embarrassed at The Eagle’s presuming to describe me as a “preservationist” who was instrumental in the ’60s in declaring BkHts a Historic District. Wish it were so, but that was Otis Peasall, Ben Crane, Martin Schneider, and so many others. Ironically I was co-leader of “Friends of Van Voorhiis Park” which in the ’90s fought the LICH garage on the then City Park at Atlantic & Hicks; these days I am a member of the BklyBrdgPark Community Advisory Council and co-chair of the BklynBrdgPark Community Council; and recently known for my opposition to the velodrome (since abandoned by its sponsors). And a fierce proponent of “Saving LICH”!
This post has been updated for accuracy.
