Lenox Hill Hospital
861 Park Avenue | also 100 East 77th Street, 855 Park Avenue | Upper East Side | built 1930
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The city photographed every building for its tax records around 1940 and again in the 1980s. NYC Municipal Archives.
Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.
- 1918
The German Hospital renames itself Lenox Hill Hospital during World War I
The institution had operated on this Park Avenue site since 1905, tracing back to an 1857 dispensary founded to treat German-speaking immigrants. Amid wartime hostility toward Germany, trustees renamed it Lenox Hill Hospital in July 1918, adopting the surrounding neighborhood's name instead.
Source: Wikipedia
- 1925
German-descended trustees fail to restore the hospital's old name
Seven years after the wartime renaming, hospital trustees of German descent petitioned to bring back the name German Hospital, reasoning it would revive donations from the German-American community and ease a growing deficit. The board rejected the proposal, and the Lenox Hill name stuck.
Source: Ephemeral New York
- 1931
The hospital completes its limestone-trimmed Park Avenue building
Lenox Hill Hospital completed an eleven-story, $2.5 million building on the 76th Street side of its campus in April 1931, replacing older apartment houses and workshops on the site. The new building's top floor housed a pioneering children's medical division founded by Dr. Abraham Jacobi.
Source: Wikipedia
- 1931
Winston Churchill is hospitalized here after being struck by a car
On the night of December 13, 1931, Winston Churchill was hit by a car while crossing 76th Street on his way to meet financier Bernard Baruch. He spent eight days recovering at Lenox Hill Hospital, where he was given a prescription for medicinal alcohol during Prohibition. Churchill accepted blame for the accident and later met with the driver, a jobless immigrant, Mario Contasino.
Source: Ephemeral New York
- 1933
Lenox Hill adds a maternity service and a cancer clinic and readies a heart clinic
According to the National Library of Medicine's account of the hospital's modernization, Lenox Hill started a maternity service in 1933 and a cancer clinic, and was putting the finishing touches on a heart clinic that was about to debut. The additions widened a hospital that had begun in 1857 as the German Dispensary, serving the Little Germany neighborhood, and had settled at its Upper East Side location in 1905.
Source: circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov
- 1944
Wendell Willkie dies at Lenox Hill after a dozen heart attacks in the hospital
Wendell Willkie, the 1940 Republican presidential nominee, was taken by ambulance to Lenox Hill in mid-September 1944 after a heart attack on the train to New York. He recovered enough that friends expected his discharge and worked on proofs of his book An American Program. After a throat infection on October 4 and three more attacks on October 7, the hospital admitted he was critically ill. A final attack killed him the next morning.
“…his press secretary called an ambulance to take him to Lenox Hill Hospital. ... Willkie suffered one last attack, which proved fatal.”
Source: Wikipedia
- 1957
Lenox Hill opens an intensive care unit in 1957, among the earliest in Manhattan
The National Library of Medicine's history of the hospital's modernization says Lenox Hill was home to one of Manhattan's earliest intensive care units, opened in 1957. A cardiac care unit followed a decade later, which the Library describes as the first in the city. Before-and-after photographs in a 1966 album show the intensive care unit as it looked before renovation and again afterward.
Source: circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov
- 1966
The Charles R. Lachman Community Health Center is dedicated with a photo album of the hospital's rebuilding
Lenox Hill officially dedicated the Charles R. Lachman Community Health Center on September 20, 1966. At the ceremony Lachman was given an album of 32 black-and-white photographs touring the hospital's modernization, from the center's construction to before-and-after views of the emergency room, clinic, gift shop and intensive care unit. Photographer Dianora Niccolini took three of its pictures of the excavation and foundation.
Source: circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov
- 1974
Ed Sullivan dies at Lenox Hill a month after an advanced cancer diagnosis
Ed Sullivan, whose CBS variety show had been cancelled in 1971, was diagnosed with advanced esophageal cancer in early September 1974. He died at Lenox Hill Hospital on October 13. About 2,000 people attended his funeral at St. Patrick's Cathedral on a cold, rainy day, and he was interred at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York.
Source: Wikipedia
- 1996
Alger Hiss dies at Lenox Hill four days after turning 92
Alger Hiss, convicted of perjury in 1950, died of emphysema at Lenox Hill Hospital on November 15, 1996, four days after his 92nd birthday. He had kept contesting the conviction to the end and in 1988 published a memoir, Recollections of a Life, maintaining his innocence. In 1975 Massachusetts had readmitted him to its bar, the first lawyer returned to it after a major criminal conviction.
“He fought his perjury conviction until his death from emphysema on November 15, 1996, at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City…”
Source: Wikipedia
Further reading
- Lenox Hill HospitalWikipedia
- The car accident that could have changed historyEphemeral New York
- The fight over naming Lenox Hill HospitalEphemeral New York
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