Main campus of Beth Israel seen from Stuyvesant Square.
Main campus seen from First Avenue, at center
Beth Israel Medical Center is a 1,368-bed, full-service tertiary teaching hospital in New York City. Originally dedicated to serving immigrant Jews living in the tenement slums of the Lower East Side, it was founded at the turn of the 20th century. The main hospital location is the Petrie Division at First Avenue and 16th Street, and facing Stuyvesant Square. Other campuses included Beth Israel-Kings Highway Division in Brooklyn and Phillips Ambulatory Care Center at Union Square.
It acts as University Hospital and Manhattan Campus for the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University. The hospital is also a teaching hospital of St. George's University and the Phillips Beth Israel School of Nursing.
Beth Israel Medical Center is a member of the Continuum Health Partners, a nonprofit hospital system that includes four other institutions: Roosevelt Hospital, St. Luke's Hospital, Long Island College Hospital, and the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary.
History
Beth Israel was incorporated in 1890 by a group of 40 Orthodox Jews on the Lower East Side each of whom paid 25 cents to set up a hospital serving New York's Jewish immigrants, particularly newcomers. At the time New York's hospitals would not treat patients who had been in the city less than a year. It initially opened a dispensary on the Lower East Side. In 1891 it opened a 20-bed hospital and in 1892 expanded again and moved into a 115-bed hospital in 1902.[1]
In 1929 it moved into a 13-story, 500-bed building at its current location at the corner of Stuyvesant Square. It purchased its neighbor the Manhattan General Hospital in 1964 and renamed the complex Beth Israel Medical Center, located at First Avenue and 16th Street in Manhattan. [1]
By the 1980s it had long extented beyond its Jewish base. In 1988 it had the largest network of heroin-treatment clinics in the United States with 7,500 patients and 23 facilities.[1]
It acquired Doctors Hospital on the Upper East Side in the 1990s, renaming it Beth Israel Medical Center-Singer Division, and Kings Highway Hospital Center in 1995, renaming it Beth Israel Medical Center-Kings Highway Division.
In 2004, Beth Israel Medical Center closed the Singer Division and consolidated its Manhattan inpatient operations at the main hospital campus, called the Petrie Division, on First Avenue at 16th Street in Manhattan.
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Coordinates: 40°44′01″N 73°58′57″W / 40.7335°N 73.9826°W / 40.7335; -73.9826
