Reimagine St. Luke's: What do you think should go on the former hospital site?

When it comes to the St. Luke’s Campus of the Mohawk Valley Health System, everyone in the Utica area seems to agree on one thing.

They want to see the 53 unused acres on the hospital campus in New Hartford, which closed in October, reused in a way that’s good for the community.

So, what should the campus become? That’s where the arguments begin.

Imagine a community center offering a gathering place, fun activities for the kids, exercise opportunities for the whole family, and child care, surrounded by fitness trails and an educational walking trail through the site’s carefully preserved wetlands habitat with sculptures, gardens and links to the area’s other trail networks.

Or think about the site continuing to offer health services, possibly specialists or an urgent care center, care easily accessible to South Uticans and suburban dwellers.

Then again, maybe it should be used to help Utica University, located right across Champlin Avenue, grow.

How about housing, shops and restaurants, or a business park?

All those ideas came from area residents who attended a Reimagine St. Luke’s forum last week, held at New York Mills High School. They wrote down responses to four prompts asking about development in the area, needed development in the area and the St. Luke’s site in particular.

Stores, restaurants, a business park, a community center, fitness and walking trails — the ideas ran the gamut.

How the committee is welcoming input

Consultants Fu Wilmers Design, of New York City — hired by a partnership of Oneida County, the Mohawk Valley Health System, Mohawk Valley EDGE and the Town of New Hartford — are gathering the public’s concerns and ideas, looking at conditions on the site and market conditions, and creating a plan for the reuse of the site. The final plan should be completed in September.

Both the St. Luke’s Campus and the St. Elizabeth Campus of the Mohawk Valley Health System closed in October after the health system opened the Wynn Hospital in downtown Utica. The health system’s Center for Rehabilitation and Continuing Care Services, which houses a nursing home and other departments, will remain on the St. Luke’s Campus.

The St. Elizabeth Campus is undergoing a similar reimagining process. 

The project already includes an advisory committee made up of community leaders, representatives from surrounding neighborhoods, community service organizations, faith-based groups, small business owners, housing organizations and real-estate developers.

But it’s important to include the general public as well, Oneida County Executive Anthony Picente Jr. said. “I wanted to make sure that we got to the public first, before we started exploring and having the consultants hit the ground,” he said.

Three more public meetings are scheduled at different points in the process, in April, June and July, to keep the community informed and to get feedback on what’s been done so far.

"For the first meeting, it was, I thought,” Picente said, “productive. I would have liked to see more people."

About 80 or 90 people turned out for the first forum and Picente said he hopes to see bigger crowds in the future.

On its website, EDGE describes the vision for reuse as a “fresh, modern, smart-city-enabled pedestrian-friendly, mixed-use environment with urban amenities just a short walk or bike ride away.”

The size allows for a lot of possibilities, Picente said. “You could almost form a neighborhood in there,” he said, “with some retail and some other pieces.”

The public’s ideas

Participants were asked to answer four prompts about the property and what development they want to see in the area. When answering what they want the property to become or what amenities the area lacks in general, their answers fell heavily within a few trends:

• Health care. People apparently found the location convenient for medical services or think a medical reuse makes sense. Leading the medical responses were calls for a Veterans Affairs hospital or a teaching hospital. Other ideas included a medical center with urgent care and specialists, medical respite care, a mental health and/or substance use rehabilitation center, and an oncology center.

• Education. Given the site’s location across the street from Utica University, many thought it should be used by the university or at least tied into education. Some of those ideas focused on teaching health care-related topics.

• Housing. Types of housing suggested include townhouses that won’t decrease local home values, single-family homes, studio apartments, upscale condominiums, senior housing and housing for recent graduates and middle-income earners.

• Fitness and entertainment. These included both indoor and outdoor ideas such as walking and fitness trails (possibly connected to other area trail systems, possibly an educational trail through the property’s wetlands and walkability between area housing, shops and other resources), a community center/family recreation center with activities for youth, performing arts space outdoors, a farmer’s market, indoor rock climbing, indoor pickleball, outdoor sculptures and gardens, an indoor/outdoor dog park and a horseback riding arena.

• Child care.

• Mixed-use development. This would be some combination of shops, services and small businesses with some calling for housing as well. Someone suggested a place where Utica Business Park employees can shop, bank and eat lunch.

• Businesses other than retail. These suggestions were less common, but some people suggested a business park, work pods to rent or a research and development hub for the medical and technology industries.

When asked what places they’ve visited elsewhere that they’d like to see come to the Utica area, respondents mentioned four stores: Costco, Ikea, Trader Joe’s and Krispy Kreme. Someone mentioned The Crossings in Colonie, a 130-acre passive-use park with a pond, a meadow, wetlands, woods, wildflowers, trails, a children’s maze and a playground.

Another person brought up Country Club Plaza in Kansas City, a 15-block downtown area with local and national shops and restaurants, Spanish architecture, fountains, statutes and artwork.

Reality checks

None of those ideas, of course, can come to fruition, of course, unless someone with funding wants to put them in.

Veterans Affairs, for example, already has a medical center in Syracuse and an outpatient clinic in Rome. Former Utica University President Todd Hutton said in 2015 that the college wasn’t interested in taking over the site. Kelly Adams, vice president for marketing and communications, reiterated in 2020 that the likelihood of the college investing in the repurposing of St. Luke's was "very low."

And Wynn Hospital is a teaching hospital that has greatly expanded its medical education programs in the last two years. It received $300 million in state funding in large part because it consolidated health care in Utica, leaving it with just one hospital.

Officials have said that they think it's likely that the 460,000-square foot St. Luke’s hospital will have to be razed, its sprawling layout making reuse difficult. A demolition estimate done by DiMarco Constructors, of Rochester, in 2020 estimated demolition costs at $5.3 million, an amount likely to have gone up with inflation.

A market analysis of all three health system campuses (the Faxton Campus remains in use by the health system) done in 2019 by Fairweather Consulting in New Paltz found residential development to be a viable possibility for the campuses if it focused on the areas of greatest need at that time: seniors, empty nesters who want to downsize and mid-career professionals starting families.

The campuses would likely include retail and hospitality space, the analysis noted, but determined that retail space would not be the main driver of redevelopment. And it determined that office development was unlikely to prove viable, although space might be needed to house institutional partnerships, such as between higher education or health care organizations.

A study by CHA Consulting, Inc. in 2020 suggested that St. Luke's could be re-used as housing for Utica University or SUNY Polytechnic Institute, or as a mixed-use development with shops and restaurants.

But officials have noted that many factors have changed since those reports came out.

For updates on this project, go to the Reimagine St. Luke's website.

This article originally appeared on Observer-Dispatch: Mohawk Valley Health System, Oneida County hold St. Luke's forum