Of People and Profits

You’re at the movies. Suddenly, your heart races and your arm goes numb. You have a friend drive you to a hospital located a short distance from the theater only to hear a doctor say, “You got here just in time.”

The above scenario is hardly rare to residents of Altadena and northeast Pasadena, who have to travel nearly six miles to reach the nearest emergency room located in either southern Pasadena or Arcadia.

But that could all change, depending on the results of an upcoming meeting between Pasadena City Councilman Steve Haderlein and a Beverly Hills-based developer that recently purchased the historic building that once housed St. Luke Medical Center at Altadena Drive and East Washington Boulevard.

Haderlein, whose district includes St. Luke, is scheduled to meet with representatives of

DS Ventures LLC Wednesday to discuss the possibility of placing an urgent care facility on part

of the 13.4-acre property, which

the developers purchased from Caltech in October for a reported $45 million.

“They would only build the facility. An operator would have to come in and run it,” Haderlein said of a scenario in which DS Ventures would actually commit to putting a health care facility there. “And those things typically don’t make money. There are not a lot of people that are willing to come in on businesses that don’t make money.”

During the meeting with the developers, Haderlein said he planned to bring up issues related

to any possible project such as neighborhood compatibility, historic preservation, possible opportunities to place an urgent care facility on the site and the creation of park space.

“Those are the threshold questions,” Haderlein said. “I think there is enough space for neighborhood compatibility and park space. The space for an urgent care facility seems to be there, but the city can’t make anybody enter into a particular kind of business.”

In February, the City Manager’s Office received $3 million in federal aid to help start a facility in southeast Pasadena on East Del Mar Boulevard which, like Huntington Hospital, is several miles from St. Luke.

Members of the citizens’ group Emergency Care Now balked at that idea, pointing out the dearth of health care facilities north of the Foothill (210) Freeway, and saying an urgent care facility should be placed at St. Luke, which from 1933 until 2002 was a functioning hospital, complete with 164 beds and an emergency room. The seven-story hospital building and the adjoining convent and chapel, which were added in 1947, are protected by the city due to historic landmark status. The medical center was shuttered in 2002 by Tenet Health Care, which cited declining patient numbers and profitability.

Caltech paid $20 million to Tenet for the property in 2003 and planned to do medical research at the facility, but never used it for that purpose. Instead, Caltech rented it out for sets on movies like “Million Dollar Baby” and TV shows like “Scrubs.”

According to Irma Stranz of Emergency Care Now, DS Ventures, which specializes in building senior citizen housing, does not have a good reputation with preservationists.

She recalled one of their projects in Los Angeles in which units with no lawns were tightly packed in a neighborhood of single-family homes, upsetting residents there.

“So we look at the St. Luke property, which is about the same size. The main hospital building has to be preserved, and then there’s a medical building, a power generator and a former nuns’ residence that’s now rented out. Then they have to jam like 70 houses onto the rest of this property,” Stranz said of possible plans for the site, which have not yet been made public.

“I’m hoping we’ll have an inkling of what they’re proposing for that property soon. One person at City Hall says no urgent care, another one says yes. We’re not saying emergency care. We’re saying urgent care. The building has not been changed by Caltech. … In the old ER you could just put in the old X-ray machines and they’d be ready to go. But the question is: What do they want to do with the rest of the building?”

“This is probably the last major area in Pasadena subject to development,” said senior housing activist Marvin Schachter. “It’s an area where there are tremendous needs in the community and the City Council has total control over it due to its historic nature. The question should be what does the community need, rather than profitability for the developer. The City Council has an enormous responsibility when it has control of the potential for property that large.”

Schachter acknowledged that the council has several competing community needs to consider and that there are several good prospective uses for the property. One need is for an urgent care center, another is affordable housing for families and seniors — and there’s the increasing need to create more open space.

However, Schachter adds, the property owner may have an entirely different agenda. “The developer says they’re open to a wide range of thinking on this. Caltech made a very great profit on this. If I was a developer, I would never buy a piece of land without knowing what I was going to do with it.”

St. Luke for many years provided health care to Altadena residents who didn’t want to make the trek to Huntington Memorial Hospital — a trip often cumbersome and even dangerous due to heavy traffic and frequent construction projects along Fair Oaks Avenue, a major north-south connector.

Talk of opening an urgent health care facility in eastern Pasadena follows the release earlier this year of a study conducted by the American College of Emergency Physicians, which gave California a grade of “C” when it came to access to emergency care, quality of care, patient safety and injury prevention.

Clearly at least some local medical facilities are stretched beyond their means. According to one Huntington Hospital official interviewed for a Pasadena Weekly story in 2006, Huntington was built to accommodate about 35,000 patients a year. In 2004, the hospital treated almost 60,000 patients.

The city is in the preliminary stages of placing a new urgent care facility on Del Mar Boulevard in Pasadena, near Kinneloa Avenue, in a building that is already owned by the city. According to City Manager Cynthia Kurtz, plans to put a facility there are moving forward.

“We feel the [Del Mar project] is something we can do in the short term, and if it does not meet all of our needs, we would be very anxious to proceed with one at St. Luke’s in the future,” Kurtz said.

“It’s a critical need for our city and both of these make sense,” she said.