In the short term, it’s not a good thing to see a satellite emergency room suddenly shut down in a city, like one did in Trenton last week, officials say.
Structural issues in a connected building led Capital Health to shut down last Thursday, June 5, the emergency room they’d operated on the Bert Avenue side for a few years, at the former St. Francis hospital.
The closure was “nothing short of devastating for the local community, the City of Trenton, and the Greater Trenton area as a whole,” State Sen. Shirley Turner, Assemblywoman Verlina Reynolds-Jackson and Assemblyman Anthony Verrelli, all Democrats from the 15th district, said in a statement.
“The effects will be felt regionwide as vital medical care is diverted to other facilities,” it said.
But Trenton Mayor Reed Gusciora, while not praising the closure, sees good things down the road for the former St. Francis site – a sizable, six-acre footprint in the East Ward.
“While there is a void in Chambersburg [health care], now Trinity has the green light to demolish the campus,” Gusciora said.
Trinity Health, the recent former owner of St. Francis, was leasing space to Capital Health, which has two hospitals, in Trenton and Hopewell Township. They were calling the emergency room Capital Health – East Trenton.
Gusciora said the closure opens all sorts of possibilities, if Trinity indeed takes down the former St. Francis buildings.
“The site could be redeveloped, with Trenton’ oversight, into mixed uses, including medical arts and/or an urgent care, and senior housing,” Gusciora said.
The current situation was not going to allow such a significant project, Gusciora said.
Trinity Health did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
St. Francis was the first hospital in Trenton. The Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia began giving care in 1874 to what grew into an acute care, Catholic hospital that had a specialty in cardiac care.
For years, the St Francis site grew to occupy land bound by Hamilton Avenue and Chambers Street, and Bert and St Francis avenues.
It also became an anchor of the Chambersburg neighborhood in which it lies, which was long an Italian American neighborhood before its current transition to a home for Latin American immigrants.
In 2022, after years of struggling financially, its then owner Trinity Health and Capital Health announced a purchase agreement. Capital Health took over in late December that year and closed the acute care hospital.
The city is now served by just one hospital – Capital Health’s Regional Medical Center on Brunswick Avenue in North Trenton. The former Mercer Medical Center closed in 2011, the same year owner Capital Health opened a new hospital in Hopewell.
Capital Health later sold the Mercer hospital site in the city’s West Ward, and it sits abandoned along Bellevue Avenue.
St. Francis Medical Center in 2019, in a file photo from Trenton Central High School across Chambers Street in Trenton, N.J.Michael Mancuso | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
Stories by Kevin Shea
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Kevin Shea may be reached at kshea@njadvancemedia.com