Hospital Hill in Passaic

Hospital Hill in Passaic
By Francis Gurtowski
October 2011

This December 17th will be the 120th anniversary of the founding of
the first hospital in Passaic. The homegrown charitable institution
outgrew one hand-me-down accommodation after another until it finally
homed in on the ten heavenly acres of Passaic's Little Switzerland known
thereafter as Hospital Hill.
Bounded by Crescent Place, Boulevard, Oak Street, and Lafayette
Avenue, the singular second-ward tract stubbornly held out as late as
1891. It remained first-growth forest despite one real estate boom
after another. A quarter of a century after municipal incorporation,
the largest profits were still being made here by flipping farmland.
The structure of the economy of Passaic would soon change due to one
Julius Forstmann, however. The future Dundee drumbeater was as gifted
as Steve Jobs, but he was too headstrong to wait his turn to run his
family's German woolens empire. Forstmann had already scouted Passaic
as possibly the most promising place to roll his own dice, but it would
be four more years before he took the plunge, settled here, and
ultimately precipitated 18,000 manufacturing jobs.
A putative grid of paths and plats already tattooed the domesticated
foothills of Little Switzerland, while its summit nevertheless stayed
unblemished, positively raw and intact. The wilderness had been spared
subdivision by resolutely resisting grading. Prescribed to level off
bumpy land to a smooth, flat or gently sloping, surface, grading was the
absolutely indispensable ingredient in the foolproof formula for
transforming "third-class" acreage in its natural state into
"first-class" building lots.
The first peek at the massive underlying ledge was obtained when an
outcrop was exposed by the workmen, dynamite, horses, and plows
heroically punching Lafayette Avenue through to Oak Street. The bedrock
prominence would have been an ideal site for a citadel had there been a
consensus for a fortress commanding the city. The high timberland was a
white elephant until a high-concept proposal for a regional hospital did
receive universal support and struck pay dirt.
The Aycrigg family donated the land for next new thing in Passaic.
By sheer serendipity, the plateau crowning the bluffs - as is -
satisfied the prerequisites for a site for the sort of "convalescing
hospital" which its boosters had in mind. In theory, its patients would
be cured by "walking it off." The regimen was trice-daily
constitutionals in fresh air on the grounds of the sanatorium.
There was an ample supply of pro bono MDs. Attending physicians
donated their services on a rotating basis. Doctors "only" billed for
follow-ups: office visits and house calls. On the other hand, from the
get-go, a nurse shortage shaped the development of Hospital Hill. Stays
were typically long and drawn out, and the nurses throughout New Jersey
were organized. A nurse's pricey hourly fees could add up to a
considerable bill for services rendered to the patient. Anyone
fortunate enough to latch onto a compatible nurse was wise to just pay
the piper, however.
The demand side of the nurse shortage was mitigated by having family
members provide hands-on bedside care for their loved one, around the
clock, right there in the hospital. Kith and kin were drafted to pitch
in. The supply side was assuaged too. The hospital's boosters lured an
esteemed senior nurse from Boston General to train and certify new
nurses; beat the bushes to recruit superior trainees; and spared no
expense to retain them.
A college-like campus was constructed within the walls of the
hospital and elsewhere on the hospital grounds. The most visible
embellishments were a lavish dormitory and a clay tennis court. One of
the two cuts in the Hospital Hill curb along Boulevard was for a
dedicated entrance to the student nurses' home. A long driveway veered
left, passed right by the tennis court, and led to their dormitory. The
drive in and out was facilitated by a landscaped circle right at the
door. The front of the student nurses' home was brightly lit from dusk
to dawn.
A student nurse could go on a casual date without even leaving the
campus. A couple could eat a light, leisurely meal in the hospital tea
room and then hit the tennis court, or vice versa. The doctors ate in
the five-star lunch counter too, on a regular basis, while the families
from the neighborhood ate there only on special occasions. The hospital
tea room featured Welch Farms ice cream. The super-premium treat was
available for eat-in and take-out. Swollen tonsils were a scourge back
then. The same ice cream was also prolifically prescribed on the
children's ward.
One of the two most glamorous spots in Passaic was the Central
Theater where I and many others luxuriated in its expansive art-deco
lounge. The other was the student nurses' home. On duty, they wore
starched whites but, off duty, the immaculate Florence Nightingales-in
training metamorphosed into fur-draped glamour girls on Friday and
Saturday nights. On formal dates the student nurses left their campus
in fairy-tale style. Gussied-up boys in gussied-up cars queued up right
outside the door and called in turn for their respective gussied-up
girls. The entire rigmarole reminded me of the red-carpet treatment
that Hollywood starlets receive at Academy Awards.
The student nurses flaunted fur stoles from Broadway establishments
such as Phil's Rent-A-Fur. Through my high school years, I worked at
Phil's Furs where I cleaned and glazed all kinds of fur and fake-fur
garments. The business had a roomy, high-tech, climate-controlled,
two-level fur vault upstairs just for the garments belonging to storage
clients. During the Cuban missile crisis, I stayed close to that Fort
Knox-like "bunker." The rental enterprise had its own vault in the
basement, right there where I operated the various forms of special
equipment indigenous to the fur trade. The grotto extended seemingly
for miles and miles all the way across Broadway and beyond. Phillip
Cohen had a knack for matching up a rental client with precisely the
right fur garment for the occasion. At the conclusion of his theatrical
matchmaking, I would "spritz" the "piece de resistance" and after that
it would be "good to go." During the Cuban missile crisis, I avoided the
"cave" for fear that it would collapse and bury me.
The only cut in the Hospital Hill curb along Lafayette Avenue was
for the laundry/incinerator which satisfied the demand for starched
whiles. The incinerator was on the street level of the works, but it
had a tall chimney. The incinerator generated the heat that boiled the
water that washed the soiled linens. The laundry had a separate
entrance facing in the direction of Boulevard. The laundry was reached
via a long concrete ramp to the second floor of the works. Workers
rolled huge canvas-sided bins up and down, to and from an assembly line
where the Hospital Hill's laundering was done. The only exception was
whatever items required sterilization with super-heated steam in the
autoclave (which was located elsewhere).
There was a superficial similarity between my work dry-cleaning fur
garments and the far more onerous, industrial-strength, garment
laundering going on up there on Hospital Hill. I operated a small
boiler which produced the steam required to remove wrinkles from garment
linings, while the hospital laundry was a veritable steam room
especially during the summer. The hospital laundry lacked a certain
creature-comfort to which I had access, moreover. The
thirty-something-degree fur vaults were my favorite summer retreats.
I was raised right below Hospital Hill, so I naturally took the
hospital grounds for granted. I grew up automatically thinking of
Hospital Hill as just yet-another awesome park in Passaic. I lived
halfway between the hospital grounds and Second Ward Park. The former
just happened to have a hospital on it and the latter a school. It was
the same thing as far as I was concerned. I was a very independent
eight-year-old kid, by the end of 1953, with a tough choice to make each
day. Where should I play?
That year is my chosen benchmark because I remember vividly the
aftermath of a 1954 hurricane. It knocked over a dozen first-growth
trees on the Lafayette Avenue side of the hospital grounds. The
respective canopies of those fallen specimens landed practically in my
front yard. The downed trees looked for all the world like expired
parachutes. I was surprised by the diminutive root balls of what were
without a doubt the best playground equipment ever. The individual
victims stood apart where the hospital grounds had been thinned. Only
the more sociable trees everywhere else withstood the stiff winds. I
figured the survivors must have held hands with what meager roots they
did have.
Snow meant extreme sledding on the hospital grounds.
Alyse (Korzeniowski) Kalas wrote:
"Our house was directly across from the emergency room entrance so
we heard sirens all the time. In 1962 Passaic General Hospital was one
building at the top of the property. There was a nurses' home and a
doctors' home on the property as well. We played major, major games of
hide and seek on the hospital hill during the summer, going home only
when it got dark. During the winter that hill was called Suicide Hill
because the slope was pretty steep for sleigh riding and lots of kids
got creamed on the way down. The hospital now occupies every square
inch of the what seemed like endless space back then."
Bernie Heyman wrote:
"Before I was of school age (1925-27) we lived in a four-family
apartment house on Paulison that backed up to the Memorial School Park,
then we moved to 418 Howe Avenue where we and the kids from Linden
Street played on the slopes of Passaic General Hospital."
Dave Lewis wrote:
"My dad worked at Passaic General Hospital. The hospital was
surrounded by a very steep hill. As soon as it snowed we all headed for
the hill with our Flexible Flyers. It's probably good that we were so
close to the emergency room as the hillsides were extremely steep and
you finished your sled run out on a busy street. I don't remember
anybody getting killed or even seriously hurt and the minor wounds were
just part of being a kid."
So-called Suicide Hill faced the Lafayette Avenue end of Crescent
Place. It resembled a ski jump more than a ski slope. There was no
traversing the narrow channel because it was pinched by imposing trees.
The chute was one-way, straight down. We could not climb snow-covered
Suicide Hill, especially lugging a sled. It was too steep and had too
much downhill traffic. Instead, we had to take the stairs intended for
hospital employees and visitors. A series of connected steps and
landings ascended from the corner of Crescent and Lafayette all the way
up to the parking lot at the summit of the hill. In practice, we might
have used those stairs more than anyone else but the phenomenon was
certainly not by design. The draftsman of the plans for that particular
pedestrian convenience surely did not have us sledders in mind.
The hilltop lot served the hospital itself (as opposed to the
dormitory or the laundry/incinerator). Drivers reached it via the
second cut in the Hospital Hill curb along Boulevard bearing right. The
summit lot was rimmed with a low wooden barrier. The obstacle was just
high enough to catch the bumper of any errant vehicle before it took a
dive. Sledders congregated behind the barricade where we drank the
"Kool-Aid" and hatched yet another mass descent. There was no need for
a warming hut because our feverish adrenaline took care of that. The
epinephrine was a natural response to Russian roulette. Chalk up the
madness to group dynamics. I do not recall anyone sledding Suicide Hill
solo. Mass-Suicide Hill was more like it.
You could not change your mind. It was physically impossible. Once
over the wall and on your sled, that was it. There was no bailing out.
There was no turning back. 3-2-1, there we went. Whoosh! Moreover,
staying on your sled all the way down to the bottom of the hill was only
the first half of the thrill ride. The best was yet to come. There was
barely ten feet of flat ground from the base of the drop to the curb,
and the abrupt transition was enough to jar the fillings out of your
teeth. The desperate gradient was nowhere near what would have been
required to gently undo the acceleration of a body in "free fall" under
the influence of the earth's gravity.