MGH maps new growth: Plan lays out new buildings
By Scott Van Voorhis
Boston Herald Business Reporter
Friday, September 22, 2006 - Updated: 07:45 AM EST
One of the giants of Boston?s economy, Massachusetts General Hospital has talked publicly about some modest future building plans.
But internally, the health-care powerhouse may be eyeing a much grander, longer-term expansion, one that amounts to a complete overhaul of a large section of its jumbled campus.
One that could further stoke - with hundreds of millions of dollars of new facilities - the engines of one of the city?s biggest employers.
A hospital planning document, dropped off by a friendly tipster, details a series of modern midrises and parks. The new buildings and greenery fill out a section of the MGH campus dominated by concrete parking garages and aging brick buildings.
This expansion, covering up to a third of the MGH campus, brings the hospital right up to bustling Cambridge Street, one of the city?s main boulevards, the document shows.
?Hospitals are one of the greatest economic engines of the city,? said state Rep. Marty Walz (D-Back Bay). ?I would rather have MGH grow here than grow in the suburbs.?
But this big expansion concept stands in stark contrast to the more limited plans hospital executives have been discussing publicly.
MGH executives - in talks with City Hall about a 10-year master plan for hospital expansion - have discussed adding just a single, midsized building to its main campus.
However, that addition is just one of several new buildings pictured in a map of possible future expansion by MGH.
When first contacted, a top hospital development executive denied knowledge of the internal planning map.
After agreeing to sit down and look at it in person, Dr. Jean Elrick, a top MGH administrator, confirmed it was the real thing, adding that it was six years old, and not in current use.
Still, the tipster who delivered the map of MGH?s future expansion swears he just picked it up a month ago. A hospital consultant left it carelessly in a public place after a meeting.
That said, while insisting their are no plans, hospital executives acknowledge that the area of the MGH campus near Cambridge Street is a possibility for long-term expansion. Not in the next 10 years, that is, but possibly farther out. So is the Spaulding Hospital complex and the land around it, soon to be freed up by the rehab clinic?s move to Charlestown.
Still, don?t use the word ?project? or ?plan? for this possibility, Elrick urged. Instead, just call it a ?conceptual diagram.?
But it might have been nice, for example, to drop a line to Jim Sauro.
Sauro owns the Exxon station on Cambridge Street. His business, at least in this ?conceptual diagram,? has been replaced by a hospital building.
That said, Sauro was taking it in stride yesterday.
?I own the land here. I am pretty well entrenched,? he said. ?I am not going anywhere anytime soon.?
