February 26, 2025 - Brooklyn Downtown Star

Architectural Renderings Reimagine SUNY Downstate

BQE Admin on February 26, 2025

The architecture firm NBBJ partnered with local leaders to envision a modernized SUNY Downstate, only a year after the hospital was slated for closure.

Graphics courtesy of Brooklyn for Downstate

By JACK DELANEY | jdelaney@queensledger.com

This past year has been a rollercoaster ride for SUNY Downstate, the only state-run hospital in New York City.

In January 2024, Governor Kathy Hochul announced plans to either shrink or fully close the teaching hospital, relocating its outpatient and urgent care units to a new building in a nearby parking lot. The mood at the time was grim, with SUNY Chancellor John King rattling off a laundry list of problems: “We do have a $100 million deficit at [Downstate],” he said, “and we will run out of cash this summer, and the building is in disrepair and at risk of catastrophic failure.”

But community advocates pushed back, calling the move rushed and arguing that it lacked buy-in from residents. “If everything is dire, if everything is falling apart, come to us and show it,” said State Senator Zellnor Myrie, in whose district Downstate falls.

The response was overwhelming. Most tellingly, a poll released in March showed that approximately 70% of those in the neighborhood opposed a closure. And local politicians and hospital employees alike rebuked the state for only allocating $300 million in capital funding for the smaller facility across the street, claiming that a sustainable solution to the issues plaguing Downstate — which had suffered from decades of shortfalls — would require an injection on the order of $1 billion.

By April 2024, officials had clarified that they would not be closing Downstate in the “near-term,” a win for activists. Yet another twist came in December, when the hospital’s CEO since 2020, Dr. David Berger, resigned amid allegations of financial misconduct. But the tides shifted decisively in January 2025, with Hochul pivoting to allocate an additional $550 million to address Downstate’s woes, for a total of $950 million (the previous funding had included $100 million for operations). The governor then passed the baton, for now at least, to a community advisory board (CAB) she had formed last November, whose recommendations will be due this upcoming April. Karl-Henry Cesar, chair of Brooklyn Community Board 14, said he hoped the board would be “fully empowered and supported to take as much time as needed to talk with the community and faithfully execute its mission” — the group held its first hearing in January, after months of inactivity, and the next is scheduled for February 27 at Medgar Evers College.

It was in this context, of an averted closure and stalled conversations in the aftermath, that the local coalition Brooklyn for Downstate (BfD) partnered with an architecture firm to envision a next-generation hospital. Last week, they unveiled the fruits of that collaboration: glitzy renderings of what SUNY Downstate could look like if lawmakers deliver enough funding for a full revamp. During an online presentation, members of BfD criticized the state’s approach to gathering community input, with many singling out delays around the CAB as particularly frustrating. “From our position, 8 months were wasted,” said Redetha Abraham-Nichols, DNP, MRA, RN. “We think it’s unfair for the commission to take the work of 12 months and have to do it in 3 months.” Yet they were taking matters into their own hands, the coalition’s leaders stated, and the renderings were an attempt to chart a course for the hospital that would have broad appeal.

In drawing up a modern iteration of SUNY Downstate, architects from the firm NBBJ pulled heavily from a report BfD commissioned in December that brainstormed practical alternatives to closing the hospital. Such a tack could prove disastrous, “deepening disparities and straining neighboring hospitals” the report concluded, offering a counterproposal. “Retaining core services, while optimizing capacity and modernizing infrastructure, is the most effective path forward to sustain equitable healthcare access for Brooklyn’s most vulnerable residents.” Specifically, the report laid out four demands: first, to streamline service by reducing the number of beds from 342 to 250. Second, to upgrade technology and facilities for departments like emergency care, while adding rooms for maternal and OBGYN treatment. Third, to create urgent care and ambulatory surgery centers, with the goal of reducing ER visits. And fourth, to funnel resources into outpatient preventative care centers, heading off major health issues before they occur.

During the presentation, the architects placed special emphasis on transplants, noting that SUNY Downstate is the only licensed organ transplant provider in the county. “Patients may be waiting on a transplant list for an extended period of time,” said Christina Grimes, who leads NBBJ’s global healthcare practice, “and it can be a very multi-disciplinary team.” With that in mind, the renderings leaned into a biophilic approach to make long waits more tolerable

Joan Rosegreen, who represents the nurses at SUNY Downstate, asked how the new design would deal with patient overflow, to which the architects responded that they were still working out the details, and that this was just a starting point. Rosegreen also outlined a brief wish list for future schematics: “We have a small oncology unit,” she commented, “so it would be great if we could expand that.”

Downstate has a storied history that can be traced back to 1856, when a handful of physicians opened a free clinic to care for poor German immigrants. The next year, its name changed from the German General Dispensary to The St. John’s Hospital; it was renamed again in 1858, with administrators settling on the Long Island College Hospital. As of 1860, it was one of only 11 medical schools nationwide to admit Black students, and it was among the earliest to admit women, too, in the early 20th century. Today, Central Brooklyn has one of the greatest concentrations of Caribbean people in the country, which is why some critics of the governor’s initial plan cast it as another case of chronic disinvestment in Black communities.

As the MC of the BfD presentation, Abraham-Nichols was adamant that the state support a grander vision for the hospital. “We cannot, and we will not, go backward,” she said. “Only forward.”

George Boorujy’s New Direction

BQE Admin on February 26, 2025

Artist George Boorujy invited the Star to his studio at The Old American Can Factory in Gowanus. Photo: Jack Delaney

By JACK DELANEY | jdelaney@queensledger.com

As George Boorujy was painting his mural in the summer heat, groups of passersby would call out to him on their way to the soccer fields. Boorujy was covering the block-spanning wall across from a public pool in Red Hook with migratory birds, accompanied by tags for the countries they winter in, and the common complaint was that he was missing a name: “What about Jamaica?” someone would tease, while another pedestrian shouted “You don’t have Peru!”

It was hard work. In the end, it only took Boorujy fifteen days to finish the installation on Bay Street: six for the birds and plants, and nine for the solid colors of the background. “I banged those things out,” he’d say proudly, months later. But that sprint belied years of studying the subject matter and many hours spent scoping out the site, which the veteran artist described as “really weird,” and “a very difficult spot to conceptualize” because the retaining wall was low yet long — a daunting 963 feet.

The mural, sponsored by the Red Hook Conservancy as an addition to the Audubon Mural Project, took shape last June. But Boorujy still has fond memories of the commission, in part because of those exchanges with onlookers. If the piece was an homage to the eight bird species it depicts, it was also a statement about migration in general, or the “dichotomy of when you call more than one place home,” as Boorujy put it. “The birds that we think of as ‘our’ birds are not our birds. They’re also Panama’s birds, they’re Venezuela’s birds.” Many of the regulars who play soccer in the adjacent park are from Central and South America, he noted, and amid rising xenophobia, he wanted to acknowledge that parallel. “We welcome our birds every spring as they come in,” he said. “Yet we aren’t necessarily welcoming certain people.”

In a sense, the Red Hook mural expresses a dual interest — nature and migration — that has long been embedded in Boorujy’s art, and has just started to find a new form. Boorujy, who is based out of a studio in the Old American Can Factory in Gowanus, began drawing at an early age. And what he drew, growing up in a small New Jersey town, was animals. Everywhere he looked, he’d “always see the compromise with mankind,” like roadkill littering the highway, yet he initially shied away from portraying humans, even any evidence of them. “Sometimes an animal can function as a mirror better than a person,” he mused. He followed his love of wildlife by majoring in biology at the University of Miami, and eventually swung back towards painting.

Boorujy said the three stone figures in the center of this piece reminded him of himself, with his two sons. Photo: Jack Delaney

Now in his late forties, Boorujy has covered a lot of ground. “I’ve been making work about the environment forever, around 20 years,” he explained. “About climate change, and wildlife, and our relationship to [them].” For a spell, his trademark was rendering an animal, or several, in high fidelity against a massive white canvas, like a god emerging from the blank before the Big Bang. These paintings are extremely detailed — in one 44” by 88” portrait from 2019 of a panther suckling two cubs, it would be easy to miss a tiny mosquito clinging to her paw. Still, they’re not quite hyperrealism, because they’re too laden with symbolic weight. Therein lies Boorujy’s magic: his creatures are otherworldly, but they’re presented with such attention to detail that viewers are compelled to believe that this other world has weather, too, and life and death like ours.

During a visit to Boorujy’s studio this month, he showed off his latest paintings, which maintain that uncanny quality with a notable difference: the tabula rasa backgrounds are gone. Sweeping landscapes have rushed into the vacuums, articulating them with high-contrast rocks, trees, and lakes. In short, there’s a newfound emphasis on worldbuilding, a shift which Boorujy said was intentional. “If we cut carbon tomorrow, we’re still going to be living on a very changed planet,” he said. “And so I was like, Okay, what will it be?”

Though Boorujy’s recent work doesn’t offer definitive answers, each painting reveals a fresh and memorable corner of this hypothetical future. The landscapes are by turns bleak and serene. When his familiar animals show up, they’re altered: one image shows a zebra on its side at either dusk or dawn, its head out of sight — so that it reads more like terrain than living being — with a host of stone figurines sitting on its haunches. These statuettes, halfway between animate and inanimate, are everywhere in the studio. Boorujy sculpts them by hand, then uses them as models when he paints; that impression of a human’s touch is palpable. The overwhelming impression is that people were once here, in the frame, but they’ve since traveled elsewhere. What’s left behind is this makeshift collection of humanoid cairns and religious implements, personified and clamoring, to gesture at a broader story.

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