Last Call.(The Talk of the Town)(St. Vincent's midtown hospital)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 17-SEP-07

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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

A recent block party to commemorate the closing of St. Vincent's midtown hospital (until 2003, it was called St. Clare's), at Fifty-second Street and Ninth Avenue, could have passed for any Labor Day cookout: hamburgers on the grill, beer in Solo cups, Italian ice served from the back of an ambulance. Then you caught a scrap of conversation: "Hey, Mike, remember the jumper at the Carter Hotel who got impaled on the fence? That was your guy, wasn't it?"

"Oh, yeah," said Mike Rosenblum, a former paramedic who's now a doctor in Springfield, Massachusetts. "He jumped off a building trying to kill himself, and got harpooned two floors below, like this." (Rosenblum arched his back.) "So he was hanging...

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