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

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 off the side of the building, probably looking at beautiful downtown Manhattan and the Empire State Building in the distance. And when we got there he said, 'You know, when you try to kill yourself you never expect something like this to happen.' And we were like, 'You're right! It is unusual.' "

The hospital is itself an anomaly: the city's first 24/7 paramedic unit, it managed, despite periods of bankruptcy, to see Times Square and Hell's Kitchen through the heroin and crack epidemics of the seventies, eighties, and nineties. In 1998, Joe Connelly, a St. Clare's ambulance driver, wrote a book based on his experiences there, called "Bringing Out the Dead," which Martin Scorsese made into a movie. The hospital is the first of several to be shut down by a task force known as the Berger Commission, which aims to consolidate New York State's health resources. (Fire Department paramedics will take up the slack.)

"Remember the night we picked up one of the musicians from 'Saturday Night Live'?" Fred Kavanagh, a heavyset ex-medic who's now a physician's assistant, asked. "That was another drug-related one." "And the one who married the millionaire?" Rosenblum said. "Anna Nicole Smith!" (Her mother was sick.) One partygoer said he knew the paramedics at the scene of Nelson Rockefeller's death. Other famous patients: Stevie Nicks (slipped in the studio), Barry Manilow (allergic reaction), Henny Youngman (pneumonia), Roger Moore (fainted), Shawn Bradley (basketball injury), Tennessee Williams (swallowed the cap of his pill bottle, fatally), and Ian Schrager--who collapsed in a hotel next to Studio 54 while getting fitted for a tuxedo. "He'd been standing still for a long time, and he was getting hot," Rosenblum said. Kavanagh added, "He was not too ...