Daily News from New York, New York • 680

tr i fT 1 1 cr I (Airviews trotn NKWS plane by iieorire Mattsqn; Al DeBello. pilot) Here's Welfare Island as it appears today. The Bird S. Coler Memorial Hospital (A) is nearing completion. Broken line bounds Metropolitan Hospital (B) which will be razed.

Part of site will be landscaped as Coler Memorial grounds. Another part will be added to day camp for children (C). In center of (B) and (C) a new hospital for tuberculosis and chronic diseases will be built. Welfare Aged Skk Inlwen By ROBERT DWYER Within five years. New York's Welfare Island the infamous Blackwell's Island of bygone days will be the world's largest center for the study of diseases of old age, cr geriatrics as scientists term it.

This will come about with completion of the city's monumental project for new hospital construction, financed from an earmarked 192,000,000 fund. Plans are in accord with the well-known increase in the human life span, operating 1... 1 1 Continuing view of Welfare Island, the present City Home and Farm Colony (D), Goldwater Memorial Hospital (E) and City Hospital (F) complete the picture. City Hospital eventually will be razed to extend Goldwater Hospital. I tiary was synonymous with disease, dirt and despair.

Today, there are no prisons on the Island, and the present old City Hospital, lving south of Goldwater, scheduled for eventual razing, its site to become recreational space for Goldwater patients. A new City Hospital is under construction in Elmhurst, Queens, with facili ties for 830 patients, phychiatric service and an out-patient department. Coler Memorial. Most spectacular of the archi tectural groups that the motorist sees from Manhattan's shore or the bridge is the Bird S. Coler Memorial Hospital and Home at the extreme north end of the island.

This institution, to be completed by next Spring, will be devoted naif to chronically ill persons, who need medical and nurs ing care, and half to custodial pa tients, for whom little can be done except to feed and bed them. On completion of this mammoth hospital, patients will be transfer red there from New i ork general hospitals and from the City Home and Farm colony, which now lies farther south on the Island. City Home, a barracks-like group of structures, dating from Civil War days will then give way in part to grass and trees and recreational facilities. Third Hospital Planned. Although the Bird S.

Coler structure is not yet occupied, so great is the pressure of chronically ill persons in Xew York that a third Welfare Island hospital for their accommodation has been planned. Building of this hospital will start as soon as the doomed City Home is out of the way. This third building, as yet unnamed, originally had been designed for 1,000 chronic cases, but the present tuberculosis crisis forced a change of plans. As l-result, an addition soluble for 500 BmVs here as elsewhere. Xew York's 1948 population estimate assumed total of half a million persons who were 65 or more.

This is double the number for Otder people get sick more often and stay sick for longer periods," Commissioner Marcus D. Kegel of the Department of Hospitals remarked recently. With concentrated interest and research on the special problems of the aged and chorn-ically ill, as will be possible on Welfare Island, Dr. Kogel expects discoveries "that will benefit not only Xew York but all mankind." A Good Start Already Made. Welfare Island, nearly two miles long and about two city blocks wide, lying off Manhattan's swank tipper East Side, is already well started on its ambitious career.

The motorist crossing Queens-lro Bridge or driving tip the East Side Highway can glimpse, near the Island's south end, the six buildings of the Goldwater Memorial Hospital, erected in 1939. This institution was the world's first hospital for chronic diseases. Before it was opened, chronic patients were indefinite residents of small city hospitals, where they took bed space needed for the acutely ill. Goldwater, staffed and used as a research center by Xew York and Columbia Universities, is the long- delayed realization of the vision of Bird S. Coler, who was Commis sioner of Public Welfare under Mayor Hylan's administration.

Blackwell Stigma Removed. Coler, although not a doctor, was far-sighted enough back in the early "20s to realize that eventually mass-scale medical facilities would have to be made available to the chronic sick. One of his first acts as commissioner was to start wash- in? the taint off the then Black well's Island which, with its pest-house, workhouse and city peniten alterations to the island's powerhouse were completed at a cost of $3,700,000. A new firehouse also was built. Plan Easier Access.

Access to the island' will be improved. At present, supply trucks, ambulances and visitors going by Queensboro Bridge must buck and delay the teeming bridge traffic, in order to turn into a small roadway and be lowered by elevator onto the island level. A more awkward approach could hardly be imagined. The only alternative is to use the slow 79th St. ferry.

New plans call for a $4,500,000 bridge to connect with 36th Queens. It will span only half the East River. Manhattan traffic will approach it via Queensboro Bridge. In five years the island's population is expected to touch 30,000, including patients, doctors, nurses, and maintenance staff. These changes, largely looking toward hospitalization of older people and study of their ailments, are colossal, but urgent.

By 1980, it is expected that 11 of New Yorkers will be over 65. Says Commissioner Kogel: "The apathetic era of care for the chronically ill belongs to a bygone day. We have entered an age when the most hopeless patient is approached in the spirit of hopefulness and with an enthusiasm and zeal that transcends all vided. Between the two structural layers will be an operating room, clinic and laboratories to serve both hospitals. Other Major Changes.

Metropolitan Hospital, also on the island's north end, will be razed, and its functions taken over by a institution to Be known as East Harlem General Hospital. This will be erected on Second Ave. from 97th to 99th Sts. Before work can be started, 90 families who now occupy the site must be rehoused. Metropolitan's old site will supply the Bird S.

Coler building and the new TB and Chronic building with landscaping. Another great change in New York's hospital system is abandonment of the New York Cancer Institute on the island as a hospital for cancer cases, and their removal to the fine, new James Ewing Memorial and Francis Delafield Hospitals. Both are about to be dedicated. The Ewing Hospital is on First between 67th and 68th alongside and affiliated with the Memorial ancer Center and the Sloan-Kettering Research Institute. The Francis Delafield Hospital is adjacent to the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center.

As soon as the patients are moved, the institute will accommodate 225 tuberculosis patients. Later, the building will be razed. Recently laundries, garages and Rent Bonus Nets 30 Days The $100 bonus Mrs. Florence Belimier, 68 -year -old superintendent of a housing development in New Brighton, S. accepted from a family to whom she rented living quarters last October, yesterday cost her 30 days in the workhouse.

Unable to pay a $500 fine assessed in Special Sessions Court, St. George, S. the downcast rent gouger was sent to the Woman's House of Detention in Manhattan. tuberculosis beds will be superimposed on the building. At the start, the entire 1,500 beds will be used for tuberculosis victims.

The excess of chronic sufferers will have to wait until the backlog of tuberculosis patients now in private fiomes, hospital corridors and in general hospital beds has been provided for. Separate Arrangements. The two hospitals, although in the same building, will have separate elevators and separate rehabilitation services so as to achieve segregation of illness types. The building also will have a separate area f6r chronic child sufferers and access to p'lay spots without contacting adult patients. Sun decks and solaria will be pro.