Decision marks a new era for Medical Center

PACKET EDITORIAL, Feb. 21

By: Packet Editorial
   For as far back as anyone can remember, The Medical Center at Princeton — or, as it was known in the days before health care went corporate, Princeton Hospital — has had a rocky relationship with its neighbors.
   Princeton’s African American community, which has lived cheek by jowl with the hospital in the John-Witherspoon neighborhood for generations, has watched its own numbers get whittled away by gentrification while the hospital has grown from a small-town facility into a regional medical center. Older residents, remembering Princeton’s segregationist past, can recall a time when the hospital was reportedly less than enthusiastic about providing medical treatment to people of color. And the perception even today across Witherspoon Street, true or not, is that the hospital is a place where African Americans are welcome as cooks and custodians but not necessarily as patients or professionals.
   In the other direction, residents of Jefferson and Moore streets were annoyed when the hospital put up a parking garage, visible from some of their back yards, in the late 1970s. (This was the first parking garage in Princeton, by the way.) The neighbors’ annoyance turned to anger two decades later, when the hospital unveiled plans to expand the garage. After a series of acrimonious public hearings, the hospital won approval to build a garage addition that was considerably smaller than it would have liked, but much larger than what the neighbors had in mind.
   In the course of the debate over the garage expansion, it was revealed that the hospital had taken over several houses on Harris Road and turned them into offices, in apparent violation of the township’s zoning ordinance. The hospital had never bothered to go before the Zoning Board of Adjustment for a use variance; it had simply gobbled up 12 Harris Road properties and assumed occupancy.
   The neighbors, whose anger had by now turned to outrage, were heartened when the zoning board ordered the hospital to remove its offices from the Harris Road houses and return them to residential use. But the hospital took the position that the offices represented an inherently beneficial use to the community, a condition that greatly reduces the burden of proof on an applicant seeking exemption from local zoning restrictions, and challenged the zoning board ruling in Superior Court. The case bounced back and forth between the court and the board for several years, with the hospital administration digging in its heels while the neighbors — and, truth be told, many townspeople otherwise inclined to be supportive of the hospital — grew increasingly irritated with the administration’s arrogant intransigence.
   Enter Barry Rabner. The hospital’s new president and CEO wasted no time initiating a strategic planning process that focused not only on assessing institutional needs but also on improving community relations. This week, just six months into this process, Mr. Rabner announced that the hospital will drop its legal challenge, abide by the zoning board’s ruling and turn the Harris Road houses back to residential use. The hospital will find space elsewhere for the operations that were housed on Harris Road, Mr. Rabner said.
   This is welcome news to the hospital’s neighbors, and to everyone else around town who objected less to the hospital’s occupancy of the Harris Road houses than the furtive means by which it absorbed them into its growing empire. Even those who are sympathetic to the hospital’s need to expand know how important it is for its administration to be open, engaging and neighborly in the pursuit of additional space.
   Mr. Rabner, who is now busy mending in daylight the fences his predecessor erected in darkness, plainly understands this, too. And that alone has infused The Medical Center at Princeton with a healthy breath of fresh air.