St. Vincent's was founded in 1849 and was a major teaching hospital in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City.

For more than 150 years, St. Vincent's Hospital served a wide range of New Yorkers, especially in its neighborhood of Greenwich Village, including poets, writers, artists, homeless people, the poor and the working class.

It maintained its connection to the Roman Catholic tradition, and was sponsored by the Bishop of Brooklyn and the President of the Sisters of Charity of New York.

It was founded as a medical facility in 1849 and named for St. Vincent de Paul, a seventeenth-century French priest, whose religious congregation of the Daughters of Charity inspired the founding in Maryland in 1809 of the Sisters of Charity by St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, a native New Yorker and Roman Catholic convert.

[2] In 1817, four Sisters of Charity from Emmitsburg, Maryland at the request of Bishop John Connolly established an orphanage in New York.

In 1859, a fair was held at the New York Crystal Palace to raise funds to renovate the former orphanage and erect two additional wings.

According to an 1892 New York Times article, St. Vincent's was distinguished from other hospitals in the city by now for its large number of tramps and other destitute persons".

The poet Edna St. Vincent Millay got her middle name from the hospital, where her uncle's life was saved in 1892 after he was accidentally locked in the hold of a ship for several days without food or water.

In 1912, St. Vincent's received and treated victims after the sinking of the RMS Titanic, while mourning the loss of attending physician Francis Norman O'Loughlin, who died in the disaster.

[8] In 1968, under William Grace, Director of Medicine at St. Vincent's, and his associate John A. Chadbourn, the hospital established the nation's first Mobile Coronary Care Unit (MCCU) following an example in Ireland.

The success of the St. Vincent's MCCU project inspired the development of the "HeartMobile" in Columbus, Ohio and similar programs in Marietta, Georgia, Montgomery County, Maryland, and Los Angeles in 1970.

[3] In 1975, the Puerto Rican extremist nationalist group FALN bombed Fraunces Tavern in the Wall Street area.

It became one of the best hospitals in the state for AIDS care with a large research facility and dozens of doctors and nurses working on it.

The mergers were intended to reduce costs by improved efficiency and elimination reductant administration, however, it also brought increased debt with the member hospitals.

[citation needed] In 2005, under financial pressure from its charity involvements and rising costs, the SVCMC system filed for bankruptcy.

The system launched an aggressive reorganization effort, selling or transferring its money-losing facilities and focusing development on its main hospital, which allowed it to emerge from bankruptcy in the summer of 2007.

[11] St. Vincent's announced on January 27, 2010, that its financial situation had soured further and desperate measures would be required to keep the hospital open.

The St. Vincent de Paul stained glass window from the hospital was donated to St. Joseph's Regional Medical Center in Paterson, New Jersey in honor of its legacy of charity.

Former City Council Speaker Christine Quinn said that the plan also calls for a reduction in the number of new apartments, funds for affordable housing and arts education in local schools.

In addition, SVCMC developed the unique Airbridge Project, which coordinates care for HIV-positive patients who make frequent trips to Puerto Rico.

In an effort to reach this underserved population, the hospital opened an independent Chinese-speaking inpatient unit, which employed physicians and nurses who spoke Cantonese and Mandarin.

The chapel, named for St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, offered daily Mass and refuge for patients and hospital staff.

[43] Responding to the unique needs of an urban population, SVCMC instituted a program to help patients provide for their pets during their stay in the hospital.