Sydenham Hospital

[citation needed] Sydenham opened in 1892, occupying nine houses on 116th Street near 2nd Avenue as of 1911[1] serving mostly African American patients.

[7] Care to the uninsured through the city's hospital system ”accounted for more than half the budget gap for most of Koch’s mayoralty.”[8] The administration feared that the municipal hospital system alone was "the one agency that could plunge us back into a fiscal crisis," according to Deputy Mayor Robert F. Wagner III.

[10] Koch saw the hospital closings and reorganization as steps to take control of healthcare costs and, in the bargain, deliver better services.

[9] However, the Civil Rights Office of the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare certified the Koch reorganization plan as without discriminatory effect.

In the spring of 1980, as Sydenham was about to be shut down, angry demonstrators stormed the hospital, and initiated an occupation that lasted 10 days under a so-called “People’s Administration.”[14] On June 24, 1980, city, state and federal officials proposed a plan they said would improve healthcare in Harlem by keeping Metropolitan Hospital open with improvements and converting Sydenham to a drug, alcoholism and outpatient clinic.

Community activists rejected that plan[15] and, in November 1980, Sydenham's doors were closed for good, while Metropolitan Hospital was saved.