Thomas Farragher has a powerful column in today's Boston Globe. Please go read it right away, comment and share it with your friends who care about this issue.
His column begins:
Those loud cheers you heard along Longwood Avenue this week were coming from the corporate suite inside Boston Children’s Hospital.
I can imagine the celebration. Corks popped. Champagne glasses clinked. The hospital’s $1 billion expansion plan had been approved.
Barring a judge’s intervention, it’s only a matter of time now before the bulldozers are summoned and the hospital’s beloved Prouty Garden is plowed under to make way for private rooms, a heart center, and a new neonatal intensive care unit.
What a pity. It didn’t have to be this way.
It certainly didn't have to be this way. The other options were plentiful. Healthcare architect David Deininger wrote into the Globe this week with a much more feasible option:
Let me suggest another way forward: Locate the new tower above the vehicular courtyard at the existing main entrance (cars would circulate under the new building). This approach would be an improvement for a number of reasons: simplified public-patient wayfinding by using the existing main entrance and creating a multistory atrium and central elevator bank; more efficient relationship between acute-care functions (horizontal and vertical connection to existing emergency care, imaging, surgery, and beds); and, as an added bonus, avoidance of Prouty Garden altogether, thereby preserving it.
As we stated yesterday, our fight is not over. We will not rest until every stone has been turned and we have several stones left ahead of us.
The group of people who truly understand the remarkable, irreplaceable healing power of Prouty Garden are used to hardship. We're used to fighting for our children, and we're used to hoping in the face of incredible odds. Children's Hospital itself trained us this way.
And we're not backing down.