Mt. Sinai Hospital ca. 1904

On May 22, 1901, Isaac Wallach, President of the Mount Sinai Board of Directors, placed the cornerstone of the new hospital buildings at 100th Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues, a neighborhood that was experiencing a surge of development. The ten new buildings, which filled the entire block from Fifth to Madison Avenues, 100th to 101st Streets, were dedicated on March 15, 1904. Equipped with 456 beds (up from 200 at the Lexington Avenue site), the hospital needed to expand again by 1913, when the campus took over two-thirds of the 99th Street block along Fifth Avenue. This expansion included larger private patient facilities (allowing the old private pavilion to be used for a new model of care: semi-private rooms), a larger employee dormitory on 99th Street to house the non-medical staff, a new children’s pavilion, and a pediatric outpatient department building on the south side of 100th Street. This building program was completed in 1922.

Other expansions followed. In 1952, Mount Sinai’s obstetrical service began with the establishment of the Klingenstein Maternity Pavilion. Ten years later the Klingenstein Clinical Center opened on Madison Avenue to house the Psychiatry Department as well as medical-surgical semi-private rooms that replaced large, communal, open wards. The towering Annenberg Building opened in 1974.

The next significant construction came with the razing of the 1904 buildings to make way for the Guggenheim Pavilion, designed by internationally-renowned architect I.M. Pei and dedicated in 1992. Three years later, the creation of the new Primary Care Building on Madison Avenue, 101st to 102nd Streets, brought pediatrics, geriatrics, and internal medicine outpatient services together to better serve the community. Also in 1995, the East Building on Madison Avenue opened with state-of-the-art laboratories as well as patient care areas.