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Surgery center envisioned as medical campus gateway

Proposed Main Street development would house Women & Children's Hospital outpatient facility

By Henry L. Davis
NEWS MEDICAL REPORTER
Published:December 16, 2010

A proposed medical office building that includes Women & Children's Hospital outpatient surgery center downtown will feature a contemporary glass-paneled design that invites passers-by to see the activity inside.

That's the initial impression from the first architectural rendering for what will be one of the biggest developments on Main Street in recent memory.

The surgery center, which will fill about 25 percent of the space in the building planned for Main between High and Goodrich streets, is seen as the first step toward the eventual move of the pediatric hospital from its Elmwood Village neighborhood to the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus.

The rest of the $80 million, 350,000-square-foot medical office building, to be developed and operated by Ciminelli Real Estate Corp., will be leased to doctors for offices and to a diagnostic imaging center. Likely tenants include physicians affiliated with the University at Buffalo -- their group is called UBMD -- and those displaced by the anticipated closure of Millard Fillmore Hospital.

Plans also call for limited retail business on the first floor, mainly to serve the tenants, and three levels of underground parking -- about 300 spaces.
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Proposal at a glance
* Located on Main Street between High and Goodrich streets
* Seven stories and 350,000 square feet of rentable space
* Three floors of below-grade parking
* $80 million cost
* Key tenant is Women & Children's Hospital ambulatory surgery center and its 14,000 operations a year
* Potential additional tenants include physicians affiliated with the University at Buffalo, known as a group as UBMD
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Ciminelli and Kaleida Health, which operates Women & Children's Hospital, released the rendering in anticipation of a public hearing on the development before the city Planning Board at 8:15 a.m. Tuesday in Room 901 of City Hall.

The design by Kideney Architects of Amherst is an attempt to satisfy an assortment of goals -- expand medical space to accommodate an assortment of different doctors, create an eye-catching structure to serve as an entryway to the downtown medical campus, ensure that the Women & Children's section be identifiable and kid-friendly.

"We recognized the challenge of building on Main Street near Allentown and made a concerted effort to make sure you don't see a blank wall when you walk by. We want people to see inside and have a sense of interactivity," said Timothy Vaeth, vice president for development at Ciminelli Real Estate.

In addition to the hearing, public comments can be sent to the Planning Board until Jan. 7 as part of its environmental review of the project. Ciminelli also has submitted to the city a site plan application and, if all goes well, wants to start work in March and occupy the structure by late 2012, Vaeth said.

Traffic flow and parking are likely to be the key issues in the environmental review, but Vaeth said the developer does not anticipate any unresolvable problems or major opposition.

A handful of other features of the seven-story building include plans for "green" technology to be used to build and operate the complex. It will connect to Buffalo General Hospital by either a tunnel or sky bridge. Ciminelli also is exploring the possibility of connecting the below-ground parking to the Allen Street Metro Rail platform, which ends at High Street.

The project marks the first major private investment on the medical campus, the most expensive single building Ciminelli has developed and, possibly, the biggest project on Main Street since construction of the Key Center in 1989.

"It's an example of the public investment in the medical campus paying off, and it could be the catalyst for a closer working relationship between Kaleida Health and UBMD (the university physicians)," said Vaeth.

Women & Children's, at the urging of its physicians, announced in September that it intended to locate the long-planned outpatient surgery center on the medical campus.

The larger move of the pediatric hospital to the medical campus is not imminent. For now, it remains a costly vision for the future. But the shift of ambulatory surgery, meaning cases that don't require an overnight stay, is a major decision. This is the busiest ambulatory surgery service in the Buffalo area and represents nearly 60 percent of the more than 14,000 operations performed annually at Women & Children's.

The recommendation to shift future development to the medical campus had been percolating for some time. It came after more than a year of study by doctors and was supported by the pediatric and obstetrical staff and Kaleida Health's governing board.

The project will add to a cluster of new buildings reshaping health care in Buffalo and the downtown landscape. For instance, construction is under way on a center for vascular care and medical research, a 10-story, $291 million facility that will abut Buffalo General Hospital at Ellicott and Goodrich streets.

The vascular center represents a collaboration between Kaleida Health and UB. One half will consolidate Kaleida Health's heart, stroke and vascular care, and also will include a new emergency room. UB will use the other half for a research center devoted to ideas on the cusp of new treatments and medical technologies, as well as a program to spin off research work into new businesses.

Completion of the vascular center and a new nursing home will allow Kaleida Health to shift the physicians and staff from its Millard Fillmore Hospital on Gates Circle to Buffalo General and the new buildings.

The surgery center-medical office project also reflects a major change at Women & Children's over the future of its campus on Bryant Street.

Kaleida Health in 2002 committed to keeping Women & Children's a free-standing facility. That decision followed community and physician opposition to a Kaleida plan to relocate the pediatric hospital into part of Buffalo General Hospital on the medical campus.

In deciding to leave Women & Children's where it is, Kaleida Health promised its physicians, surgeons and obstetricians that an ambulatory care center would be built to replace inefficient facilities and expand parking.

But a physician proposal to build an ambulatory center on Hodge Street across from the hospital encountered opposition from residents, who criticized plans to demolish homes for the ambulatory center and an expanded parking lot.

So far, physician leaders at Women & Children's like what they've seen of the proposed medical office building's design.

"We wanted something that was fresh-looking, different architecturally yet respectful toward its neighboring buildings, and a gateway to the medical campus," said Dr. Michael Caty, surgeon in chief at the pediatric hospital and chairman of the physician committee that studied the issue of whether to move.

"It's spectacular," said Dr. Steven Lana, a leader of the 2002 drive to keep Women & Children's on Bryant Street, who now serves as the hospital's medical director for physician outreach.

Lana said the challenge for the developer and architect will come in the next few months as they fill in the details over how to identify the building as having a medical purpose, make it welcoming to children while also catering to adults, and figure out how to identify the various services inside.