The first-floor hallway snaking around the edge of Ravenswood Medical Center’s Building Two is lined with desks, filing cabinets, book-cases, tables, and storage lockers–all for sale. Among waiting-room chairs and wire shelving are a washing machine and two dryers, a Wurlitzer organ, and two shelves of LPs (Linda Ronstadt’s Greatest Hits, Semper Fidelis: The Marches of John Philip Sousa, Cabaret) for a buck apiece. A room off the hallway is filled with Magnavox TVs ($25-$40) set at a fixed volume–loud. Another room holds wheelchairs ($75).
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Just yesterday a Nigerian doctor was happily stacking Personnel Protection Supplies containers onto a cart. He was sending the plastic boxes, filled with gowns, gloves, masks, and biohazard bags, to an AIDS clinic back home. Now Grzenia is wheeling an anesthesia system ($3,200) into the “hot spot” facing the doorway, where an eye laser ($3,700) was purchased earlier. Four rows of sophisticated machinery are priced to move, including a $350 blood gas monitor, a $1,200 bispectral index monitor, a $2,000 intra-aortic balloon pump, a $2,500 Stabilet infant warmer, and a $3,500 orthopedic operating room table.
Stainless steel surgical instruments are displayed on shelves: trays filled with forceps and tweezers, boxes of bone-saw blades and burls, and scissor-handled, sharp-edged scoops for cutting out tissue samples. Prices range widely; forceps go from $5 to $65. “There’s the Rolls-Royce version and then the Yugo version,” says Grzenia, who was a cardiovascular/cardiopulmonary technologist before he got into hospital liquidation. Many of the instruments are highly specialized–tiny titanium bipolar brain cauterizers, which would sell for $1,100 new, are marked down to $200. Some items are so unusual even Grzenia and some visiting surgeons can’t figure out what they’re for.
Meanwhile, in an administrative office down the hall, Joanne Festal shops for furniture for the church she attends–Our Lady of Lourdes, just east of here on Ashland. She’s happy to find a desk and matching wastebasket for the church reception room, but mourns the loss of the hospital. “Some of our people at our church work here–or they did work here,” she says. “Our priests come over and take care of the patients. It’s sad, because it has been in the community for such a long time.”
Not everyone got good news before the office was abandoned. Someone has scrawled the words “HELP ME!” in black marker on the white door of a supply cabinet. Other offices contain evidence of the previous occupants: a pile of X-ray films, a stack of billing records, a plastic box labeled “head measuring tape,” empty syringes, coffee cups, Styrofoam takeout containers, a hand-drawn diagram of the stomach, a tank of carbon dioxide. The fifth-floor hallways of Building Four are dark, muggy, and deathly silent.
Frank Long has taken part in 74 hospital liquidations, and he understands how tough a hospital closing is on its employees and patients–staff members are out of work, neighbors are confused. “The community should have some idea of what’s going on,” he says. “If there is something like what we’re doing here, they generally want to attend. We’re putting on the sale for Advocate, [but] rather than back-door the stuff and take it off-site somewhere, we’re giving the community a shot.” But only until mid-July, after which ICL will load out whatever remains.
