While two teams vie for rights to redevelop the shuttered Millard Fillmore Gates Circle Hospital site, Kaleida Health has found a taker for the old Deaconess Center located at 1001 Humboldt Parkway. Kaleida Health will demolish the 268,000-square-foot facility to make it shovel ready for the Community Action Organization of Erie County Inc. (CAO).
CAO plans to construct new headquarters, additional office space, a community service center, classrooms and housing on the site, while preserving the Gethsemane Manor Apartments, a senior living facility. The CAO also plans to locate a Head Start Academy on this site and is working through a plan to stimulate home improvements in the surrounding areas.
The Deaconess Center is a former hospital that closed in 1986. Most recently, the Deaconess Center served as a nursing home for Kaleida Health but closed in December 2011 to make way for the organization’s new long-term care facility, HighPointe on Michigan.
HighPointe on Michigan marks the consolidation of two Kaleida Health nursing homes, the 242-bed DeaconessCenter and the 75-bed skilled-nursing unit located inside Millard Fillmore Gates CircleHospital, both of which are now closed.
The Deaconess property is just north of CAO’s St. Martin Village project on Dodge Street (below). The multi-faceted St. Martin Village development consisted of partial demolition, renovation and new construction at the former German Roman Catholic Orphan Home site to create 60 affordable housing units. The complex opened last July.
Demolition of the Deaconess site is expected to begin this summer.