Clearing Land For The New Memorial Cancer Hospital

This 1935 photograph is from city street photographer Percy Loomis Sperr.

We are looking east from First Avenue and 67th Street and shows the land that would soon be the site for Memorial Hospital for the Treatment of Cancer and Allied Diseases.

This plot of land stretching from York Avenue to  First Avenue between 67th and 68th Street was donated to Memorial Hospital by John D. Rockefeller. This neighborhood today houses numerous medical institutions.

Over the ensuing decades, every visible building along 68th Street; the tenements, a blacksmith shop, auto repair shop and ambulance company would be demolished for expansion of hospital buildings.

The large building complex with the tower on York Avenue is New York Hospital and Cornell Medical College. To the left is a smokestack belonging to the hospital. To the right, beyond the trucks along 67th Street is the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, part of Rockefeller University, conducting biomedical research and is a graduate-only university.

Memorial Sloan Kettering

In 1945, General Motors executives Alfred P. Sloan and Dr. Charles F. Kettering established the Sloan-Kettering Institute for biomedical research to cure and treat cancer. A $4 million grant from the Alfred P. Sloan foundation provided the initial funding for the Institute.  Memorial Hospital would oversee the Institute.

The frontage on First Avenue between 67th and 68th Street would become The James Ewing Memorial Hospital, a city hospital and laboratory to treat cancer patients, but whose doctors and staff was vet by Memorial Hospital.

When finished in 1948, the three completed units of Memorial Hospital; Sloan-Kettering Institute; and Ewing Hospital made up the largest cancer institute in the world.

A new corporation and name combination took place in 1960 as Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

In 1968 Memorial Sloan-Kettering took over the running of Ewing Memorial Hospital from the city. The First Avenue building is now Memorial Sloan Ketterings’s Arnold and Marie Schwartz Cancer Research Building.

While scientists make new discoveries about cancer, there is still no cure. Even with research progress, the CDC and MSK are rather glum when it comes to the future of eliminating cancer. MSK is planning on expanding its facilities, with new enormous buildings on York Avenue to treat future cancer cases.