The Danza Group was recently awarded a citation for their contribution to medical education. The award, from Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine, located in New York City, NY, named Danza Group for their “vision and determination in bringing Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine to the Horton Complex in Middletown, NY.”
By Richard J. Bayne – Times Herald-Record
July 21, 2014 – 2:00 AM
MIDDLETOWN — Developer Tony Danza remembers how people said he had gone crazy back in 2009, when he announced plans to buy the old Horton Hospital building and turn it into a medical school.
Horton had evolved into Orange Regional Medical Center. It was set to desert the Horton building for a brand-new, $350 million facility on East Main Street in the Town of Wallkill.
Middletown was faced with the possibility of watching its hilltop health care anchor turn into a white elephant.
But Danza, joined by Dr. Ron Israelski, now director of academic affairs at Orange Regional, embarked on a quest to land a medical school for the old Horton building.
Then Mayor Joe DeStefano signed on. They eventually convinced Touro College, which operates medical schools in Harlem and in California and Nevada, to open Middletown as a branch campus.
Danza bought the building for $3 million in 2011. The state came through with $1 million for the project in 2012. The Danza Leser Group has signed Touro to a 20-year lease.
“It gathered steam, and as more people came on board, it became less and less crazy,” Danza said. “They saw the economic impact and the jobs it’s going to create.”
Classes are set to officially begin Aug. 5 when the school welcomes 135 first-year medical students. In four years, the number of students will swell to about 500. Tuition is about $45,000 a year.
“The fact that we’re opening a medical school seems almost surreal to me, in that we have been working on programs like these for almost eight years,” Israelski said.
The school will have 60 full-time employees, about 50 part-time workers and about 250 adjunct faculty members. But various studies point to the school creating between 800 and 1,000 jobs through joint efforts with the local medical community.
Drawn by Middletown location
Danza, who has done projects in Blooming Grove, Cornwall and Montgomery, among others, said he saw a crying need for doctors in the Hudson Valley, and converting the old hospital into a medical school would help ease an impending doctor shortage.
Studies back him up, pointing to an increasing need for physicians as baby boomers age, but younger doctors aren’t filling the ranks quickly enough.
“We need doctors, I understood that. But I didn’t understand what a job it was going to be to get a medical school,” Danza said. “I knocked on every door I could.”
Talking about why Touro decided to open the Middletown branch, the school’s dean, Dr. Ken Steier, said they saw a “perfect storm” of opportunity in Middletown: the Horton building, local support, an underserved community and hospitals that were wiling to sign on as students move into clinical settings. And, lately, he said, there’s been a national trend to locate medical schools in smaller communities.
Plastic skull models will be used by medical students at Middletown’s new Touro medical college.
High-tech facilities
The old Horton Hospital on Prospect Avenue opened March 29, 1929. Touro spent about $25 million to turn it into a 110,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art school of osteopathic medicine. It includes:
Danza plans to turn the old emergency room suite into a clinical area and to renovate the old cafeteria. Workers knocked out the back wall of the lobby to open up access to the courtyard garden. The lobby is getting a new coffee shop.
The fourth and fifth floors, formerly patient rooms, have been converted to student dormitories. About 85 students will be housed there.
DeStefano said the “initial shock and anger” over ORMC’s decision to leave Middletown “turned into a multiyear effort to make this (medical school) happen.” The new school, DeStefano said, is a “top-notch facility” and will “promote a general good feeling within the community.”
For those who remember the old hospital as a bustling center chock-full of personal histories, the long hallways seem eerily empty. But that will change quickly once the students move in, said library director Sue Ben-Dor, who worked at the old hospital for 15 years.
“It won’t be quiet much longer,” said Ben-Dor. Both her parents died at the old hospital. Her grandchildren were born there.
Through all the renovation, Danza is determined to preserve the history of the building and what it has meant to the community. He plans to put a special plaque in the renovated garden.
“I can’t tell you how many people have told me, ‘The last time I saw my father, he was in this room,'” Danza said.
“This building has been an anchor for the community and my hope is future history will be made here with these doctors who are learning here,” he said.
Private student housing and the Center Court in Middletown, NY.
150 units of State-of-the-art Student housing being constructed for Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine. Middletown, New York classes begin on this new medical school August 2014.
Danza Group receives master development status from Palm Beach County Florida. Projects in development stage include residential above commercial and the gentrification of Westgate Belvedere, Palm Beach. Anticipated construction beginning 2015.
Award-winning design center scheduled for occupancy mid-2015.
Both homes were built and developed by the Danza Group residential division. Click here to see even more photos of these beautiful homes.
One of the first new homes constructed after Hurricane Sandy in Ocean County built above and beyond FEMA standards. This home includes hurricane windows, special constructed foundation and shear walls. There is also a professionally landscaped in ground pool with smart home technology. The home is currently on the market for $1,275,000.
By Nathan Brown
December 24, 2013
MIDDLETOWN – A clinic to treat veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder will open in January in Middletown.
The Road Back Trauma Center, located in a former medical office building on Ridge Street in the shadow of the old Horton Hospital, will treat clients with an experimental technique espoused by Frank Bourke, the psychologist who will run the center.
The technique uses a “visualization process” to retrieve and alter traumatic memories, Bourke said. It is still in the research phase, but he said it has done well in clinical trials.
When people with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, have flashbacks, they are reliving traumatic events, Bourke said.
Bourke has already started to treat a few people in the building; he said the clinic would formally open and start seeing more people in late January.
Bourke learned about the technique 25 years ago, and applied it after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when the Aon Corp. hired him to counsel hundreds of its employees who had worked in the south tower of the World Trade Center.
Ron Israelski, a local doctor who is on the clinic’s advisory committee, said he thinks Bourke’s technique will be more effective, in a shorter period of time, than other post-traumatic stress disorder treatments.
“This is a program that can cure,” Israelski said.
The center already has a $300,000 state grant to begin operations. State Sen. Bill Larkin, a Korean War veteran, sponsored the bill. Bourke said the clinic will cost $1.6 million to run for a full year; he said they’re hoping to raise more money from donors, the state and other sources to keep the project going.
More than 200,000 veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been diagnosed with PTSD, a condition people can develop after exposure to a traumatic event such as serious injury or the threat of death. Experts on the topic believe many more are affected but undiagnosed.
The clinic is not affiliated with the osteopathic medical school that will open in the old hospital in August, but it is, in a sense, happening because of the medical school.
Developer Tony Danza, who owns the former hospital, also owns the clinic building. He is letting Bourke use it rent-free for a year-and-a-half.
Danza is a veteran, and this is one of the programs that he is working on to help veterans across the country.
New York Lt. Gov. Robert J. Duffy, Developer Tony Danza and Dr. Ronald Israelski.
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