By Susan Marschalk Green ~
Timing is everything, as they say, so the reaction you might get from a Chicago North Side resident when you say the name “Edgewater Hospital” today is likely to be a wrinkled nose and a shake of the head. The once-venerable institution closed at the end of 2001 amid scandals that included rampant fraud and shocking disregard for human life.
To make matters worse, the high-rise buildings of the old hospital remained shuttered on a prominent corner in Andersonville for nearly 20 years, during which they were sullied by time and vandals. Locals remember the eyesore the hospital became while government officials, financiers and land developers debated its fate. Finally, in 2022, the former Edgewater Hospital got a new lease on life as a luxury apartment complex known as Anderson Point.
For most of its existence, however, Edgewater Hospital was a well-respected fixture in the community. When I was born there in 1957, Edgewater had set a high bar for medical centers, not only in its hometown of Chicago but across the country. Its founder, Dr. Maurice Mazel, a Chicago native, had brought his dream of a community hospital to reality during the Great Depression, and that was a tremendous feat in itself. By the time I entered the world via the Edgewater delivery room, Mazel had made a name for himself not only as a noted heart surgeon but also by creating a medical center with trappings much like the nearby luxurious Edgewater Beach Hotel.
“It was novel for its time,” says LeRoy Blommaert, who oversees collections for the Edgewater Historical Society museum located on Ashland Avenue, only a few blocks from the former hospital. “When it started out, it was quite the place.”
In fact, Edgewater Hospital was such a standout that decades after my birth, my parents were still talking about the posh appearance of the hospital lobby. Indeed, vintage pictures portray the reception area as having chandelier lighting, ornate wall sconces, plush sofas and an admissions desk that looked much like a luxury hotel’s check-in counter recessed within marble walls.
Local historians say uniformed employees catered to patient needs the way bellhops and concierges look after hotel guests, and local lore has it that Hollywood celebrities, including Frank Sinatra, checked into private suites there from time to time. Patient rooms were equipped with television sets, a lavish touch in the 1950s. The hospital had a rooftop solarium furnished with cushioned chaise lounges and patio chairs. At some point, a multistory apartment building for nurses was added to the campus, and it had a top-floor swimming pool.
Excellence was more than skin deep
Edgewater Hospital was also a bit of a trailblazer in health care. It had state-of-the-art medical equipment and a larger-than-life leader in Mazel, who pursued some offbeat but effective medical research and manufacture – including processing human fetal urine into a wonder drug called urokinase, which dissolved blood clots in the lungs. The hospital eventually added a rooftop helipad to its list of innovations and became known for its first-rate burn care and enormous hyperbaric chamber.
When Mazel died in 1980, he was still at the helm. Then his widow, Harriet, ran the hospital for a few years after his death. Although she had been involved in the day-to-day operations of the hospital, she lacked the clout of her late husband. Some observers attribute Edgewater’s demise to deficits in her leadership. But even before then, community hospitals like Edgewater were starting to feel the pinch of a changing health care model in which patients spent less time occupying hospital beds, instead receiving outpatient treatment and recovering at home. Regional hospitals like Edgewater depended largely on billing for in-patient care to stay afloat. Perhaps that explains why my mom’s top memory of her postpartum stay at Edgewater is how long it was.
No TV for Mom, and no painkillers, either
My mother doesn’t recall visiting the hospital’s solarium or having a TV in her room but does remember her obstetrician congratulating her for delivering her child without the benefit of drugs. It struck her as remarkable that he touted the virtues of natural childbirth to the attending nurses because women weren’t widely encouraged to pursue natural childbirth in the 1950s. She also remembers the hospital insisting that she remain there for five days after I was born, even though she was feeling well and wanted desperately to get home to care for my older sister, then only a year old.
For me, Edgewater Hospital was just a name on my birth certificate until recently. My father finished his schooling in Chicago three months after I came into the world, and our family moved to Daytona Beach, Florida, where I grew up. As the only child in my family to be born “up North,” my origins at Edgewater Hospital were a bit of a novelty to discuss at family gatherings. Otherwise, for most of my life, I had little interest in my birthplace.
Late-life disillusionment spurred me to investigate the place where my life began. It’s not that I think my birthplace had much to do with my outcome. After all, in the 1940s, two highly recognized names – Hillary Clinton and John Wayne Gacy – also got their start in the Edgewater maternity ward, and their trajectories couldn’t have been more disparate. But it’s interesting to contemplate the highs and lows of the institution where thousands of people (no one seems to know exactly how many) took their first breaths and, sadly, many others took their last.
In the case of Edgewater Hospital, there’s not much doubt at what point the institution’s lofty arc took a nosedive.
Heart health goes rogue
When Harriet Mazel died in 1989, Edgewater Hospital had amassed a monumental debt. The institution was sold to Indiana attorney and businessman Peter Rogan, who would later be found guilty of masterminding a system of Medicare fraud that led to hundreds of homeless and low-income persons receiving unnecessary treatment, including cardiac surgeries and procedures. At least two persons died during angioplasty procedures that the surgeon later admitted were unnecessary.
Four physicians and a former Edgewater Hospital executive received prison sentences in 2002 – the longest was 12 years. Rogan initially escaped criminal charges but led authorities on a years-long chase that included a lavish lifestyle in Canada as he tried to avoid paying the U.S. government $64 million for his part in the Medicare fraud. In 2015, Rogan finally admitted to perjury and obstruction of justice related to his claim that he couldn’t pay. He was sentenced to 21 months’ imprisonment as part of a plea deal. Online records indicate he is now age 77 and living with relatives in Munster, Indiana.
Edgewater was hardly alone among health care providers seeking to reverse their financial fortunes by bilking the Medicare program in the 1990s and beyond. But Edgewater’s story stands alone in its irony as a hospital that was started by a gifted heart surgeon to benefit the community and save lives, only to become a house of horrors in the hands of cardiologists who came along after Dr. Mazel was no longer around to stand watch.
What will your legacy be? Do you ever wonder?
Comments on this entry are welcome. Please keep the discussion cordial and on topic, and don’t include links to external websites. Past Lane Pilgrim reserves the right to block comments that are not appropriate.