By Amy Zimmer
DNAinfo News Editor
MANHATTAN — East Side residents are fighting to get the city to move the 850-bed men's shelter from the crumbling former Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital on East 30th Street so they can turn the building into a community resource.
But they're not turning a blind eye to the men staying there.
The Turtle Bay Association and the Bellevue Hospital Community Advisory Board have been getting magazine subscriptions for the shelter and sent an e-mail plea the community to help their cause.
They already had one or more subscriptions to Men's Health, Men's Fitness, Men's Journal, Popular Mechanics, Reader's Digest, and Sports Illustrated with more expected to follow.
The grand but dilapidated space at Bellevue has been the subject of failed redevelopment proposals since the 1980s and the city’s Department of Homeless Services tabled the most recent plan after the economy tanked.
"We believe that the men now living in the Bellevue Psych Building should be moved to a more adequate site and that this historic building should be redeveloped and preserved as a medically-based community-friendly facility," Carol Ann Rinzler of the Turtle Bay Association and Louise Dankberg of the Bellevue Hospital Community Advisory Board, wrote in a statement to DNAinfo.
"However," they wrote, "for the moment the reality is that there are people living in the building and that simple, relatively inexpensive things such as magazine subscriptions can improve their situation."
Members of Community Board 6 have called for the building’s restoration to its former glory — without towers as suggested by the city’s most recent plan — and called for it be put on the National Register of Historic Places.
They suggested using the building for extended stays for hospital patients and their families, accommodating seniors with housing or as a senior center, and including uses for nearby medical and scientific institutions.
