Requiem for a Hospital

¹ From the Children's Seashore House, Atlantic City, New Jersey, and University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia

The splendor falls on castle walls

And snowy summits old in story:

The long light shakes across the lakes,

And the wild cataract leaps in glory.

Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,

Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

—from The Splendor Falls by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

This is the story of the closure of a hospital and with it a part of American pediatric history.

Children's Seashore House of Atlantic City is the nation's fourth oldest pediatric hospital. After 118 years, it will close in the summer of 1990 and move to a new facility in Philadelphia.

The simple brick, layer-cake structure looks very tired now, its iconic soul having been steadily removed for incorporation into the new hospital. The cornerstone animals, lions and bighorn, have been chiseled free and now guard a new outpost. So too have the plaques from the turn of the century, optimistically commemorating the establishment of endowed beds, wards, and cottages "for perpetual use" with their benefactors of simplicity and gentleness by name, such as the "Endowed Bed of St James Sunday School, 1889" and "Endowed by the Everyday Kindness Society, 1912."

On this day, the workers hammer to remove the final link—an enormous marble tablet from 1919 eulogizing Dr William Bennett, the principal driving force of Children's Seashore House and also the founder of St Christopher's Hospital in Philadelphia. A mere 50 yards away, the Atlantic Ocean beats inexorably as it did at the founding in 1872, 2 years after the first planks were laid for the famous boardwalk.

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