LYNN — Before the end of the summer, David J. Solimine Jr. projects that the former Union Hospital building on Lynnfield Street will be demolished. However, he makes one promise.
“I want to make sure that the property that has always been a community asset will continue to be a community asset,” said Solimine, who purchased the property last year and hopes to build 150 apartments for people over the age of 62. He will also turn an existing building behind the main structure into a place for advanced elder care.
Over the past five years, a new medical building with an urgent-care center opened on the property. And during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Union site became an outdoor testing center.
Since the beginning of April, demolition workers have been gutting the inside of the main hospital building. Once that’s done, the demolition team will start on the outside. Because all of the equipment is set up behind the main building, this work may not be evident to motorists and pedestrians traveling down Lynnfield Street, Solimine said.
“The building will be down by the end of the summer,” Solimine said Tuesday, “with the exception of the two-story building in the back.”
That building will be left standing to be part of the space allotted to medical and social support services for the residents, provided by Element Care’s PACE program.
Solimine also has plans for the parking lot across Woodland Avenue North. There, he hopes to construct Woodland Village, consisting of 28 family-age restricted (55 and up) homes. Clustering the homes will help protect the existing wetland areas and maintain a buffer of mature trees and natural woods between the new homes and the abutting existing homes, he said. He is partnering with 2-Life Communities of Brighton to manage the project.
Union Hospital’s beginnings date back to the earliest part of the 20th century. It opened in 1902 in the Tapley Mansion on Linwood Street. By the middle of the century, it had outgrown that structure and construction began on the current facility on Lynnfield Street.
That facility opened in 1953, giving Lynn two hospitals for nearly the next 40 years (the other being Lynn Hospital on Boston Street). In 1983, the two hospitals joined forces under the name AtlantiCare. By the early 1990s, Lynn Hospital closed, with a new emergency room built at Union. By the end of the decade, Lynn Hospital was razed, with Stop & Shop occupying the land.
That left Union as Lynn’s only hospital (its original name was restored in 1997 when North Shore Medical Center put it under the same umbrella as Salem Hospital).
Through it all, the Solimine family has been involved. Solimine, whose father, David J. Solimine Sr., is a prominent funeral director and philanthropist, made a sizable donation toward construction of the new emergency room, and the facility was subsequently named for his parents, David and Mary Jane.
“Our family has always supported the hospital,” Solimine said. “I’ll always have a soft spot for the hospital. Seriously, what’s more important than health care?”
However, in 2015, Partners HealthCare (now Mass. General Brigham) announced plans to close the hospital and move all of its operations to Salem. The parent company built a larger emergency center at Salem Hospital while Union’s ER closed two years ago — the last vestige of an era that spanned more than a century.
“For so many people, their lives were in this hospital,” Solimine said. “There was so much emotion involved here. People met spouses here. This was family to some people. This hospital will always be special.”
Solimine wants to make sure he’s a good neighbor to the people who live around the property. The city conducted a Union Hospital Re-Use Planning Study, which was managed by the Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC). A number of community meetings were held, resulting in recommendations that senior housing would be the preferred reuse for the hospital site.
That left the demolition. It wasn’t as easy as taking a wrecking ball to the place.
“The first thing we had to do was go through it and identify all of the things that needed to be disposed of properly, such as asbestos,” he said. “It turned out that all the floor tiles had asbestos in the mastic.
“Not only that,” he said, “there are three underground oil tanks that have to be disposed of.”
Once all of the hazardous material was hauled away, next came Solimine’s efforts to recycle as much of the material as he could.
“Thankfully,” he said, “there was a lot of metal in the building. We separated all the metal and recycled it. The rest, we just put it in trucks and hauled that away. From what I saw, there were more trucks hauling away scrap metal than there were other materials.”
When the doors were finally closed, and a fence was put up around the property, Solimine hung a sign on the front of the building thanking everyone who ever had an association with the hospital.
“You have no idea what that meant to people who worked there,” he said. “I got phone calls right away thanking me for doing that.”
