Page 14 - Vol.5 No. 7 July 2021

12 JULY 2021
BACK TO LIFE
With new apartments, reuse of Plainfield hospital site taking shape after more than a decade
By Joshua Burd
The new six-story, 120-unit apartment building known as The Randolph has brought new life to a vast structure on the former Muhlenberg Regional Medical Center campus in Plainfield.
As Bill Colgan points out — and seemingly embraces — its previous use is still evident in many places throughout the property.
“Here is where you feel the remnants of an old hospital,” he said during a recent tour of the building, as he entered a central, open lobby area that once housed nursing stations and other functions, but will now serve as additional lounge or co-working space for residents.
It’s only fitting for a location that was a community anchor for more than a century, leaving Plainfield residents all the more devastated
by the hospital’s closure in 2008. Colgan and his team at CHA Partners, a Bloomfield-based development firm, now hope to honor that history even as they open a new chapter for the property.
That chapter is off to a good start. Through June, CHA had leased more than 90 percent of the Randolph Road building since it hit the market in mid-January. That success,
which follows a multiyear battle to repurpose the 11-acre campus, has positioned CHA for the next phase of its plan — creating a
186,000-square-foot primary and specialty care medical center that will answer the community’s call for bringing health care jobs back to the site.
“There were 1,100 people that worked at this hospital,” said Colgan, CHA’s managing partner. “When they closed the hospital, a community that was already hurting got impacted significantly.”
Located in southwestern Union County, about 10 minutes from Route 22, the 355-bed facility had long served residents in and around Plainfield, including those in poor neighborhoods. It also grew to become the city’s largest employer
and remained so after it was acquired in 1997 by Solaris Health System, the parent of Edison’s JFK Medical Center.
But Solaris announced in 2007
that it intended to sell the 550,000-square-foot complex, citing unsustainable financial losses. The announcement and the prospect that the hospital would close rippled through the community, leaving Plainfield residents both scarred and furious as stakeholders mulled what to do next.
Colgan recalls that CHA, which had a track record of repositioning shuttered hospitals, got involved in earnest around 2014 and lobbied
CHA Partners recently marked the opening of The Randolph, a new 120-unit apartment building at the site of the former Muhlenberg Regional Medical Center in Plainfield. The milestone comes more than a decade after the hospital’s closure, which devastated city residents and set off an emotional, multiyear battle to repurpose the site.
Courtesy: Peter Dant Photography/CHA Partners