Exempla St. Joseph Hospital is buying The Children’s Hospital campus downtown.
As reported by The Denver Post on April 20, St. Joseph plans to build a new facility on the 14-acre campus when Children’s moves to the Fitzsimons campus in Aurora this fall.
The site is between Downing and Emerson streets between East 20th and East 18th avenues.
St. Joseph, which currently operates 450 beds, expects to break ground on the new facility next August, said Robert Minkin, the hospital’s president and chief executive. The first phase will include up to 350 beds and cost as much as $700 million based on a price of $2 million per bed.
“St. Joseph is operating in space that is almost 100 years old,” Minkin said. “It creates incredible inefficiencies for our staff.”
The hospital still needs the approval of its directors.
St. Joseph signed a contract Monday to buy the site from Cherokee Denver LLC, which was selected last fall as master developer for the property. Before negotiating a deal with St. Joseph, Cherokee had planned to redevelop the site with residences and retail space.
“We struggled with it mightily,” said Ferd Belz, president of the development firm. “At the end of the day, we believe that the best thing for everybody was to try to keep the hospital in the urban area of the city.”
Separately, the firm is selling a 3.5-acre piece of the site west of Ogden Street to Trammell Crow Residential, which plans to develop about 300 residential units on the site.
Exempla has agreed to work closely with Cherokee and the neighbors.
“The neighbors have been dealing with hospitals a long time,” Belz said. “They just want to make sure it’s well-integrated.”
Staff writer Margaret Jackson can be reached at 303-954-1473 or mjackson@denverpost.com.
