AIC's 43rd Annual Meeting

Coler-Goldwater Memorial Hospital was built on Roosevelt Island in 1939 as the Welfare Hospital for Chronic Disease. The construction of the city-owned hospital was carried out as part of a nation-wide construction campaign under FD's Works Progress Administration. Included in the design of the hospital campus were a selection of eight original murals that were installed within circular day rooms. When in these day rooms, patients and hospital staff found themselves located between contemporary, abstract American art and a wall of windows that looked out onto the East River; a highly curated view deliberately orchestrated by the hospital's architect Isadore Rosenfield. The hospital exemplified progressive medical architecture with it's interconnected campus setting, emphasis on interior and exterior circulation, and rounded building forms. Over the years, the murals were painted over and completely obscured from public view, remaining only in memory. In 2010 the City of New York announced plans to demolish Goldwater Hospital in order to make way for a new technology campus to be built by Cornell University. The murals, still alive in Goldwate's institutional memory, came into focus, but no one knew if they still existed. In an attempt to locate these original artworks technicians from EverGreene Architectural Arts lead by chief conservator Gillian Randell were commissioned by Cornell to attempt to locate the obscured murals and assess their conditions. The exposure process included chemical and mechanical overpaint removal in nineteen dayrooms throughout the hospital complex. As the hospital was still occupied at the time of the investigation the work had to be done at night and in conjunction with the hospital staff to ensure that the rooms were empty at the time of the investigation. This meant that rooms were investigated out of sequence and the work could not all be performed at once. Additionally, all investigative work was carried out between midnight and four in the morning. Two extant murals were found during these investigations. Plans to remove the over painted murals were set and the removal process began in April 2014, just as buildings within the now closed Goldwater Hospital were being demolished. Conservation philosophy dictates that the timeline for the removal process of historic artwork should not be motivated by external project time constraints, but by how much time is necessary to ensure safe removal. However, as professionals in the construction industry know, conservation work does not exist in a vacuum and demolition schedules dictated the time frame in which extraction of the murals was carried out. Over the next five weeks the murals were removed and taken off site for conservation. This paper will explore the history of the Goldwater murals as both a piece of WPA history and as forgotten art, explain the technical process of removing the murals, the technical difficulties encountered along the way, and discuss how the murals will become a permanent link from the now ephemeral hospital complex to the future Cornell Tech campus in terms of institutional memory and historic site interpretation within new architecture.