Hydrant at 1181 Fifth Avenue, on the northeast corner of East 99th Street

Mt. Sinai Hospital ca. 1904 On May 22, 1901, Isaac Wallach, President of the Mount Sinai Board of Directors, placed the cornerstone of the new hospital buildings at 100th Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues, a neighborhood that was experiencing a surge of development. The ten new buildings, which filled the entire block from Fifth to Madison Avenues, 100th to 101st Streets, were dedicated on March 15, 1904. Equipped with 456 beds (up from 200 at the Lexington Avenue site), the hospital needed to expand again by 1913, when the campus took over two-thirds of the 99th Street block along Fifth Avenue. This expansion included larger private patient facilities (allowing the old private pavilion to be used for a new model of care: semi-private rooms), a larger employee dormitory on 99th Street to house the non-medical staff, a new children’s pavilion, and a pediatric outpatient department building on the south side of 100th Street. This building program was completed in 1922. Other expansions followed. In 1952, Mount Sinai’s obstetrical service began with the establishment of the Klingenstein Maternity Pavilion. Ten years later the Klingenstein Clinical Center opened on Madison Avenue to house the Psychiatry Department as well as medical-surgical semi-private rooms that replaced large, communal, open wards. The towering Annenberg Building opened in 1974. The next significant construction came with the razing of the 1904 buildings to make way for the Guggenheim Pavilion, designed by internationally-renowned architect I.M. Pei and dedicated in 1992. Three years later, the creation of the new Primary Care Building on Madison Avenue, 101st to 102nd Streets, brought pediatrics, geriatrics, and internal medicine outpatient services together to better serve the community. Also in 1995, the East Building on Madison Avenue opened with state-of-the-art laboratories as well as patient care areas.

It’s no secret that New York is one of the Jewish capitals of the world. The city alone is home to 1.1 million Jews. That makes the city the largest Jewish community outside of Israel - larger than Tel Aviv and Jerusalem combined! The city's Jewish communities are not only multiple but diverse – they are Ashkenazic and Sephardic, Hasidic, and secular. The city owes this diversity to various waves of Jewish immigration over time, but did you know that Jewish geography today still in many ways reflects these immigration eras? Indeed, when and from where your Jewish ancestors immigrated may actually inform where you live in NYC today!