Photo by Buck Ennis
Arthur Schwartz developed a taste for activism in college.
The planned closure of Mount Sinai Beth Israel, an ailing 543-bed hospital in Gramercy, is by all accounts a major shift in health care in one of the busiest medical corridors in the country. What stands in its way is not a regulator or a politician. It is a single person. His name is Arthur Schwartz.
Schwartz, a labor lawyer, founded the advocacy group Advocates for Justice and the law firm Advocates for Justice Chartered Attorneys. After the state Health Department approved Beth Israel’s closure last July, only a series of temporary restraining orders is now keeping its doors open – and that is Schwartz’s province.
Schwartz grew up in Pelham Parkway and has always been politically active. One of his first movements was taking part in anti-war sit-ins during his time at Columbia University in the 1970s. He studied political science to inform his brewing activism and later got a law degree from Hofstra University, where he had an internship at the New York Civil Liberties Union.
For most of his career, Schwartz has been a labor lawyer, his name periodically gracing the broadsheets, such as the time when he represented the Transport Workers Union during the 2005 strike that halted subways and buses for the first time in a quarter-century. He makes his living through his law firm, which does most of its business with the Center for the Independence of the Disabled, a plaintiff in the Beth Israel case, and the TWU. From the late 1990s through the mid-2000s, he fought to stop an athletic field on Pier 40 from becoming a parking lot because he felt the neighborhood needed the space for recreation. His win in that case launched a parallel career as a pro bono community activist, he said.
“It was like this example of, Wow, you can take on the state of New York and the attorney general’s office and get somewhere using these laws,” he said.
Then, in January 2017, he had a heart attack and was sent by ambulance to Beth Israel. The state of the hospital made him want to do something, even as he was in distress. He saw it as another opportunity to once again be a thorn in the side of a powerful actor threatening changes to his neighborhood.
After a handful of missives in local papers decrying the planned closure of the building that saved his life, he filed his first lawsuit in late 2017. The cases, one after another, have dragged on since then.
Mount Sinai acquired Beth Israel through a merger in 2013. For most of the time since, the health system has been taking steps to shutter the hospital, only to be forced to keep it open, first by legal complaints, including Schwartz’s, and later the pandemic, which filled it with patients. Last summer a state judge temporarily blocked the closure until Schwartz’s latest challenge, on procedural grounds, can be resolved. In the meantime, the facility loses the health system $600,000 a day, according to legal filings. But Schwartz believes the hospital is important to the community.
The whole effort has become rather personal, in part because Schwartz makes it so. Amid the years of stalling, the whipping up of community fervor and the gadflying in the papers, as well as the hours upon hours in courtrooms with his partner on the case, civil rights attorney David Siffert, working to keep the hospital open has become a large part of his day-to-day life.
Schwartz no longer believes he can stop Beth Israel from shutting down. His ideal scenario is for the health system to revisit a plan to build a downsized 70-bed facility nearby, a proposal that was floated in the mid-2010s before leaders abandoned it after the pandemic.
“If they had bargained with us a year ago … they’d have enough money to put a nice down payment on constructing a new hospital,” he said.
DOSSIER
GREW UP Pelham Parkway, the Bronx
RESIDES Greenwich Village
EDUCATION Bachelor’s in political science, Columbia University; J.D., Hofstra University
FAMILY LIFE He is married with four kids between the ages of 19 and 37.
TIME Schwartz raises and breeds tropical fish. He has fish older than 10 who let him hold them, he said.
ANOTHER MISSION Schwartz was part of a push to block the sale of the former St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village in 2010 in hopes of securing a deal that would restore the site to a Level 1 trauma center.
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