David Hill

dwhill@gannett.com | @NY_newsguy_Hill

Where others see blight, Binghamton University President Harvey Stenger envisions boundless opportunities for Johnson City and his institution.

As a university photographer poses Stenger against the backdrop of a chain-link fence surrounding a newly vacant six-acre lot, the university president seems out of place near the debris marking the site of Endicott Johnson's original shoe manufacturing plant at 96 Corliss Ave.

But this is exactly where Stenger wants to be on this unseasonably mild winter day, laying out a vision for a Binghamton University satellite campus to become the center of a medical education hub.

At the core of what was the region's manufacturing legacy will rise a $100 million complex, transforming a six-block area from the industrial revolution to today's world of cutting-edge medical research.

Just as the University Downtown Center spurred a renaissance in Binghamton, so, too, will the medical education complex turn a sick-looking section of Johnson City into a vibrant educational and commercial hub, Stenger said.

Down the street from 280-bed UHS Wilson Medical Center is imagined the Johnson City Health and Cultural District. The plan is pretty straightforward: Build a health-sciences campus for the university in the heart of the post-industrial village, rehabilitate the former Goodwill Theatre into a performing-arts center and school, and attract offices, apartments and housing for the students, faculty and staff. If pharmaceutical companies move in, their workers also would populate the offices and apartments.

By 2017, 90 students getting the first pharmacy professional or graduate degrees — joined by subsequent classes each year, their professors, adjuncts, support staff and, possibly, professional researchers into new drugs and delivery products — all will pump new life into the village of 15,000. Then will come the nursing school and its 300-plus students and approximately 50 faculty members.

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The strategy? Tap growing areas of the economy — health care and higher education — and breathe new economic life into Johnson City.

“I don’t know if it’s the last chance for Johnson City,” said village Mayor Greg Deemie. “But it’s a chance for Johnson City to move forward into the future, bring ourselves out of this economic downturn and be able to prosper again, and bring some pride and enthusiasm back to the village. That’s what important about this.”

Binghamton University received approval in 2014 from the SUNY Board of Trustees and a $60 million commitment in the state budget for building the school in Johnson City.

Meanwhile, the Binghamton University Foundation bought a former Endicott Johnson building down the street at 48 Corliss Ave. with plans to turn it over to the university to renovate into a new home for the Decker School of Nursing, which has outgrown its home on the university's main campus in Vestal.

BU's project is due to also get $21 million in state economic-development aid as part of the $500 million five-year prize won in December by the Southern Tier, one of three regions to share in the $1.5 billion Upstate Revitalization Initiative competition. Additional SUNY money is expected as well.

Pharmacists needed

The Johnson City complex will address a national need for pharmacists and other health care professions.

By 2020, 41,400 more pharmacists will be needed nationally, according to BU. Today, 291,000 pharmacists are employed nationwide, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 2010, 918 people applied to the one public pharmacy program in New York, at the University at Buffalo, which enrolls about 125 students a year. The median annual earnings of pharmacists in 2014 was $120,950. But an even bigger part of the university’s case for a pharmacy school is how the profession can fill gaps in the health care system.

“They all learn to take care of patients nowadays,” said Gloria Meredith, appointed last spring to be the first pharmacy dean at BU after 32 years in the field, including launching a pharmacy school at Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science in Illinois.

“I come from Chicago, where pharmacists are rounding with every team in the hospital,” Meredith said. “Pharmacists in many of the drug stores are out in front. They’re no longer back behind the counter. They’re taking care of patients. They give immunizations. They’ll give you your flu shot, shingles, pneumonia, all of these immunizations. But they can also run glucose screenings. They can find out whether you’re diabetic or not.

“We want to try to ramp up some of this activity in this area, because anything we can do to stop hospital re-admissions is going to help the health of the population.”

The school plans to offer the doctor of pharmacy degree, sometimes called the “pharm-D,” and doctorate degrees pending accreditation from the national accreditation agency in the field. Meredith expects to hire 30 to 35 faculty members over time. She’s hired three key members of the leadership team.

The new school will comprise four stories, two for education and two for research, Meredith said.

“One of the education floors will be shared heavily with nursing, simply because we want nursing students there working alongside the pharmacy students.”

New nursing school

Meanwhile, Binghamton’s Decker School of Nursing is outgrowing its home in Academic Building B on the university’s main campus in Vestal. With about 350 undergraduates and about 250 graduate students, the school offers bachelor’s degrees in nursing; master’s degrees with emphasis in family and community practice and geriatrics; a joint nursing-public health administration degree; and perhaps the most in-demand specialty, psychiatric nursing, according to Dean Pamela Stewart Fahs.

“You can’t have a health sciences campus unless you have more than one school in the area,” Fahs said. “We needed resources and an area for nursing and other future health disciplines to be in the same area to make it a stronger entity than it would be if you had pharmacy over there and nursing over here.”

One of the challenges for nursing faculty now is finding places where students can carry out their clinical education, whether in hospitals, clinics or medical-practice settings. Students already are at Wilson, but it should only help to be so close by.

“The convenience of being a block away and having access ... to that type of educational opportunity is phenomenal for us,” said Kay Boland, vice president for patient care services and chief nursing officer for Wilson Memorial parent United Health Services.

Boland sees a couple of benefits for Wilson and UHS from having two health schools so close.

On a practical level for the 1,000-some nurses who work at various UHS sites, especially those at Wilson, furthering their professional education at Decker can be much more logistically simple: Walk across the street instead of arranging work schedules to get to the BU main campus, park and get to class.

But more broadly, having graduate nursing students and faculty so close will inevitably lead to more collaboration and innovation. The research and teaching facilities are enticing, too, particularly the simulation lab, complete with interactive patient-mimicking mannequins.

A BU health campus

For Binghamton University, Johnson City will become its de facto health professions campus.

In addition to the new pharmacy school and a new home for nursing, social work students will likely get practical training there. BU has proposed to SUNY officials a master of public health degree program, and in the future could consider adding other health professions such as physical therapy, occupational therapy and physician assistant programs.

It's what many other universities are doing: putting health-related, career-directed programs near hospitals, Stenger said.

"If you look at Richmond or you look at New York City or you look at Hershey, or you look at Buffalo even, they’re moving their health professions as close to the urban centers where the hospitals are as possible," Stenger said. "I’m just playing the same playbook that other people are doing."

The university also recently purchased property at 27 Jennison Ave., within site of the nursing school building site, with plans for a gerontology center as part of the Decker nursing school.

Such career-directed graduate education is where the university can grow, rather than in undergraduate enrollment, where there are many options for students across the SUNY system, Stenger said.

More practically, the move gets more space for the nursing school while opening up room on the Vestal main campus for other uses, Stenger said. Shuttle buses will link them.

BU also has invited Upstate Medical University in Syracuse to move the base for its Southern Tier residency program to the new nursing-school building at 48 Corliss Ave. Physicians in training already may serve residencies at UHS. This would help them to also work with nursing, pharmacy and social work faculty and students as well.

A medical school of its own is unlikely, Stenger said. "The liabilities, the expenses, the management of a medical school is just enormous. If you don't already have one, you probably don't want to start one."

But it's still a big step for the university, and Stenger acknowledged it's also a big deal for Johnson City's economy. Between up to 600 nursing students, 400 pharmacy students, 60 to 70 faculty members and support personnel, the mere foot traffic for retailers along nearby Main Street will surely explode.

"It'll be twice as big as the downtown center building in terms of people, and we've seen what impact 400 students and 25 faculty has done to that part of Binghamton," Stenger said. "The same thing will happen here times two."

Bob Schmidt, UHS system director of pharmacy, sees the same for his professional arena. UHS already hosts some clinical rotations for pharmacists in training from other schools, but it’s limited because the schools are far away — Buffalo, Rochester, Wilkes-Barre, for instance. But perhaps even more importantly, having pharmacy faculty and researchers so close at hand will undoubtedly stimulate the professional practice, he predicted, particularly in integrating pharmacists into health care teams.

“Pharmacists could meet with patients in a physician office, review drug regimen, make sure the patient is compliant, educate the patient on how to manage his or her therapy,” he said.

“Those kinds of things we don’t think about because we just think about the prescription. But Binghamton University coming here is really going to expand how pharmacy services are provided in our community, because you’re going to see pharmacists in settings you would never have even imagined.”

The prospect of a health campus also excites Dr. Domenico Prato, who teaches internal medicine to third-year medical students from Upstate Medical University.

Like BU, Upstate Medical is part of the State University of New York and has its main campus in Syracuse, but Upstate has a clinical campus in Binghamton serving as a base for physicians-to-be getting their early hands-on training under veteran doctors’ supervision. Prato came to a Feb. 17 session Meredith hosted at BU to update the university community on the pharmacy school plans, and expressed excitement about having full-scale health schools in the Southern Tier to benefit medical students.

“They're going to have access to the simulation lab along with with all the other programs,” he said. The learning experience for the Upstate medical center students is going to be up a notch now.”

Medical educators have been pushing the BU and SUNY administration for a pharmacy school for years, Prato said, noting the existing workforce is aging and yet is needed more and more in today’s team approach to medical care. He also predicted big spinoff benefits for Johnson City.

“The clinical campus and the Decker School of Nursing — it’s going to be a great hub, and I’m sure it’s going to attract some pharmaceutical companies and probably will enhance the employment situation in this area greatly. So this is a wonderful thing.”

The nursing and pharmacy deans imagine a virtual collaboration campus, with engineering faculty and graduate students working on projects seemingly out of science fiction movies: three-dimensional printing of prosthetic devices, even fabrication of body tissue.

“They’re creating cells that can replace your cells, or they’re going to maybe do some 3-D printing of your body parts,” Meredith said. “When you need that new heart, they’re going to have the machine to print it for you.”

Being close together may be a selling point for both schools, for faculty and prospective students, but also for research funders public and private, Meredith and Fahs said.

“But it will also serve to attract perhaps other companies to the area. ‘Oh, you’ve got a health science campus. That means there’s research going on,’” Meredith said. “‘And so, gee, maybe we’d like to have a branch of our company close by where we can take part in some of the research that’s going to happen.’”

Binghamton University plans to apply to the state to have the de facto medical campus be part of the Start-Up NY program, which grants extensive corporate and individual tax breaks to qualifying tech-based companies located on land owned or affiliated with universities. The program has been criticized for not producing many jobs yet — a 2014 state comptroller’s audit found $45 million was spent on on advertising it for only 76 new jobs in its first year, but it’s also seen as helping commercialize on research.

Housing plans

Where will all these people live? Some might be living in the 104 apartments for the Century-Sunrise project, named for the two remaining Endicott Johnson factory buildings between Baldwin and Willow streets. The project is planned by Regan Development, of Ardsley, Westchester County. It’s on 2.38 acres and will have 44 one-bedroom, 56 two-bedroom and four three-bedroom apartments, along with some commercial space.

The company is financing the project with a mix of sources, including state economic development aid; selling federal and state tax credits for building housing for low-income residents and rehabilitating historic structures; federal flood-relief funds; bonds; and nearly $1 million of its own money.

The company has developed a specialty in rehabbing old industrial buildings, Regan said. Among them: a former Packard car showroom in Buffalo, former Newark, New Jersey, offices converted to apartments and a former brassiere factory in Bayonne, New Jersey.

“We believe that there’s character in these buildings, and there’s history, and there’s a lot of people that like to live in adaptive re-use if it’s done creatively and you can do it and make it cutting-edge and make it new again,” principal Larry Regan said.

Regan likened the plan to returning Johnson City to its roots: A place where people lived within walking distance of the buildings where they worked.

“They were generators of economic development, and we’re looking to be the next generator, the next generation of that,” Regan said. “What better than to take a building that had fallen into disrepair and disuse, and find a repurposing and retool it and rebrand it in a modern and new fashion to make it attractive to the next generation of potential users?

“They’re not manufacturing people working in the building, but the people that want to live down there, that want to bring up the quality of life in that neighborhood.”

Word of the project, announced in July, has prompted other calls from people interested in Johnson City real estate, said Deemie and Town of Union Supervisor Rose Sotak.

Sotak said Union has been involved from early on in planning for the whole health district project, including assessing effects on traffic. She said she doesn’t see a potential downside. The town expects to get significant revenue for its operations from increased property values and sales taxes, and it might lead to more business on Main Street, but the main benefit, she said, is it’s creating optimism.

“We’re gonna be building new, and I think that’s just a very positive impact,” Sotak said. “I think the location is where people can see it, that it will have that high visibility.”

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Village needs revival

Johnson City has a long way to go. The situation was spelled out in the Southern Tier Regional Economic Development Council’s submission for the Upstate Revitalization Initiative: almost 14 percent of the village’s families live below the poverty line, and per capita income for all households is $21,666, compared with $32,382 for New York state.

Health care accounted for a growth in 1,400 positions, or 41 percent, from 2001 to 2014, while all other industries in the village collectively declined by 1,200 jobs, or 14 percent.

A lot has to happen yet. Architects are retained and plans drawn, but Meredith has to hire faculty and get final accreditation from the national pharmacy school accreditation agency before it can offer degrees. Regan plans to start construction this summer; it’ll take about 16 months. Students can start applying for admission in July.

Deemie would have preferred Binghamton University had picked the former Victory building, the long, white hulk visible from Route 17 once housing Endicott Johnson production. But he understands why it wasn’t picked: It’s significantly farther from the hospital and would have required getting many different parcels of land. He’s ready to move forward.

For all the money about to be poured into Johnson City and the promise of economic activity, what Deemie is most hoping for is less tangible. He points out the blocks of wooden houses lining the streets west and south of the putative health district and notes most were built by Endicott Johnson for its employees. Most still stand, but they’re not the same, Deemie said. Instead, they’ve mostly been divided into apartments housing unrelated people who might or might not know one another. Johnson City isn’t the community it once was.

“Those were family homes, and whole families lived there — Grandma and Grandpa, aunt and uncle, Mom, Dad, brother, sister — all lived in multiple apartments in the same house. They walked to work or drove to work at EJ’s.”

Now, he said, the people who work in Johnson City mostly live somewhere else. It’s not like before, when everybody it seemed was an EJ worker, family and friends. If this health district works, it might make Johnson City feel more like a cohesive community again.

“We’ll be able to be proud of our community,” Deemie said. “That’s what we’re looking forward to, and that’s what our hope is, and that as time goes, we’ll slowly fill up the storefronts and we’ll have some great times again in the village.”