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After a 40-year run as a teaching hospital, the Creighton University Medical Center is to be resuscitated as a mammoth apartment building with up to 700 units, open-air atriums, a rooftop pool and an enclosed retail corridor that looks out to a new lake.

NuStyle Development plans to add a couple of floors — expanding the midtown institution to 10 levels and 1 million square feet — solidifying it as the metro area’s largest single structure of market-rate apartments.

But the housing infusion is just part of what officials bill as a broader revival.

A signature pedestrian bridge longer than two football fields is to be constructed eastward across the North Freeway, linking the repurposed mixed-use area to the heart of the Creighton University campus.

New walking and biking trails around the area should help forge pathways into the surrounding Gifford Park neighborhood to the west and Mutual of Omaha’s Midtown Crossing to the southwest.

Such connective elements — along with the 2.5-acre lake, fountain and sandy recreational area on the apartment complex site — are intended to help restore some of the neighborhood feel to this urban pocket that NuStyle says was lost in part by the Interstate exchange construction decades ago.