Bellevue Hospital Center has long been on the front line of global health crises. But rising to the challenge of New York City’s first Ebola case may be the biggest test of the grit and adrenaline that saw it through the AIDS crisis, the Sept. 11 attack and Hurricane Sandy.

No place is better suited to the task of handling Ebola safely than the seventh-floor isolation unit where Dr. Craig Spencer, the Ebola patient, is being treated, according to doctors familiar with that special locked ward at Bellevue, a sprawling 22-story building in Manhattan that is the flagship of the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation, the nation’s largest public hospital system.

The isolation ward was set up over 20 years ago amid a New York epidemic of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, and its high-powered ventilation system, special antechambers and highly trained staff were key factors in rapidly containing the spread of TB in the city. Its success was part of what made the reputation of Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, now director of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and then the head of the city health department’s TB bureau.