Looking for Ways to Slice ‘Pie’ at Old Navy Hospital

In the last three weeks, Navy Lt. Gene Elliot has escorted two families through “the compound”--San Diego’s Navy Hospital.

Cameras in hand, they walked through rows of the tile-roofed, pink stucco clinic buildings. They gazed nostalgically at the 63-year-old administration building with its arched doorways, elegant parapets and dazzling view of the bay. And they sat by the fish pond in one of the palm-tree-shrouded courtyards.

They wanted to photograph this majestic old hospital complex before it was gone, Elliot said.

“They said they wanted to get it all recorded because their children were born here, and they heard it was all going to be torn down and made into a park,” he said.

Actually, the families don’t need to worry for a while. Although some or all of the old medical buildings on Inspiration Point are expected to be demolished, that’s not likely for several years.

Not until 1988 are the 34 1/2 acres of ponds, parking lots, infectious waste disposal areas and one large pink clinic building after another scheduled to be turned over to the city as an addition to Balboa Park.

The transfer will mark the final step in a controversial land swap in which the city in 1981 agreed to accept the old hospital and $6.8 million in return for giving up 35.9 acres of park land nearby to the Navy.

Not far from the old pink buildings, the Navy now is building a new $293-million medical complex to replace the outdated Spanish-style hospital. The new structure, a gray fortress rising from the southwest wall of Florida Canyon, is scheduled for completion in 1988.

While the final exchange is three years away, interest in the transfer is growing.

For months, community groups, ranging from hobbyists seeking a home for their railway museum to planners seeking larger quarters for the city library, have inquired about using the Navy Hospital site. Navy retirees have been discussing the trade, Elliot said; there are strong feelings about a hospital where each month 400 babies are born.

Earlier this month, the City Council’s Rules Committee created a 17-member task force, composed largely of architects and planners, to decide what to do with the land and report to the council by mid-1986. Mayor Roger Hedgecock and the task force plan their own tour of the grounds on Wednesday.

The interest is not premature, said city Park and Recreation Department director George Loveland. “If all goes well,” he said, “my hope is that, crack out of the box in 1988 (when the city gets the land), there will be expanded public use in that area.”

What can you do with a park site crowded with buildings--medical buildings at that?

Loveland said he doesn’t know yet.

Years ago, before the Navy acquired the land, Inspiration Point was an undeveloped portion of Balboa Park. And one option for the city--a cheap one, Loveland said--would be to ask the Navy to convert the grounds back to raw land.

“We could ask the Navy to return it to us cleared, with the buildings and foundations removed, and the land reseeded,” Loveland said, and the city would not pay a cent.

At the other extreme, the city could spend “in the high millions” rehabilitating the old buildings and offering them to community groups as offices and museums.

Actually, Loveland said, the solution will probably be somewhere in the middle--retaining several buildings and razing the rest to create a “passive park” with lawns and picnic tables.

Ann Hix, chairwoman of the new hospital task force, agreed. Hix said that although she was trying to keep an open mind about what to do with the property, “my absolutely personal preference is to return at least a portion to open park land.”

One of the committee’s first tasks will be to investigate the condition of the buildings to see which ones comply with city codes. Though further studies are needed, it appears that most of them do not, Loveland said.

Of the 17 buildings that the city will be acquiring, only five appear structurally sound, he said--the chapel, the library, two maintenance sheds and Building 29, an outpatient building constructed in the late 1960s.

Loveland agreed Building 29, which resembles a bland, post-modern apartment building, was ugly. “Yeah,” he said, “but it’s new.”

Meanwhile the elegant, Spanish-style clinic and administration buildings may not remain. “It’s difficult to determine what significance these 50-year-old hospital buildings have,” Loveland said. “They were not designed as masterpieces.

“With Building 1 (the administration building), you’ve got the view and the two spires. But you get inside, and it’s your typical government bureaucratic building.”

Maintenance for the old buildings would be “a nightmare,” he said. “The Navy has a lot of light-duty sailors who can come in and wash floors. We (the city) don’t have light-duty gardeners.”

Capt. William J. O’Donnell, the Navy’s officer in charge of construction at the new hospital, agreed that the old buildings might cost too much to keep. “Building 1 is pretty and the quadrangles (the clinic buildings) are pretty. But if you step back and take a common-sense look, they were built long before people worried about earthquakes.

“These are hollow-tile buildings. In a big earthquake, it is my considered opinion, this would be rubble,” O’Donnell said.

Other problems in the old hospital complex include leaky pipes, faulty wiring and problematical heat. When the Navy leaves, it plans to demolish the hospital steam plant, an ancient contraption with huge boilers and a maze of pipes that has been the source of heat for all the Navy Hospital buildings.

If the hospital site doesn’t sound like the ideal setting for a park, Loveland doesn’t mind. Over the last century, Balboa Park has shrunk from 1,400 acres to its present 1,100 acres, so the parks director said he appreciates getting 35 acres back.

And if the added land is covered with buildings, Loveland said he can handle that. “We’ve built parks where there were once canyons and mountains,” he said. “We’re excited about this as an exciting addition--a re-addition to the park.”