Glendale Adventist Selling Part of Satellite Hospital Land

Glendale Adventist Medical Center is selling part of the grounds of a satellite hospital on South Chevy Chase Drive.

Hospital spokesman Kevin Edgerton said the sale would substantially lower the main facility’s operating costs and eliminate 152 hospital beds.

“The health-care industry is shifting,” he said. “The need for beds is decreasing as outpatient procedures are increasing.”

Group Mariposa of Glendale is buying one parcel, 80,000 square feet on Adams Street between Windsor Road and Garfield Avenue, for a 300-resident retirement center. The hospital refused to disclose the purchase price. Work on the $12.5-million project will start in October or November, and it is scheduled to be completed in the spring of 1991.

Nursing Home Proposed

The developer’s plans coincided with desires of hospital administrators, who had said earlier that they hoped for a buyer who would use the buildings for a nursing home.

For competitive reasons, one condition of the sale was that the buyer not be another acute-care hospital, Edgerton said.

The hospital sold another 80,000-square-foot plot for $1.6 million to Glendale Community College for use as an adult community training center. The college will use two apartment buildings on the land for the facility, scheduled to open in September.

On the same site, the hospital is keeping a family residency program and physicians’ offices leased to Hawthorne Community Medical Group.

Group Mariposa had originally intended to buy all the land but later agreed to allow Glendale Community College to buy half of it.

“Glendale Community College was looking for a site for their center,” said Bob Cable, Group Mariposa general partner. “We agreed to take a piece out of escrow and let them buy it.”

The land was originally the site of a satellite campus, which closed in 1987. Administrators of Glendale Adventist said the campus had been in financial trouble since 1978, when the not-for-profit medical center bought it from ailing Glendale Community Hospital.

Glendale Adventist had opened several special-care programs at the Chevy Chase facility, including those for alcoholics and the deaf, but low occupancy rates forced administrators to phase out almost all functions during the last two years of operation.

The only program remaining at the Chevy Chase facility is the family practice residency program.