Allan Appel Photo
The beam, with signatures, rises.
Fair Haven was beaming Wednesday as Fair Haven Community Health Center’s (FHCHC) CEO Dr. Suzanne Lagarde presided over a festive “topping out.”
That’s a traditional ceremony marking the hoisting into place of the final beam into a steel superstructure — in this instance, the new clinic building rising at the corner of Grand Avenue and James Street.
Fifty people — staffers, funders, friends, neighbors, and clients — gathered early both to sign their names on the beam with Magic Marker and to watch it be hoisted high into the air.
A history-recording drone hovered even higher above. People on the ground took out cameras to record the beam being bolted into place by two non-acrophobic workers waiting atop the steel frame.
“If you signed [the beam], you’ll be part of this building as you are part of this community,” Lagarde said. ”And it will serve this community for a century to come.”
The building will feature 26 new examining rooms, counseling and conference rooms, a pharmacy, and multi-purpose space for training, digital literacy, and other services for the anchoring health organization’s many underserved and non-English speaking clients.
The expanded campus plan, which the City Plan Commission approved in January last year, is addressing what Lagarde termed “an explosive growth” in the need for maternity services and, in coordination with Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Services (IRIS), medical and related services for refugee and asylum seekers.
Unique individual patient visits rose in 2023 by nearly 8 percent, she reported, to 34,391 unique patient visits, and the new building will enable FHCHC to accommodate another 10 to 20,000 more.
Lagarde noted that the building is “the first major capital project in the 50-plus years of FHCHC and the first in decades” along Grand Avenue.
The pricetag for the entire project, including the new building, the previous expansion of the parking lot facing adjacent Woolsey Street, and future renovations to the current clinic headquarters at 374 Grand Avenue is $41 million, said Lagarde. About half of that money is in hand.
The only change to the City Plan Commission-approved plans, she reported, is that FHCHC has nixed a splash pad (due to concerns about water access and infection). It has substituted a labyrinth / maze / meeting space outdoors, adjacent to the new building, instead.
Suzanne Lagarde, Maritza Bond, and Karen DuBois-Walton
For City Public Health Director Martiza Bond, who signed her name, the date, and the word “congratulations” on the beam, the occasion was personal and particularly meaningful. She recalled her grandmother, who spoke no English, also receiving medical care at FHCHC, and the importance of the culturally sensitive way it was delivered.
“Not only was I raised here as a child,” she said, “I was a patient. I was nurtured here. It was my inspiration to enter public health. It’s such a good feeling raising this last beam, knowing it will be here for years to come.”
If all goes well, the building will be open to receive its first patients in the spring of 2025.
Those interested in helping with the ongoing capital campaign, which is headed by former Mayor John DeStefano and Marta Moret, should be in touch with FHCHC Development Director Karen Nemiah: [email protected].
Changing the entrance of Fair Haven for the better. Love being a patient of FHCHC. Excited to walk that labyrinth. Grateful that FHCHC asks for community input all along the way.