He doesn’t know what that bunker-like area was either, but he sees it, too, while traveling along W.Va. Route 2-South near Center Wheeling.
That’s about all everyone sees that’s left of the former Ohio Valley Medical Center campus, and for a guy like Bernie Albertini, it’s emotional, and it’s weird.
First, he was in charge of the pharmacy in 2007, then the pharmacy and the food, and then there was something else and again, something else on top of that until Albertini found himself four years later as the administrator in charge of the seven-structure campus at 22nd and Chapline streets.
“Was it a coal repository? That’s what I’m wondering. I wasn’t back in that area very often because the men that worked back there had everything under control,” said Albertini, the chief operating officer of the new-troubled East Ohio Regional Hospital before he resigned in September 2024. “I know the boiler house was back there, but I’m not sure what that area was used for while I was here.
“The way it looks, though, it makes me think if it was the area where coal was stored for heat back in the days of the Ohio Valley General Hospital,” he said. “That’s the way people did things back in the early 1900s when the hospital went into operation. When the West Tower opened in 1980, the original building was made an office building, and I bet maintenance made a work area down there.”
There was the two-sided nurse’s residence, the South Tower, the original OVGH/East Tower, the Education/Administration Building, the West Tower, and the Hillcrest Behavioral Health complex at the corner of 22nd and Chapline streets, and the center acquired those seven structures along with the former Ohio Valley Professional Building from Medical Properties Trust (MPT) located across the street.
That three-story, 32,000-square-foot professional center is now the headquarters for the Wheeling Police Department, but the 800,000-square-feet worth of building space that was OVMC has been demolished over the past two years.
“It was really an amazing place for a lot of different reasons, but one of them is because there was one boiler system that worked for the entire campus. When they added a building to the campus, they just connected it to the same boiler plant system,” Albertini said. “The steam heat filled the whole campus.
“There were repairs but that’s why there were multiple boilers back there,” he said. “It’s an interesting decision that was made to build a campus but to continue depending on the same system that was installed back at the turn of the (20th) century, but I also think it says a lot about what they built back then. That’s pretty cool.”
Dust to Dust
Albertini is a resident of Wheeling so, like many others, he makes frequent trips to the Centre Market area to take advantage of the pizza parlor and the shops and eateries inside and surrounding the north and south market houses.
A recent trip, though, struck him differently.
“Now the campus is gone. Amazing. I’m not used to it yet, that’s for sure,” the former administrator admitted. “The other day I was driving along (W.Va.) Route 2 and you can see St. John (the Divine Greek Orthodox) Church for the first time in my lifetime. You never could see that church, and that’s when it really hit me that OVMC is gone now.
“What’s being built there – the cancer (treatment and research) center – is going to be great for this region, so I’m glad the property will still be medical. But the skyline is changed forever,” he said. “I was down at Centre Market, and now that the parking garage is gone now, too, you can see straight through and it’s all gone. It’s really weird for me.”
Work has continued on the four acres of property since the West Tower – the final vertical piece of the $7 million demolition by bid-winner Beinke Wrecking Inc. of New Jersey – vanished, and, according to Wheeling City Manager Bob Herron. Now, those crew members operating excavators are searching for underground remnants.
“Now that the structures have been removed, the crews have been digging to make sure they didn’t miss anything because there is something new coming in the near future and it’s very important there’s no surprises when that construction process begins,” the city manager explained. “Taking care of the foundations and other things they have found is part of the project, and they have removed a lot more from what was under the ground on the campus.
“There have been foundations and basements and things of that nature that they have found,” Herron said. “And I am sure WVU Health will continue to prepare the property for their new building because there’s a lot of dirt movement that needs to be done before the cancer center project can begin.”
Albertini hopes the history of the medical center will be preserved for the future.
“We’re talking about an original hospital that was constructed without central. That’s why you saw so many individual AC units in all the windows … could you imagine that today? No way,” he said with a chuckle. “The way the elevators worked is unsafe by today’s standards, but (architect) Edward F. Stevens designed it and built a heck of a building because there weren’t a lot of problems with it through the years.
“I was glad to see the historians were able to get the neon letters (OVGH) off of the smokestack before the crews knocked down that part of the building, and I’m looking forward to seeing them in their new spot,” Albertini added. “The medical center was an important place for a lot of people, so we need to preserve as much of that history as we can.”
