The campus of the former Ohio Valley Medical Center may not appear as a maze from the exterior of the six buildings along 22nd Street, but on the inside there are skywalks, stairwells, and passages that allowed employees to stroll from one building to the next without taking a single step outside.
Mark Boehm knows every path of that interior labyrinth, though, because of his 28 years as a member of OVMC’s Engineering Department.
“Point A to Point B, right? The best way to go,” he said. “It took a little time, but it was important to learn because sometimes you had to get to a certain area as quickly as possible.”
Boehm became known as the “Doorman” because of the 800,000 square feet of space with thousands of entryways. In fact, in one of the building’s basements, there are hundreds of wooden doors awaiting repair, but the “Doorman” hasn’t touched them just yet.
“We’ll see what the new people want,” he said. “Some people like doors, and some people don’t, and I know there is interest in these buildings. You’d be surprised how much can go wrong with a door in a hospital, but I’ll fix them if those folks want to keep me around for a while.
“There has been interest in these buildings; I know that,” Boehm confirmed. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. I guess it all depends on how much people want to spend.”
Concern from the Start
Boehm is now a city of Wheeling employee after receiving paychecks from OVMC, Alecto, MPT, CBRE, and MOC out of Pittsburgh. At 61 years old, he figures he still has a job because of his knowledge of buildings, the history of repairs and because he’s managed something with nothing one time after another.
He saw signs early on, too, when he first started nearly 30 years ago.
“I knew the decline had started even before I got hired here back then because there were layoffs and things like that,” Boehm recalled. “Even back then I would hear from people in engineering that this and that wasn’t going to get fixed the way it needed to be, and that was a sign right there that there were money problems. It was all about band aids.
“Then we started to hear there was no money for maintenance, so we were asked to do what we could,” he said. “That’s why we started making the joke that we could do the impossible with nothing. That’s how it felt, anyway.”
Once the decision was made by the managing non-profit to sell both OVMC and EORH to Alecto-West Virginia, Boehm and his co-workers held hope issues would be addressed, updates and improvements would take place, and the finances would allow for growth instead of perpetual decline.
“And at first, it sure seemed like night and day because we saw them put a bunch of money into the buildings here,” Boehm said. “They did some remodeling in the Education and Administration Building, and they also put in a new patient monitoring system into the West Tower. We all took that stuff to be very positive for the future of the hospital.
“It seemed as if they were going to make things work here, but then I started thinking that they didn’t have a clue about this area and the people here,” he said. “We lost a lot of doctors and other employees to other places because of how much people were getting paid back then. They actually asked the doctors to take pay cuts.”
How the business plan ultimately led to the closure of the campuses in Center Wheeling and Martins Ferry remains a mystery to the 1,200 former employees and thousands more of patients. Boehm believes, however, that it came down to California people not understanding northern Appalachian folks.
“I really do believe that they were taken by surprise by the dynamics of this area and that they were just used to what they had on the West Coast. We don’t have that big population or the resources around here. I don’t think they knew how to deal with what was happening around here,” Boehm said. “That’s when they just stopped taking care of these buildings and the people who worked here. The writing was on the wall.”
State of Structures
Some of the buildings were constructed in the 1890s; some were erected in the 1960s and 1970s, and newest structure is the East Tower which was opened in 1980.
Together, the OVMC campus offers 800,000 square feet, and in Boehm’s opinion, only a significant investment stands between viability and the wrecking ball.
“I think we all know that anything can be fixed if you want to spend the money,” he said. “Structurally, the Nurse’s Residence is a really strong building, especially the newer section of it. It has cast-in-place concrete and that makes it a substantial building.
“But it’s the mechanicals that are the problems, like the electrical and the plumbing. Those would have to be addressed if the city wanted to keep it because when the two sections were constructed, people didn’t need the air-conditioning every moment of the day,” Boehm explained. “Plus, all of the plumbing is 50-60 years old and that means it is passed its lifetime.”
He feels the same about the original hospital, a seven-floor facility opened 1892 with 200 beds that is now known as the East Building.
“The original hospital has had some additions to it, but it is basically more than 100 years old,” Boehm said. “That means that there has been a lot of work on it as far as the electrical service and the plumbing, but there are still issues with it. There is air- conditioning is some of the areas, but there are also a lot of window units that you can see from the front of the East Tower.
“But the same is true with the East Tower as is with the Nurse’s Residence,” he said. It’s all about how much money you want to throw at it.”
2021 Expectations
Wheeling City Manager Bob Herron said in August the bid for the renovations to the Valley Professional Center to transform it into the new home of the Wheeling Police Headquarters will be released in mid-2021. At this time, the city’s police department has 70-plus officers and as many as 20 civilian employees that now operate in a 4,600-square-foot space inside the Ohio County Courthouse in downtown Wheeling.
The future of the rest of the OVMC campus will be determined by what Wheeling’s Council is willing to approve the city manager to do. Interest in the West Tower and the former home of Hillcrest has been communicated to Herron by members of the medical industry, and those discussions continue.
“I have seen a lot of mismanagement through the years, and I have seen a lot of things that haven’t been taken care of the way they should be,” Boehm said. “That’s why the West Tower has a lot of issues right now, but those things can be fixed the right way in the future. It is a substantial building, and everything is very solid; that’s for sure.
“Now the Hillcrest building was constructed in the early 1970s, and it’s had some issues because of the way it was built,” he explained. “Right now, that building is pretty tight, but there have been some big issues with leaks and water getting inside. That’s because the decision-makers at the time decided to build it as cheaply as they could, in my opinion.”
But the future home for the city’s law enforcement agency?
“The Valley Professional Center, I think, will be a good place for the police because it’s a good area for them to have their headquarters,” he said. “It’s a good building, and I know they are going to do some things to it, and that will be good because they are in a rat hole right now. Those folks need the space that the Valley Professional Center will give them.”
