By Sophia Lian
One of the nation’s top cardiac care community hospitals is in Roslyn.
St. Francis Hospital is on the land that Flower Hill’s founding father, Carlos W. Munson, bought at his wife’s request after observing groups of drunken men congregating there around the year 1900.
This plot of land was the starting place for what eventually became the grounds of St. Francis Hospital.
The Munsons encountered nuns from the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary when the nuns stopped at their door hoping to sell handmade embroidery for charity.
This meeting grew into the formation of a relationship between the Munsons and the nuns that led the Munsons to offer 15 acres of their land and a house, known as “Elderfields,” to the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary.
By 1922, the Elderfields land was used to host summer camps for poor children from New York City.
In 1937, St. Francis became a children’s cardiac sanitarium that worked to help impoverished kids suffering from rheumatic heart conditions.
In 1954, it expanded to treat adults. St. Francis Hospital is now part of a larger mission to fight cardiovascular disease. It is the hospital that performs the most open-heart surgeries and cardiac catheterizations in New York.
You can visit the Roslyn Landmark Society’s website for more information about St. Francis Hospital and other local historic sites.
Sources:
Franciscan Missionaries of Mary USA Province. “St. Francis Hospital.”Accessed June 21, 2024. https://www.fmmusa.org/index.p…
Roslyn Landmark Society. “The history of St. Francis Hospital by Mitchell Schwartz, the newest trustee for the Roslyn Landmark Society.” Accessed June 21, 2024. https://www.roslynlandmarks.or…
Sophia Lian is a Roslyn Landmark Society 2024 Gardiner Young Scholars Program high school intern as part of the new “Young Historians” collaboration between the Roslyn Landmark Society and Blank Slate Media.