Planning to tear down the West Tower at Covenant Health began about five years ago. Now that the demolition is complete, construction on Hope Tower, which will be six stories, is set to begin in a couple of weeks.
Covenant Health Vice President Kelly McDaniel says not all the floors will open initially.
“When the Hope Tower opens in about two years, it will open with 90 beds initially. We’re going to occupy the first floors, but floors two, three and four will be patient rooms and then we’re shelling the top floors. And then we have the ability of adding on an additional 60 in the future,” he says.
The West Texas healthcare provider is working to designate specific buildings for specific patient needs.
“Back in the past, our critical care beds and other beds, we’re all just kind of mixed up. So we’ve been working hard to get a little more organization to those types of services. So, for example, the east tower, is mainly critical care. We’ve been kind of organizing our beds and towers,” he explains.
The West Tower building opened in the 1950s and, McDaniel says, as the years went by city codes changed.
“We really didn’t want to tear it down,” he says. “If we could have found a way to continue using it, we would have. The problem was the building was so old and so out of compliance with current code, there was no way for us to bring it up to current codes to put patients in that building.”
People coming to the new building will now have options for parking. A survey showed that many people wanted a parking lot.
“We want more parking. We want more surface parking. People do not like garage parking. There’s just a certain population, they would rather park six blocks on the street and walk to us in the rain than walk in a parking garage and take a sky bridge over to us. If you drive around the hospital, you will see them parking significant distances from the hospital. We’re going to add a little over 200 new parking spaces right in the very front of the building.”
When it was fully operational – a long time ago -- the West Tower housed about 250 patient rooms in its eight stories. More recently, it housed office space and a rehab center on one floor
“Through the years it went from being full, to in the last few years, we had one floor that had patients—that was our rehab department. Once we relocated them, they were the last patient care to be in that building. Once they moved out, all we could really use it for was office space. We needed clinical space. We needed patient rooms,” he says.
McDaniel says Hope Tower will be connected to other hospital buildings through a small basement. And, after all is said and done, Hope Tower will not be as large as what was demolished.
“We will have much more capacity for patient care, while being 400,000 square feet small than what we started with.”
Covenant surveyed many across its West Texas footprint and will be changing names of existing towers. Respondents said they want Covenant to be more open about it faith-based ties. With that in mind, the east tower will become the Faith Tower, the south tower will become Mercy Tower and the heart center will become the Peace Tower.
“There’s nothing Methodist about those words. There’s nothing Catholic about those words. There’s nothing Baptist about those words. Those words speak to really all Christians.”
The Keep the Covenant Campaign, which includes caregivers, community and friends, raised $25 million to help fund Hope Tower and other upcoming projects.
The demolition took down the west tower, a birthing center, the former children’s hospital and a professional office building. And about $100,000 was reaped from the demolition, based on feedback that Covenant recycle more.
“As we were looking at the demo, we saw a great opportunity to really respond to that request. So we’ve recycled about 92 to 94 percent of the material that were demoed have or will be recycled,” he says.