Central Consulting and Contracting Starts Work on Six-Story Parking Structure

NEW YORK – Central Consulting and Contracting, a New York City-based medical and commercial construction firm, was awarded the contract to design/build a six-story, 605-space parking garage on the St. Barnabas Hospital campus in the Bronx.

The new 210,000-square-foot structure will be built on a site that is currently an existing surface parking lot.

St. Barnabas Hospital is a 461-bed, nonprofit, nonsectarian, acute care community hospital and Level I trauma center authorized to treat the most critically ill and severely injured patients. As a state-designated stroke center and state-designated AIDS center, it provides access to much-needed services in the community, according to a hospital statement.

The parking garage project has been in the making for the last two and a half years and will cost $23.3 million, with $19.8 million financed in triple tax-exempt bonds by the New York City Capital Resource Corp., a subsidiary of the city’s Economic Development Corp. authorized under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. New York City has a severe parking issue where even residents even struggle to find somewhere to keep their vehicle for even short periods of time. Many have turned to solutions like this NYC vehicle storage facility if they know they won’t be requiring it for some length of time.

The contracting firm, which has completed previous projects for St. Barnabas, will oversee development, hire and supervise required contractors and an estimated 173 union workers, monitor programming, design development and construction documents and maintain control of the pre-cast structure’s budget and schedule.

Construction is expected to take from 12 to 14 months.

Though the parking garage is not physically attached to the hospital facilities, Central Consulting and Contracting President and CEO Richard Simone anticipates challenges inherent in construction in busy, operational medical facilities.

“In the early planning stages, the decision was made to use a drilled caisson system, which is more costly, rather than a driven pile system for noise abatement,” he said.

The company has also planned the logistics to assure access for emergency vehicles including ambulances, police and fire department vehicles in common driveways, including the Senior Health Center.

The company has previously completed new construction and renovation projects for medical facilities that remained open and operational during construction, including St. Peter’s Hospital, Englewood Hospital and Medical Center, Lenox Hill Hospital and Manhattan Eye, Ear & Throat Institute, among others.