Reassessing the People’s Hospital in the Bronx
After a militant 1970 hospital takeover birthed a pioneering detox program in the South Bronx, New York City is now studying what it dismantled, and what redress requires amid an ongoing overdose crisis.
Gloria Cruz (left) and Jack (no last name given) talk with newsmen on July 14, 1970, about why the Young Lords took over the old nurses’ residence at Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx. (Bettmann Archive / Getty Images)
At 3 a.m. on a summer morning in July 1970, a group of activists climbed into the back of a rented U-Haul truck believing they might not make it out alive.
The action was led by members of the Young Lords — a predominantly Puerto Rican revolutionary organization — and included members of the patient-worker “Think Lincoln” committee and the Health Revolutionary Unity Movement (HRUM), a formation of left-wing black and Puerto Rican hospital workers. Roughly 150 people were involved in the takeover of the hospital’s nurses’ residence building in the South Bronx on July 14, 1970.
By dawn, they were inside. A Puerto Rican flag hung from the building. A banner read: “Welcome to the People’s Hospital.”
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