The ambulance sirens still wail through the capital city’s streets. But now they wail longer. They travel farther. And for some residents of New Jersey’s seat of power, they arrive too late.
In the span of a single generation, Trenton has watched its hospitals vanish one by one — a slow bleed that has left 90,000 residents with a single emergency room and a question that hangs in the air like smoke: Who decided our lives were worth less than theirs?
The numbers tell a story the powerful would prefer remain untold. Three hospitals once served this city.
Three. Today, after decades of quiet retreat and sudden, chaotic closures, Trenton has only one remaining acute care hospital, Capital Health Regional Medical Center on Brunswick Avenue.
The former 589-bed Helene Fuld Medical Center changed its name to Capital Health Regional Medical Center to highlight its role in the Capital Health hospital system, according to a report by the Trentonian.
A pipe burst at Capital Health Regional Medical Center on Monday, February 9. The Gift Shop will remain temporarily closed, although the main lobby reopened on February 12 at 5 a.m.
Prolonged freezing temperatures have led to a spike in such incidents affecting aging underground pipes, also causing major problems for the Trenton Water Works system as crews scramble to fix multiple breaks brought on by the winter weather.
St. Francis Medical Center stood for 150 years — through wars, depressions, and the slow decay of a once-proud industrial capital. It delivered generations of Trentonians into the world. It treated their parents and buried their grandparents.
St. Francis had been on life support for many years. In December 2022, it closed its doors for good.
“I know that the uncertainty of a change in the healthcare landscape is unsettling to many Trentonians. But we should look to this change as one of opportunity,” said Mayor Reed Gusciora at that time. “I am committed to (helping) make a new comprehensive city health system that meets the needs of our residents. If we pursue the right choices instead of fixing something that is unworkable, we could have better and expanded healthcare options in our future.”
Gusciora’s promise of opportunity has gone the way of most of the Princeton opportunist’s pledges.
The explanation came wrapped in the language of inevitability: declining patient volumes, financial distress, and an aging building that would cost too much to save.
The math, they said, simply didn’t work. Never mind that the patients didn’t disappear — they just became someone else’s problem.
Capital Health-Mercer had already gone dark in 2011, its emergency room following two years later.
The pattern was established: first one, then another, each closure justified by spreadsheets and feasibility studies that somehow never seemed to apply to the hospitals serving New Jersey’s more affluent suburbs.
When St. Francis finally fell, state officials extracted a promise: a stand-alone emergency department would remain, along with outpatient clinics.
It was the kind of compromise that sounds reasonable in a Trenton hearing room but feels like betrayal in a Trenton neighborhood.
That promise lasted two years.
On June 5, 2025, residents of East Trenton woke to find flyers taped to the doors of their emergency room — posted in English, despite a majority Spanish-speaking community — announcing that structural issues with an adjoining building had forced an immediate shutdown. Not a closure in six months. Not a transition plan. Immediate.
Today, sick and injured residents must find care elsewhere.
The elsewhere, it turns out, is a two-mile drive to Capital Health Regional Medical Center for those with cars, or an eight-mile journey to Hopewell for those who can find transportation.
For a city where more than a quarter of residents live in poverty, those miles might as well be continents.
“We are deeply frustrated and disappointed,” said Al Maghazehe, president and CEO of Capital Health, in a statement that somehow managed to sound surprised by the discovery that a building they were occupying had become unsafe.
Maghazehe came to the U.S. as a student in 1977, but when the Iranian Revolution erupted a year later, he knew it wasn’t safe to return home. He eventually became a U.S. citizen and brought his parents and in-laws to Mercer County. Working his way up, he became CEO and oversaw the 1998 merger that formed Capital Health, which has since grown into a regional healthcare giant with nearly a billion dollars in annual revenue.
In 2009, he landed $756 million in federal support — the largest grant of its kind — to build a cutting-edge 233-bed medical center in Hopewell, turning Capital Health into a major regional healthcare player instead of the local neighborhood hospital.
City Councilwoman Crystal Feliciano, born at St. Francis in 1970, learned of her birthplace’s fate the same way most residents did — through rumor and newspaper reports.
The demolition of the 150-year-old hospital is scheduled to begin in October, a process that will blanket nearby homes with dust for two to three years while asbestos removal proceeds without, by some accounts, the necessary state permits.
A community meeting called to explain the demolition drew approximately 30 people to Trenton Central High School’s auditorium.
When a resident asked to see the engineering report documenting the structural damage that justified the emergency closure, they were told to ask someone else. The hospital system that once occupied the building might have it. Or perhaps the city’s inspection department. No one seemed certain.
“The buildings are not in good shape; we all know that,” said Dan Moen, the former president of St. Francis who now oversees its destruction. “It stood the test of time, and it’s been the source of many good things here. But it’s time to take it down. Take it down to the ground.”
What he did not say — what no one in power will say — is that taking it down to the ground leaves nothing in its place.
Mayor Reed Gusciora speaks of opportunity, of eventual redevelopment, of senior housing and medical arts facilities that might one day rise from the rubble.
But “one day” is cold comfort to a mother watching her child struggle to breathe, calculating whether the ambulance from Hopewell will arrive in time.
The 15th Legislative District delegation called the latest closure “nothing short of devastating.” The word choice is apt but familiar.
Devastation, after all, has become the normal condition for those who must watch their city’s infrastructure crumble while the decision-makers live somewhere else, receive care somewhere else, matter somewhere else.
Trenton remains the capital of New Jersey. The dome of the Statehouse still gleams above the city. But the people who walk the streets below it have learned a hard truth: living in the capital does not mean your life is capital.
The hospitals are gone. The explanations remain. And the ambulances keep wailing, traveling farther now, carrying the people of Trenton past the empty buildings where they used to be healed — past the promises, past the press releases, past the point of caring.
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