altitude of the passage itself, that the solitary pedestrian feels himself
drawn into association with all the extravagances of the poets.

Bellevue Hospital

1st Ave. to East River, 26th to 30th St. IRT Lexington Ave. subway (local) to
28th St.; or 3d Ave. el to 28th St.; or 2d Ave. el to 23d St.; or 1st Ave. bus to
26th St.

One of the twenty-six municipal institutions under the supervision of
the Department of Hospitals, Bellevue is the oldest general hospital on
the North American continent. Probably no other hospital in the world
admits so many patients and treats such a diversity of ailments. Contagious
cases, however, are transferred to the near-by Willard Parker Hospital. The
number of cases for 1938 totaled more than the population of San Fran-
cisco: 65,352 admissions and births, 634,242 outpatient visits, and 28,253
ambulance calls.

A city complete in itself, Bellevue covers approximately twelve square
city blocks. Its twenty-five buildings contain 102 wards and cost more than
twenty-three million dollars. The massive eight-story Psychiatric Hospital
at the northwest corner, of clean red brick trimmed with natural gray
stone, exemplifies the hospital's program of modernization. A new Ad-
ministration Building with three chapels is under construction (1939).

Bellevue serves a heavily populated area of the East Side between East
Houston and Forty-second Streets, east of Sixth Avenue. Hospitalization,
medical care, and clinical treatment are provided without cost to anyone
who is unable to pay for them, investigation as to ability to pay being
made after, and not before, admission is granted and treatment begun.
Bellevue is a free, not a charity, hospital, and according to a city law, it
must accept any applicant who resides in its district and requires medical
treatment.

The ambulance service operates on a twenty-four-hour basis, and an am-
bulance and doctor can be dispatched within thirty seconds after a call for
aid has been received. Bellevue's morgue, the official mortuary for New
York County, is in the Pathological Building on Twenty-ninth Street. The
same building also houses the Medical Examiner's office, where New
York's official autopsies are performed, and the headquarters of the Mortu-
ary Division of the city Department of Hospitals. About twenty thousand
bodies pass each year through Bellevue's morgue, eighty-five hundred of
which are never claimed. All unclaimed bodies are photographed and de-