Skywalks as an alternative to closing Second Avenue won’t work for PCI

Closing a stretch of Second Avenue SE is necessary to facilitate patient flow through the Physicians' Clinic of Iowa's proposed new medical “mall” at 10th Street SE and Second Avenue SE, the physicians group has said.

The group and other representatives of the new Cedar Rapids Medical District are holding open houses today, from 4 to 7 p.m., and Thursday, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., in The Ballroom at the Crowne Plaza Five Seasons Hotel.to discuss the Medical District as well as PCI's plans to build the mall inside the district.

As for the PCI mall, skywalks across Second Avenue SE won't work, the doctors have said.

Even so, Mercy Medical Center now is in the process of building a new skywalk over Eighth Street SE in the Medical District that will connect its brand-new medical building at Eighth Avenue SE and Eighth Street SE to the Mercy Medical Center hospital. It's the second skywalk that the hospital will have built. One exists that connects a second medical building, which is owned by the hospital and leased by PCI, to the hospital across Eighth Street SE.

Karl Keeler, executive vice president and chief operating officer at Mercy Medical Center, on Wednesday put the cost of the new, heated-and-air-conditioned skywalk at between $1.3 million and $1.4 million. He said it is longer than a skywalk that would be needed to leap Second Avenue SE, and he noted that the new skywalk also is connected to a parking ramp on the hospital's campus.

Keeler said Mercy Medical Center did not ask the city to close Eighth Street SE as an alternative to building the new skywalk.

“Since it's a main artery to the Interstate and integral to traffic around here, we didn't ask to close it,” Keeler said. ” … It's a vital street.”

Keeler said the hospital also figured it would cost as much or more to close Eighth Street SE as to build a new skywalk if the city billed the hospital for the related street and traffic-signal changes that go with closing a street.

Leslie Hart, associate traffic engineer for the city of Cedar Rapids, said last week that the city is looking to change one-way Seventh and Eighth streets SE from Third to Eighth avenues SE to two-ways as the city looks to close a portion of Second Avenue SE, convert portions of Second and Third avenues SE into two-way streets as well as Fourth and Fifth avenues SE. Keeler said Medical Medical Center endorses the idea of converting a part of Seventh and Eighth streets SE to two-ways from one-ways.

Twenty-five percent of the hospital's patients come from outside Linn County, and he said the one-way Seventh and Eighth streets SE are hard for patients to navigate in and around the hospital campus.