Foxy Development's $150M Perennial Rises on 18-Year-Vacant Hospital

Forest Hills’ former Parkway Hospital, shuttered since 2008 and only recently cleared of its abandoned medical equipment, is being rebuilt from the inside as The Perennial, a $150 million affordable and supportive-housing complex at 70-35 113th Street, developer Foxy Development and nonprofit partner Selfhelp Community Services told QNS this week. General contractor Suffolk Construction has spent eight months gutting the 1963 building of decades-old debris left behind when the hospital closed. “They just packed up and left. I’m talking hospital beds, computer monitors, medical equipment. You name it,” Suffolk project manager Sean McCloskey told the outlet.

Why it matters

The project is a conversion, not a teardown, and city permit records confirm it: the Department of Buildings filing covering the work is an alteration, not a new-building application, meaning Foxy Development is keeping the old hospital’s steel and concrete frame rather than demolishing and rebuilding it. For developers weighing what to do with an obsolete institutional building, that is the decision this story actually documents: an aging hospital shell, dead for nearly two decades in one of Queens’ densest residential neighborhoods, pencils out as a gut renovation into 145 units of family and senior housing rather than a ground-up replacement, with a nonprofit operator, Selfhelp, lined up to run the senior and formerly-homeless units. The site’s own paper trail shows why it sat empty so long: it took a 2016 foreclosure sale before any redevelopment plan could move forward.

The numbers

NYC Department of Buildings records show the controlling permit, job Q01004604-S5, was filed by Foxy Management and issued for the entire job with 145 proposed dwelling units across 153,527 square feet of construction floor area, filed August 2024. Public accounts of the project, including QNS’s, describe 144 apartments (20 family units and 124 senior units, 44 of the latter reserved for formerly homeless seniors) plus a 34,000-square-foot Forest Hills Jewish Center and a 17-space garage, a one-unit gap from the DOB count that likely reflects a superintendent’s unit. NYC ACRIS records show the underlying parcel, block 2248 lot 228, last sold at arm’s length in 2016, when referee Joseph Risi deeded it out of foreclosure to Auberge Grand Central LLC for $1,000,000, well below the $150 million now being spent to convert it. The site later passed through several affiliated ownership entities, most recently to PWH Foxy LLC in 2022, before Foxy Development and Selfhelp broke ground in September 2025.

What’s next

Occupancy is now targeted for February 2028, pushed back from an original December 2027 date by a six-week delay in the abatement permit needed to remove asbestos from the old hospital structure, according to QNS. That kind of slip is a known risk on adaptive-reuse jobs in New York, where an old institutional building’s hidden hazardous materials can quietly eat a construction schedule months before the visible framing work begins.