The construction of the new Kresge Eye Institute

The present Kresge Eye Institute building, the site of the Department of Ophthalmology of the Wayne State University School of Medicine, opened in 1989. The new building was the culmination of a decade of planning, persuasion, perseverance, and compromise. The previous facility was physically connected to the Harper Hospital in the Detroit Medical Center and began operation in 1974. A campaign to expand the Kresge Eye Institute started in 1979 when the dean of the medical school and the majority of the administrators and trustees agreed that expansion was justified, but there were many political and economic obstacles. After ten years of negotiation, when the situation seemed hopeless, fiscal problems threatened to close the Hutzel Hospital, a component of the Detroit Medical Center. The Medical Center Board agreed with the Hutzel Hospital trustees to sustain the Hutzel Hospital by transforming the hospital into a specialty hospital containing only three services: ophthalmology, orthopedics, and obstetrics. A new Kresge Eye Institute was approved on the condition that it be moved from the Harper Hospital to the Hutzel Hospital. By 1989, a four-story building connected to the Hutzel Hospital was completed. Although economic and political factors were more important than medical needs in obtaining the new building, the result was an institution of the appropriate size and scope to serve the ophthalmic needs of metropolitan Detroit and the Wayne State University School of Medicine.