Again, a New Life for a Shiplike Building in the Village A 200-foot-long shiplike structure floated into its berth on Seventh Avenue half a century ago. Unable to ignore it, Greenwich Villagers have loved or hated it ever since. Their descendants will have the same privilege. The structure - originally the Joseph Curran Building of the National Maritime Union, then the Edward and Theresa O'Toole Medical Services Building of St. Vincent's Hospital - is emerging in its third incarnation, as a stand-alone emergency room and medical care center. The O'Toole Building's newly restored concrete facade, glowing white even on an overcast day, is a surprise. With the removal of the one-inch-square tiles that had been applied in 1966, the building has gained freshness and power. Its porthole-shaped cusps have never looked more shipshape. The prows at the West 12th Street and West 13th Street corners seem as if they could cleave a sea lane. More surprising yet is that the building survived to see this day. In October 2008, the Landmarks Preservation Commission granted St. Vincent's hardship application, asserting that it could not perform and sustain its charitable mission unless it were permitted to raze the O'Toole Building and replace it with a new hospital tower. St. Vincent's closed in April 2010, before it could put its plans into effect. The hardship application was shelved. Now, the North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System is developing the new emergency room and medical care center by reusing the O'Toole Building and rehabilitating many of its architectural features. "An incredible chain of events led not only to saving it but to restoring it beautifully," said Robert B. Tierney, the chairman of the landmarks commission. He is one of those Villagers who say they have always loved the eccentric building, which was designed by Albert C. Ledner, a New Orleans architect, and dedicated in March 1964. Mr. Ledner fancifully evoked seafaring themes in his commission for the National Maritime Union. The portholes are well known. Other nice touches include a rooftop elevator bulkhead reminiscent of a steamship's smokestack. Mr. Curran, the union president, whose luxurious office occupied the ship's bridge on the sixth-floor penthouse, described the building as "the box in which the Guggenheim Museum came." Through the use of deep steel girders cantilevered from a thick concrete wall near the rear of the building, Mr. Ledner was able to convey the impression that the upper floors were floating above two circular hiring halls at ground level. In these halls, clad in glass block, about 1,000 seamen were assigned weekly to merchant ships sailing from New York. In 1973, the diminished union sold its headquarters to St. Vincent's, which needed space. By 2008, the hospital was foundering. To save itself financially, St. Vincent's was to give up its buildings on the east side of Seventh Avenue, which the Rudin Management Company would redevelop as a large residential complex. A new St. Vincent's Hospital was to replace the O'Toole Building on the west side of the avenue. The plan met with impassioned opposition in the Village. The landmarks commissioners rejected as inappropriate the hospital's initial application to raze the O'Toole Building, which is in the Greenwich Village Historic District. But the commissioner subsequently found, by a vote of 6 to 4, that demolition was unavoidable if St. Vincent's were to be saved from hardship. After St. Vincent's closed anyway, Rudin Management, which had acquired the O'Toole site, conveyed it to the North Shore system, together with $10 million, to lay the groundwork of a new medical and emergency care center, offering services like outpatient surgery and diagnostic imaging. In August 2011, the landmarks commission approved North Shore's plan to renovate the O'Toole Building. "People can like it or not, but it was clearly well thought out, well designed and well intentioned," said John Gupta, the executive director of the Lenox Hill Center for Comprehensive Care, as the building has been tentatively renamed. North Shore also runs Lenox Hill Hospital on the Upper East Side, which would receive patients from the emergency department in Greenwich Village if necessary, though Mr. Gupta said the patients" own preferences would prevail. He said the emergency department should be open next July. The total project cost is $125 million. Restoration is encouraged by federal law, which gives a 20 percent income tax credit for the rehabilitation of qualifying properties according to federal standards. The architects are Perkins Eastman, and Turner Construction Company is the general contractor. Writing about the building in March 1964, Ada Louise Huxtable, who was then the architecture critic of The New York Times, noted that the union could have constructed a "cheap, dull, routine box" or chosen something "vulgar and ponderous" in marble. "It decided, instead, to go for architecture," she wrote. Whatever reservations may be held, New York needs more of those decisions. On Seventh Avenue in Greenwich Village, that decision has been made again.