It is potentially the largest single impactor for Downtown New Orleans since the Superdome. It will generate far more permanent jobs and local revenue than any mega data center, and it has been more than 20 years in the making.
“It” is the massive expansion of the Tulane University Downtown campus, with redevelopment of Charity Hospital as the centerpiece. Thousands of new jobs, hundreds of millions of dollars of new economic activity, and the creation of a new neighborhood are just some of the outcomes anticipated from this enormous undertaking.
While Tulane assuming the lead role in the Charity project is a relatively recent development, the relationship between the two institutions goes back nearly two centuries. Tulane was founded in 1834 as the Medical College of Louisiana, largely in response to a yellow fever epidemic. In 1843, it began providing free medical care to residents — which it continued for more than 100 years.
The current Charity building — an art deco masterpiece completed in 1939 — quickly became the focal point of community health and medical professional training for the greater New Orleans region. Its devastation in the post-Katrina flood left a gaping hole in local health care and a giant eyesore in the heart of Downtown.
Despite the loss of Charity Hospital, however, a substantial medical presence has remained in the surrounding area. Tulane has long been a significant part of that presence, but now it is expanding its reach to include Charity and several other nearby properties. The idea is to create a unified campus and serve as a major component of the growing BioDistrict.
“For Tulane, this is the largest and most consequential investment in our history,” stated university President Michael Fitts. “It will change our relationship with the city.”
The financial investment is indeed huge, an estimated half a billion dollars just for the Charity building. According to Patrick Norton, Tulane’s senior vice president and COO, the university’s own equity will be augmented by state and federal historic tax credits, state and local public investment, and philanthropy, along with a lead gift from the Goldring Family Foundation.
While the project has gone through several starts and stops and major renovations cannot begin until all the complex financial details have been finalized, mitigation and security work is already underway, and Norton envisions beginning the move into the building in 2029.
At the height of the construction, approximately 1,000 workers will be utilized, and that number pales compared to total long-term jobs. Tulane is already the largest employer in New Orleans, and Norton estimated that the completed Downtown campus will engage 2,400 new personnel over the course of the coming decade. Included will be physicians, nurses, researchers and related medical and scientific personnel, backed by a wide array of support and administrative positions. Norton noted that the Charity building alone will be home to approximately 700 researchers, which he termed “the largest collection of research talent in the Gulf South.”
Research, teaching and innovation, not direct medical care, will be the focus of the campus — which now includes 17 buildings, with plans to grow to at least 25 (including the Charity expansion). While the existing emergency room will continue operating on Tulane Avenue, most of Tulane’s hospital services have moved to East Jefferson. The former Downtown hospital will become the campus center, including a food court open to the public.
However, noted Fitts, “We are being faithful to the history of Charity as a medical building. You don’t have to have gone through COVID to appreciate how important public health is. We will be thinking constantly about ways to improve health care in New Orleans, across the Gulf South and around the world.”
As evidence of this, Fitts noted that along with the research, 100,000 square feet of Charity will be dedicated to the medical school and will include a wide range of patient clinic trials.
“We will be staying true to our roots in public health,” added Norton. “The discoveries made in our labs will be brought to the bedside for our patients while creating economic impact for our city.”
Both leaders emphasized the economic benefits that will accrue from the campus and the vast amount of research that will be conducted there. In addition to the Charity building research areas, the renovated J. Bennett Johnston Health and Research building on Tulane Avenue will is devoted almost entirely to lab space. The neighboring Hutchinson Memorial Building — which cut the ribbon on a $35 million renovation of its seventh floor research lab this past February — houses nearly 50,000 additional square feet of lab, office and collaborative workspace.
The goal is real-world impacts.
“It used to be that university research stayed within the university; it didn’t translate into changing the world,” Fitts explained. “Our research improves our understanding of the world, but it also translates into business opportunities.”
Fitts projected that over the next decade, research on campus will result in approximately 100 spinouts – enterprises whose intellectual property is still owned by the university – and 100 startups, private enterprises supported by the university.
“The cures and treatments we discover will benefit society,” added Norton, “and by taking these innovations, commercializing and scaling them, we will diversify the New Orleans economy.”
Retaining the new businesses that will be formed is a crucial part of the plan.
“One problem we have here is that startups don’t view New Orleans as a place to nurture and grow,” Fitts said, citing biomedical innovation, engineering and technology as major sectors that will benefit from the research. “This will change that. We will have a real focus on keeping them here.”
Economic impacts are also expected to grow beyond creating intellectual property and startups. The newly imagined Charity will include approximately 250 residential units for staff and students and Tulane is also leasing the former Warwick Hotel on Gravier Street and transformed it into a multipurpose facility that includes another 154 furnished apartments.
“Housing is an important part of creating a Downtown campus and a neighborhood,” noted Norton. “It reduces commuting time and transport demand, and it also creates business activity beyond normal business hours. It supports local restaurants and retail. Having more people around makes an area safer.”
The notion of creating a campus integrated into a surrounding neighborhood is central to the entire project, a focus resulting from a master planning process conducted a few years back.
“We’re one of the few institutions of higher education in the world that can create an entire neighborhood, because we’re a 24/7 operation,” Norton continued, pointing out the proximity to the Downtown sports arenas and the French Quarter as added amenities. “We want to create a safe, pleasant, walkable environment.”
Items on the to-do list include considerably enhancing lighting in the area — which will include the use of special green LED lighting designed to not only brighten the streetscape but connect to the university’s official color and branding. Improved sidewalks and crosswalks will increase pedestrian safety, as will the addition of bridges to connect many of the buildings, which will also provide refuge against summer heat and frequent rainfall. More accommodations for bicyclists are also part of the plan.
Further enhancing the neighborhood feel will be the streetscaping, which will be designed to reduce the amount of paved surface area in what is now largely a concrete canyon. Trees, bushes, bioswales and a retention pond in the plaza in front of the LaSalle Garage are just some of the projects that will be aimed at beautifying the area while slowing the flow of water into the city’s drainage infrastructure. In addition, the tree canopy, combined with the reduced presence of concrete and the use of reflective materials will be aimed at decreasing the amount of heat absorbed and radiated, thus helping to mitigate the urban heat island effect.
The centerpiece, of course, will remain the revived Charity Hospital, for which Fitts has very high expectations. The first floor is intended to be a public place, with a courtyard, retail space, cafes, an exhibition area, civic engagement and meeting rooms, and a 170-seat auditorium designed for health-related and cultural programming.
“Charity is going to be magnificent and cool,” he proclaimed, “a building that will draw you in, a place where people will want to be and hang out. It will be like Rockefeller Center without the skating rink.”
While providing added value to the surrounding community, incorporating the public areas is also an important aspect of Tulane’s overall strategy for the project.
“Creating a contemporary Downtown campus — which will be an urban jewel — is key to becoming a center of research and innovation,” explained Norton. “With the Tulane brand and the appeal of New Orleans, we already do a great job of attracting and retaining top talent.” He added “Tulane is one of the few private universities in the country that is growing, which also attracts people.”
“You need to establish an environment of creativity, of education, of academic excellence to attract people,” explained Fitts. “We are bringing together interrelated disciplines, which creates cross-pollination where faculty, students, entrepreneurs can all interact with each other. People want to be in an environment like that.”
The Downtown campus will house a variety of Tulane operations. The Celia Scott Weatherhead School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine will be the first to move into the revitalized Charity as the building is ready. The Tulane School of Medicine nursing program and School of Social Work, as well as the School of Science and Engineering, will also be key components in creating a multi-disciplinary experience designed to lure the best and brightest in their fields. These entities will all be supported by an administration building, the campus center in the former hospital, a fitness center, and an extensive amount of parking, both in garages and on surface lots.
Tying everything together and serving as the launch pad to success beyond the boundaries of the campus is the Tulane Innovation Institute on Gravier Street. Founded in 2022, it has already generated several spinouts and startups and was central to NASDAQ’s recent ranking of New Orleans as No. 14 among the nation’s top metro areas for innovation and growth.
The entire project interfaces with the New Orleans BioDistrict, a 1,500-acre area created by the state in 2005 to be a spur for economic growth and diversification, and to position New Orleans as a global center of excellence for medical fields such as obesity, diabetes and cancer treatment. Tulane’s investment represents one of the largest expansions of research infrastructure in the district’s history.
“The vision of the BioDistrict is to be an area focused on research, creativity and startups,” Fitts elaborated. “Charity is the geographic and symbolic center of that and will become the largest research facility in the Gulf South.”
The project is also expected to add to the ongoing reenergizing of Downtown New Orleans.
“For generations, Charity Hospital was where New Orleanians came into the world,” noted Seth Knudsen, executive director of the Downtown Development District. “It is only fitting that Charity is poised to once again deliver our city’s future — this time, new ideas, new businesses, and new industries. Charity will also serve as the catalyst for additional investment in the surrounding neighborhood, supporting a new generation of students, researchers and entrepreneurs who choose to live and work in Downtown New Orleans.”
For generations of New Orleanians, whose mental picture of Tulane University may be a verdant campus of epic buildings stretching from St. Charles Avenue at Audubon Park to Claiborne Avenue, the concept of a Downtown campus may be difficult to grasp. When completed, the Downtown campus will actually be larger than the Uptown site, which has welcomed 11 new buildings over the last decade. Fitts emphasized that both pieces of the university are integral to its success.
“The two are connected in so many ways,” he said. “They’re only 10 minutes apart, and there will be a lot of back-and-forth between the two campuses.”
The Downtown expansion, however, represents a new opportunity and a new day for the university, as well as for the city and state. Economic investment and diversification are ongoing goals for both, and the estimated impact of these projects is massive: The Charity renovation alone is anticipated to have a $1.2 billion dollar impact, and once completed, an expected $530 million annual impact. The price tag for the entire campus development is over $1 billion. Add to this the expansion of the LSU Health Sciences Center, the future Xavier University College of Medicine, and the many and assorted businesses these institutions and their personnel will attract, and the combined impact is transformative.
President Fitts quoted the late U.S. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan in articulating the overall effect. “’How do you found a great city?’” he asked. “’Found a great university and wait 200 years.’”
