Plans to redevelop the very handsome, Georgian-style Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital on the east side of First Avenue between 29th and 30th Streets into a hotel and conference center have been stopped, according to an article today at observer.com by Dana Rubenstein.

Similar-style but smaller hospital buildings at St. Vincent's and Mount Sinai hospitals have been demolished but there were not as grand and free-standing.

The full-block facility is now operated as a men's shelter but in 2008 the city issued a request for proposals to redevelop it as a hotel and conference center to serve the nearby NYU Langone Medical Center and the East River Science Park.

Louise Dankberg, of the Bellevue Community Advisory Board, and Carol Ann Rinzler, of the Turtle Bay Association, sent out an e-mail yesterday, according to the article, that said that the city "has called a halt to all plans to redevelop the historic Bellevue Pscyh Building," adding that "the homeless men living in the building will remain in substandard housing" and "the community will be denied the medically-related facility that was within reach."

The article noted that the "Department of Homeless Services sought to downplay the development. According to a DHS spokesperson, the recession and related rise in demand for shelter spaced has slowed down the redevelopment process, but the agency intends to move forward at some point in the future. Further, to allay community concerns, DHS will relocate the shelter entrance to the 30th Street side of the building."

The article said that in a statement Rep. Carolyn Maloney said, "It is unfortunate that the Department of Homeless Services failed to come up with a concrete plan for replacing the men's shelter, but we should now work together to develop such a plan. Right now, the Bellevue building is in terrible shape and we should not continue to house vulnerable populations there."

The city's "RFP elicited proposals from developer Extell, among others, and was popular in the community, but caused tremendous controversy in Crown Heights, where the homeless shelter and intake center were to be relocated," the article continued.

A New York magazine article in 2009 by Mark Harris said that the building "for 78 years has stood, gloomy and gated, on 30th and First, the Bellevue made infamous in movies and nightmares, the forbidding destination for so many celebrated and notorious New Yorkers that it stands as a chilling landmark: the Chelsea Hotel of the mad."

"Built in 1931 by Charles B. Meyers, an architect who seems to have specialized in places you don't want to be (he also helped design the Criminal Courts Building on Centre Street), it's nine stories of red brick with a perimeter of grass and, on two sides, a low wall topped with tall, spiked wrought-iron fences that look like they were designed to reassure local residents that nobody was getting out. Inside, the main stairwell was once lined with WPA murals, now hidden beneath layers of institutional yellow and gray paint....A while ago, somebody had the bright idea to remove the diamond-crosshatched steel grates that gave the first floor its prisonlike look," Mr. Harris wrote.

"To the healthy and/or wealthy," he continued, "Bellevue was still considered a hellhole. But that didn't prevent it from becoming a pit stop for a roiling, turbulently unhappy segment of cultural and literary New York, a chapter in the biographies of countless writers and artists....By the time old Bellevue closed in the mid-eighties, the landscape of public-health policy for the mentally ill had changed remarkably....There were treatment rooms still filled with bathtubs covered with canvas sheets that left just enough room for a patient's head to stick out; the huge basins, which were once thought to calm the manic, had lain unused for decades, museum relics of a less enlightened time."