Fred Donahue was born in Quincy Hospital in 1955 and his mother in 1927. His wife, Cynthia, was born there, as was her mother and her three sisters.
He had his tonsils removed there when he was 5 (“It was like a factory, there must have been 40 kids in one giant room’’). As his family grew, Donahue and his wife took their children there for stitches, pneumonia, and myriad urgent-care boo-boos. And, years later, he entered a 12-step program at the hospital and he has been sober for 27 years.
Quincy Hospital treated his father’s stomach cancer and, he says, “saved my mother’s life” when her intestines became twisted.
Like many Quincy residents over the decades, the extended Donahue family “went up the hill” to the 125-year-old hospital, from cradle to grave. By Feb. 4, the hospital, now called Quincy Medical Center, will close, a victim of changes in demographics, health care, and the tight-knit insularity once a hallmark of this and other communities in the region.
Because of its recent closing announcement, the hospital expects few, if any, patients by mid-to late December. The state Department of Public Health will hold a public hearing on the closing on Tuesday.
A drive up Hospital Hill in Quincy offers a glimpse at the history of two hospitals: There’s the sparkling chrome and glass entrance of Quincy Medical Center, with vaulted ceilings, new carpet, leather chairs, and recessed lighting built by parent Steward Health Care System, and then there’s the faded brick lobby of the former Quincy City Hospital, with a Dunkin’ Donuts selling coffee and carbs.
As with almost everything in Quincy, there’s history here. Before it was Hospital Hill, it was Cranch Hill: Richard Cranch, who married Abigail Adams’s sister, owned a farm on the site. Before that, it was President’s Hill: John Adams owned the land.
The original hospital benefactors were neighbors, who donated three acres and the first building, in 1890. “It began as a private cottage hospital with 25 beds,” says Quincy’s city historian Tom Galvin. “It was originally built to help quarry workers suffering from lung disease.”
Today, only 40 of the 196 beds are staffed; the others go unused. Many physician groups have stopped referring patients, and some staff doctors have resigned. With most of its patients on Medicaid or Medicare, the hospital is not financially viable.
Donahue, not one for sentimentality, worries most about the workers. “Some have been there years and years,” he says. “It’s going to have an impact on them.”
Patients will need to make adjustments, too. Donahue, who works for the city of Quincy’s Highway Department, says his 87-year-old mother, Pearl, who still gets care there, “will go to South Shore Hospital” in Weymouth.
Mary Harrington, 83, has lived on the same street as the hospital since 1957. “My experiences up there were wonderful,” she says. Harrington went there for an ectopic pregnancy in 1951 and her son’s birth in 1954. “My doctor was a surgeon, but he wasn’t above delivering a baby,” she says.
Harrington went to Quincy for other procedures over the years, as did her family. Her sister had her tonsils removed when she was 5, and her mother — who died in 2013 at age 107 — had her cataracts removed there. “It was easy to walk up the hill for surgery,” says Harrington.
But living near a hospital wasn’t always fun. “The ambulances would go screaming up the hill,” she says, “though it leveled off over the years.”
William Carey, 52, still gets his care at the hospital, including knee and colon-cancer surgeries. “This hospital has always been very good to me,” says Carey, who works for Verizon. “The nurses are fantastic. It’s a shame.”
Patients like Carey are in the minority. Over the years the options for health care have proliferated in and around the city and include the world-class hospitals in Boston, a journey that many generations of residents, who seldom saw the need to venture outside the city for shopping or services, would have viewed as an unnecessary odyssey.
“Quincy Hospital was a city hospital; it had everything we needed,” says Harrington.
But times have changed. Even Fred Donahue’s immediate family members get most of their care not at the hospital but at Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates in downtown Quincy.
While Steward is working with the city of Quincy to determine the future of the hospital property, the health care giant plans to continue to offer care to Quincy residents. Dr. Mark Girard, president of Steward Hospital Group, says the provider has hundreds of primary-care physicians and specialists to meet the need. “Most of the patients have doctor relationships in the Quincy community, and we will maintain and expand them,” Girard says.
According to Steward, there will still be 24-hour emergency room access and an urgent-care center in the city, though the location has not been determined. As for the hospital’s workers, Steward says it has about 980 unfilled positions within its 10 hospitals and is leaving them open for Quincy employees.
Though Galvin is the city historian, he’s not waxing nostalgic about the closing. “The hospital has been on thin ice for a number of years for various reasons, not the least is that we’re surrounded by hospitals,” he says. “I live in West Quincy, and I can be at Milton Hospital in 10 minutes and at South Shore Hospital in less than 15 minutes. If I had a heart attack, I have a Mass General card in my wallet, and that’s where I want to go.”
But Mary Foley Johnson, 78, Fred Donahue’s mother-in-law, is upset about it. “I think it’s sad and worrisome that Quincy will not have a hospital,” says Johnson, who was born there and gave birth to three of her four children there. “I wouldn’t want to try to get through Quincy at rush hour to get to South Shore or any other hospital, with traffic as bad as it is. I can’t imagine going to one of those places if you were having a heart attack.”
Bella English can be reached at english@globe.com.