After years of development, D.C. finally broke ground Thursday on a heavily anticipated Ward 8 hospital. Mayor Muriel Bowser also announced the name of the 136-bed, full-service hospital serving residents east of the Anacostia River: Cedar Hill Regional Medical Center.

Cedar Hill is named after abolitionist Frederick Douglass’ historic residence in Anacostia. (He’s also the namesake of the new bridge that spans the Anacostia River.)

“We are not just honoring one person. We are honoring all the people who fought to preserve his legacy and tell his story,” Bowser said during an unveiling of the hospital construction this afternoon. “We are honoring the family and generations of women — Black women in particular — who persisted, persevered, and eventually succeeded in preserving the Douglass family home.”

“Because in so many ways, that is also the story of the Cedar Hill Regional Medical Center GW Health,” she said. “It’s also the story of a community who knows their worth and know they deserve — no matter how difficult things got. … They refused to settle for anything less than a hospital that is just as good or better than any hospital in Washington, D.C.”

A descendant of the Douglass family was in attendance. “There would be no Frederick Douglass without Anna Murray Douglass in his life, They were married for 44 years,” said Kenneth B. Morris Jr, the abolitionist’s great great-great-grandson. “She was one of the first people to plant the seed of thought in his mind while he was enslaved with the name Fredrick Bailey that you are not to be a slave for life.”

The new hospital, which is expected to open in December 2024, will replace United Medical Center, which is troubled by financial constrains and understaffing. The Bowser administration has repeatedly stressed that UMC will not close until Cedar Hill opens. Once Cedar Hill opens, residents east of the river will have access to obstetrics and trauma-related care in their community. Cedar Hill will have a Level 3 trauma center, which is expected to be able to treat most types of gunshot wounds that occur in wards 7 and 8.

Cedar Hill, located on the St. Elizabeths East campus, has been roughly six years in the making. Led by Ward 7 Councilmember Vince Gray, the D.C. Council approved the $375-million hospital deal in 2020. The new hospital was at times controversial. “We could probably smile today because boy, did we have some tough days in getting to this point,” said Gray at Thursday’s event.

In 2018, some councilmembers wanted the new hospital to honor union contracts and hire United Medical Center staff, which almost led the anticipated operator to pull out of the deal. But the mayor’s team declined: City administrator Rashad Young told the Washington Post in 2020 that the new hospital would not be “a sort of UMC 2.0.” On Thursday, Bowser called the hospital a “fresh start.”

The new hospital comes after a string of hospital closures over the last two decades in majority-Black neighborhoods. Experts say the closure of hospitals and other service lines (like ambulatory care) have contributed to racial disparities in health care in the District. Ward 7 and 8 residents who need immediate treatment often travel farther to receive specialty hospital services, for example, potentially delaying their care. Life expectancy in majority-Black Ward 8 is 15 years less than in majority-White Ward 3.

There is currently is no trauma center east of the river, meaning gunshot and stabbing victims in those neighborhoods have to trek to Northwest D.C., where all the city’s hospitals with trauma centers are located. Residents living east of the river have also been without obstetrics care for years, after D.C. regulators closed UMC’s maternity ward. Regulators ordered UMC to stop delivering babies in 2017, after some staff made dangerous mistakes, including not taking the necessary steps of preventing HIV transmission from a mother to her newborn.

The 365,000-square-foot medical center will be run by Universal Health Services, which also operates George Washington University Hospital. GWU physicians and medical faculty members are staffing Cedar Hill, as well as two new urgent care facilities in wards 7 and 8. Children’s National Hospital, which is ranked number one for neonatal care nationwide, will manage the new hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit and pediatric emergency department.

Cedar Hill is expected to have 550 full-time staff when the facility opens in two years, along with solar panels on the 500-car garage to power 200 nearby households. The hospital will offer a full range of specialty care services from orthopedic to brain, along with outpatient services for physical therapy, dialysis, and chemotherapy infusion.  There will also be over a dozen behavioral health beds to provide voluntary and involuntary services.

Kimberly Russo, George Washington University Hospital chief executive officer and Universal Health Services group vice president, said at the press conference that the hospital is expected to serve more than 40,000 patients in the emergency room, 2,500 pregnant people in the maternity ward, and nearly 9,000 patients in the outpatient facilities within the first year of operating.