Spaulding Rehab Remembers Menino

Mayor, a frequent patient, helped approve $225m new Charlestown hospital, handicapped-accessible playground

Through good times and plenty of tough times, Mayor Thomas M. Menino developed a very close bond with the Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital.

He was an inpatient twice at the old Nashua Street location of the hospital, after falling and breaking his leg in 2011 and after developing an infection a year later while travelling in Italy. In his last year in office, relying heavily on a cane to move around, he was a regular outpatient who came to the new $225 million Spaulding he and his Boston Redevelopment Authority approved and supported at the Charlestown Navy Yard. It opened just days after the April 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, and its staff have cared for 32 of those maimed and injured by the blasts.

Menino also played the critical role in what is one of the loveliest amenities at the hospital's new location: a playground right on Boston Harbor fully accessible to children with disabilities and using wheelchairs.

Thursday, a grieving David Storto, the hospital president and a close personal friend of Menino's who lunched with him a month ago at the Drydock Cafe, remembered with affection the story of how the playground so quickly came to be.

"Shortly before we opened the hospital, about a month before, so we were pretty far along, he was here for an event that we were having and we were walking down the hall on the first floor," Storto said. "He pointed out to a parcel off to the right of the hospital and said, 'So what's that going to be?' I laughed and said, 'You're asking the wrong guy. You own the parcel" -- which was under the control of the Boston Redevelopment Authority.

Storto continued: "I said, 'I think it should be the Menino Park.' And he paused, for maybe ten seconds, and said, 'I think it should be a playground for handicapped kids. We really don't have a place like that in Boston.' And the next day, he had somebody calling me, getting to work on the project."

With videographer Abbas T. Sadek 

Contact Us