When Planned Parenthood of Greater New York recently announced that it planned to sell the landmarked building out of which it operates its only Manhattan clinic, employees were not surprised. One staffer knew offloading the property was a possibility after management told the team about mounting financial challenges last year. The organization had closed multiple clinics, including the Staten Island health center, in the fall, along with three other locations upstate. But the staffer says shuttering the Manhattan clinic, a hub for both health care and activism, feels like “terrible optics” at the start of Trump’s second term — even as she admits the organization doesn’t need multiple floors of office space now that virtual work is so common. “It just feels like we are waving a white flag. ‘Here, take this building and make it into condos for millionaires,’” she said. “Much like everything else right now, it’s like everybody’s lost their fight.”
PPGNY has listed the seven-story Bleecker Street building, built in 1900, for $39 million. It will need state approval to close the clinic, a move that would leave Manhattan with no brick-and-mortar Planned Parenthood, though some telehealth services would remain available. The affiliate would then divert all patients to health centers in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens. The Manhattan health center had already reduced services in September, shrinking abortion access from the 23rd week of pregnancy down to the 19th week and halting deep sedation for IUDs. Previously, the clinic had been the only Planned Parenthood location in the state to offer care up to 24 weeks. (There are multiple independent clinics and hospitals in New York City that provide a broader range of care.)
Wendy Stark, the president and CEO of PPGNY, told Gothamist that the affiliate had a $31 million shortfall from providing health care last year; PPGNY says more than half of its patients have Medicaid, a state program that the affiliate says does not adequately reimburse providers for the true cost of services. Donors help PPGNY see patients no matter their ability to pay, but the affiliate said rising costs alongside stagnant Medicaid rates led them to list the property for sale. Leadership is lobbying the city and state for additional funding to address its budget deficits.
As a national organization, Planned Parenthood has been in crisis for years. The first Trump administration gut the federal family-planning funds that help its affiliates care for low-income patients and confirmed three Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade. President Joe Biden restored the grant money, but providers also had to contend with the COVID pandemic and rampant inflation. Now, Trump is back in power, and a case being argued before the Supreme Court this week could lead to states kicking abortion providers out of Medicaid entirely — or the administration could try to disqualify providers at the federal level.
The very first Planned Parenthood clinic in the U.S. opened on West 16th Street in Manhattan, so the prospect of no longer having a presence in the borough feels like a painful loss to some workers. “Reproductive justice is under attack, and we cannot cede one inch, let alone a historically important flagship health center in a state that’s supposed to be an abortion haven for other people in the rest of the country,” one doctor who provides abortions in PPGNY clinics across the city told me. (Like other employees quoted in this story, she didn’t want to use her name due to fears of professional retaliation.) “It’s devastating news.”
That’s to say nothing of the impact a closure would have on patients. Employees say they got a preview of that future when the Manhattan clinic’s boiler broke in early January, and all appointments were diverted to other boroughs. A second staffer, who works across the boroughs, said management framed this as a temporary change; shortly thereafter, she says, a pipe burst and caused flooding in the Bronx clinic, leading that site to close for several weeks until the landlord fixed it. (PPGNY does not own the buildings out of which it operates its clinics in the outer-boroughs.) So the affiliate — which had a location in all five boroughs until November 1 — was quickly down to three clinics, then two. “It was chaotic,” the first staffer said.
In early February, Quinne Myers called Planned Parenthood in Brooklyn to schedule an appointment to get her IUD removed. It’s where she gets all of her gynecological care, and she was used to getting penciled in at the clinic relatively quickly. But this time, her appointment was scheduled for a month later. When she showed up the first week of March, she says, her provider told her the delay was due to an issue in the Manhattan building, which created a backlog in Brooklyn. Myers worries about what this could mean for her — and others — in the future. “I’ve never needed an appointment for anything too time-sensitive, but if I do, I hope the closure doesn’t impact it,” she said.
While the Manhattan clinic resumed offering services like medication abortion, birth control, and gender-affirming care in mid-February, procedural abortions have still not resumed there, or in the Bronx, according to the employees I spoke with. Patients who need procedural abortions are being sent to the outer-boroughs. While the Queens location offers abortions through the end of the 19th week of pregnancy, Brooklyn and the Bronx only offer care through the end of the 15th week. Abortion procedures are not expected to resume in the Bronx for several more weeks, according to a PPGNY spokesperson.
The provider said abortion-procedure days are now often fully booked, and management wants providers to see more and more patients every day. But there are only so many exam rooms and chairs in recovery rooms available, she points out. When asked if there were plans to expand gestational access in Brooklyn and the Bronx, the spokesperson was noncommittal, saying that the affiliate continues “to be committed to increasing abortion care later in pregnancy.”
The PPGNY spokesperson said it was understandable for people to grieve the loss of the clinic, but that selling is “a necessary step in ensuring that we have funds to keep the majority of our doors open.” She added that the affiliate has the space “to relocate all of the health-center staff from Manhattan and consolidate services from our current four locations into three and offer the same volume of appointment capacity.”
Stark told Gothamist that PPGNY could shutter the Manhattan clinic, which saw 18,000 patients in 2024, “without reducing our ability to care for folks.” But the first staffer said, “I’ve seen just in the last two months that it has been a barrier to access for patients.” The second staffer said management pledged to make unspecified changes to the layout of the other clinics so they can see more patients, but she’s still concerned about being able to meet the needs of the community. The provider was more direct: “It’s just laughable that you can do the same thing with three clinics that you can do with four.”
The employees I spoke with also found it disingenuous to hear Stark say in a statement that “funds from the sale will allow us to sustain services for systemically underserved communities — the people who need us most.” The provider said recent history doesn’t suggest prioritizing marginalized patients: After the affiliate said it would impose a 20-week abortion limit, she recalled, management tried to reassure workers by informing them that the change would only impact about 275 patients annually. “Statistically speaking, those 200 people are precisely coming from those underserved communities that Wendy is pretending like this organization is prioritizing,” she said. “It is absolutely grotesque to use poor and vulnerable people as cover for your failures.”
And just because the clinic is in downtown Manhattan doesn’t mean there aren’t people who are underserved in that area. “There’s the Bowery Mission right around the corner, and we do have patients from that shelter,” the first staffer said, adding that most of the Manhattan clinic’s patients are using Medicaid, or undocumented, or paying on a sliding scale. “It’s not like we’re just catering to NYU.”
Stark did tell employees that PPGNY planned to rent a new space in Manhattan, the provider noted, but given that fundraising hasn’t started, that process could take years. “I just feel bad for the community,” the second staffer said. “I wish we were able to expand our services, and that’s what people deserve to get the care they need.”