As a youngster, Dr. Dino Rumoro used to visit the now-demolished Sears store at 1601 N. Harlem Ave. It was the trendy place to buy everything from Toughskins jeans to corduroy pants.
“Sears was always so cool,” Rumoro recently reminisced. “You could get candy, snacks, you could sit on a lawn mower. It was great.”
Now, as president of Rush Oak Park Hospital, he’s on the eve of the opening of a three-story, 60,000-square-foot outpatient center on the same property, called Rush North and Harlem. The first patients are scheduled for July 1, with all doctor and coordinator offices opening July 7.
He’s looking forward to what the facility will bring for the Austin and Galewood neighborhoods, but so is Ald. Chris Taliaferro of the 29th Ward.
“It really provides an opportunity to have quality healthcare services right in the neighborhood,” Taliaferro said. “I supported the project at its onset. I thought it was a wonderful opportunity for Austin and the Galewood neighborhood. There was a lot of space to work with due to the demolition of the Sears site.”
Rumoro said there is a need for Rush North and Harlem due to the simple fact that Rush Oak Park Hospital is landlocked, by Harlem Avenue and Madison Street on the west and north and residential neighborhoods to the east and south. Lack of parking is a major issue; essentially, Rush Oak Park wasn’t designed for the volume of patients there, he said.
“It’s a very old campus,” he said. “The first buildings are from the early 1900s.”
Conversely, Rush North and Harlem has about 90 rooms, including examination, consultation and procedure rooms, and surface parking with nearly 200 spaces. Rumoro said there will be “a lot of new and advanced technology,” including an MRI unit, a 3 Tesla (3T) MRI unit, a CAT scan unit, ultrasound and advanced breast cancer screening.
There will also be an urgent care at Rush North and Harlem that will open at 7 a.m., which should handle low-acuity cases.
Geofencing is another plus, he said, and should create efficiencies.
“When you download the Rush app, you can complete your registration before you go up to the doctor’s office,” he said. “It’s like passing through a fence. You should be able to go to your appointment, and you can hopefully get right into your patient room.
“The patients are going to notice this is going to be a seamless process.”
There will also be an onsite pharmacy, which is another way to increase efficiencies.
“If a doctor prescribes a medication, you can get it from the pharmacy before you even leave,” Rumoro said. “We want to make sure you have your first prescription.”
David Osta, one of the leaders of Center West Oak Park Neighborhood Association, said that while “we think it’s great their expansion didn’t involve taking more residential housing that they’ve done in the past,” there are “definitely still concerns” about Rush Oak Park Hospital.
“Over the years they have expanded the campus by buying properties and bulldozing them, making them parking lots,” Osta said. “The newest piece of the puzzle is they bought the currency exchange at Harlem and Madison. They own it now and they will eventually have a plan for that. I would imagine they would make it parking.”
“There are some old facilities to be upgraded or replaced, so some of our biggest concerns have been about building heights, if they were to expand within their current campus,” he said.
Over the years, the association has engaged directly with the hospital regarding allowable building heights, including a text amendment with the village of Oak Park that would have established a by-right height of 60 feet, requiring a variance for any building over 60 feet. That measure ultimately failed in a 4-3 vote in June 2023.
“We’ve tried to work with the village and Rush to get a resolution from that point of view, changing the by-right height to 60 feet,” Osta said, adding West Suburban Medical Center came to a 50-foot by-right height agreement in an engagement with the neighbors and the village in 2017.
“If the neighborhood and hospital can’t do it, then the village should step in,” he said. “It’s in the village’s interest to balance the needs of the hospital and the neighborhood.
“To date, the village has not done that and we’re hopeful they will do that in the future.”