Susan Sarandon’s latest starring role is as an activist with amnesia.
The actress plans to join mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio and a star-studded cast for a rally today blasting the shuttering of St. Vincent’s Hospital in the West Village.
But it seems the liberal leading lady has forgotten how she and then-partner Tim Robbins rallied years ago against the hospital’s expansion several blocks from their home on West 12th Street.
Just a few years ago, in 2008, Sarandon blasted the medical center “as a last resort” during a city landmarks hearing on the hospital’s proposed expansion.
“I would not want to bring my children there,” she added during the testimony, in which she asked the city “to slow down here and look at what the alternatives are.”
St. Vincent’s, which served a large homeless population and was the city’s third-oldest hospital, closed in 2010 after going broke. A planned expansion that St. Vincent’s administrators hoped would save the hospital failed — in part thanks to vocal opposition from Sarandon and others.
But now, Sarandon is trying to use the issue to bolster de Blasio’s campaign, capitalizing on what has been a black mark for his chief Dem rival, Christine Quinn.
Many of Quinn’s West Village council constituents blame her for not doing more to save the hospital and for approving a zoning change that will allow a luxury housing development to replace it.
At an event with de Blasio at her Chelsea pingpong club, SPiN, last night, Sarandon said of Quinn: “It became clear to me that as a woman, you can’t just vote with your vagina.”
At a campaign event in Chelsea last night, the actress called de Blasio “one of the great progressive voices of this city.” She refused to take questions from the press.
De Blasio hailed Sarandon as someone who “doesn’t know how to back down.”
He decried the closing of 12 area hospitals in recent years and said St. Vincent’s was “lost while it could have been saved.”
Today’s rally at St. Vincent’s old site, which will also feature Cynthia Nixon, Harry Belafonte and Rosie Perez, will hit city and state policies that have led to the shuttering of hospitals, according to an invitation on Facebook.
Earlier this summer de Blasio had himself arrested protesting the proposed closure of another hospital, SUNY’s Long Island College Hospital in Brooklyn.
Days ago a judge ordered the Cobble Hill hospital be reopened to the same level it was prior to July 19 — the day the New York State Health Department approved closing it. Additional reporting by Amber Sutherland