Crouse at 138: how a hospital that refused a 2023 merger still pays its bills

By Sarah Chen, Senior Reporter

Crouse Hospital sits on Irving Avenue in Syracuse, directly across the street from SUNY Upstate Medical University Hospital. The two hospitals announced a planned merger in April 2022. They publicly called it off in February 2023. Three years later, Crouse remains independent, employs 3,200 people, holds a medical staff of more than 900 physicians, and delivers nearly 4,000 babies a year. It is one of a shrinking number of independent community hospitals in New York, in a country where roughly 95 percent of community hospitals now belong to a system.

The hospital traces its founding to 1887. Five women incorporated the Syracuse Women’s Hospital and Training School for Nurses, the only hospital in the area that would admit women and children. It was renamed Syracuse Hospital for Women and Children in 1902, began admitting male patients in 1908, and became Syracuse Memorial Hospital in 1918. In 1929, the institution moved to the present 736 Irving Avenue site.

The other hospital that fed the modern Crouse, Crouse Irving Hospital, was founded in 1912 under the leadership of Dr. William L. Wallace. The two institutions merged in 1968 into Crouse Irving Memorial Hospital. The current name, Crouse Hospital, dates to a 1996 rebranding.

The 2022 to 2023 merger that failed

SUNY Upstate Medical University Hospital announced in April 2022 that it intended to acquire Crouse Health, the parent of Crouse Hospital, in a deal that would have combined the two largest hospital campuses in the city. The transaction needed approval from the New York State Department of Health, the SUNY Board of Trustees, and the Federal Trade Commission. It also required the Crouse system to clear roughly $90 million in long-term bond debt and pension obligations.

In February 2023, the two parties announced that the merger was deemed “impractical at this time.” Crouse subsequently announced in a Becker’s Hospital Review interview that it would not look for a new merger partner. CEO Kimberly Boynton, who had led Crouse Health since January 2014, stepped down in March 2023 and was replaced by Dr. Seth Kronenberg as president and CEO. The board reaffirmed independent operation as the institution’s strategy.

Three North Country hospitals, separately, entered clinical affiliation arrangements with Crouse Health in subsequent years, an alternative to consolidation that preserves Crouse’s governance.

The Regional Perinatal Center designation

Crouse holds the only New York State Department of Health Regional Perinatal Center designation in Central New York. That designation is what permits the Walter R.G. Baker Neonatal Intensive Care Unit to accept the most complicated regional transfers. The Baker NICU cares for more than 1,000 premature and critically ill infants annually, drawn from referrals across multiple counties. The Kienzle Family Maternity Center occupies the seventh, eighth, and ninth floors of the Irving unit and is the volume engine of the hospital’s clinical pipeline.

Crouse’s annual revenue, per published business data sources, is approximately $837 million. That places Crouse in the upper range of mid-size New York hospitals, but well behind the SUNY Upstate Medical University Hospital next door, which operates at a different scale and is the state academic medical center for the region.

Three hospitals in one neighborhood

The Syracuse hospital landscape is unusually concentrated. Within roughly two miles of Crouse, three major facilities operate: Crouse itself; SUNY Upstate Medical University Hospital, the state academic medical center; and St. Joseph’s Health Hospital, owned by Trinity Health, the multi-state Catholic system. Each maintains its own emergency department, NICU operations, and obstetrics service.

The independence question

Roughly 5 percent of U.S. hospitals remain independent in the 2025 American Hospital Association data. The trend lines for the last decade have favored consolidation. SUNY Upstate’s failed acquisition of Crouse fits a national pattern in which state attorneys general, federal regulators, and hospital boards have started slowing or rejecting larger hospital deals on antitrust and access grounds.

Crouse’s 1991 Marley Education Center, its 1976 Irving Unit, and the Witting Surgical Center expansion form the operational backbone. The Witting Surgical Center is one of the hospital’s primary capital investments of the last decade.

The Crouse name itself comes from the Crouse family of Syracuse, prominent 19th-century industrialists who anchored the institution’s early funding. The “Irving” in Crouse Irving Hospital and Irving Avenue refers to Irving Avenue itself, named in the 19th century. The two names traveled together for most of the 20th century, then merged into “Crouse Hospital” in the 1996 rebrand.

What independence buys, and what it costs

Independence at Crouse comes with a measurable trade-off. The hospital cannot tap the academic clinical-research dollars that flow to SUNY Upstate’s hospital across the street, and cannot leverage the cross-system contracting power of a Trinity-scale chain. What it preserves, by every public account, is local governance and a single mission focus on community-hospital care.

That trade-off is what Crouse’s board chose to keep in 2023. As of May 2026, three years after the Upstate merger collapse, the hospital is still open, still delivering close to 4,000 babies a year, and still independent. CNY Signal will continue to track the hospital’s financial filings as the next CMS Cost Report cycle posts.

Sources: Wikipedia, “Crouse Hospital”; crouse.org “Inside Crouse: Our Story,” “About Crouse,” “Maternity FAQ,” “About the Walter R.G. Baker NICU,” and “Delivering at Crouse”; New York State Department of Health hospital profile, license No. 103015; American Hospital Directory provider profile No. 330203; SUNY Upstate Medical University news release on Crouse acquisition (April 14, 2022); Healthcare Dive, “SUNY Upstate, Crouse Health System call off merger” (February 2023); Becker’s Hospital Review on Crouse strategy after the failed merger; Central New York Business Journal on Boynton departure and Kronenberg appointment (March 2023); SUNY Upstate Medical University Library “Syracuse Area Hospitals: A History”; Crouse Hospital History collection at New York Heritage; ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer Crouse Health Hospital Inc.; Onondaga Historical Association. Hero photo: DASonnenfeld, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).