Maine Med tops off Malone Family Tower

Courtesy / Maine Medical Center A construction crew prepares to lift a topping-off beam onto Malone Family Tower.

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Maine Medical Center in Portland hit a milestone this week when construction crews held a traditional topping off ceremony, a long-standing practice among builders, for the hospital's new Malone Family Tower.

The beam added to the 265,000-square-foot structure was covered with signatures of the hospital's care team members, many of them writing personal messages that are now a permanent part of the new tower being erected on Congress Street.

Workers with Turner Construction used a crane to lift the beam, along with a U.S. flag, and a second beam signed by construction workers.

“The construction teams are making amazing progress on this important new building,” the hospital's president, Jeff Sanders, said in a news release.

Maine Med is coming down the home stretch of its largest expansion yet, slated to wrap up in 2024. The overall cost of the expansion is $588.4 million.

The new cardiovascular medical tower is the final piece of the center’s master facilities plan, and will reorient the hospital to Congress Street, expand availability of private rooms and provide state-of-the-art procedure rooms centered on cardiovascular care.

The tower is expected to open in 2024.

RENDERING / COURTESY OF MAINE MEDICAL CENTER

Seen here is a rendering of Malone Family Tower on Congress Street.

The building will have a total of seven floors plus a basement, with a new patient units totaling 96 beds in private rooms once the building opens. The center is building a new sterile processing department, which sterilizes all instruments for surgeries and other procedures, to the top of the building as well.

The new tower will allow the center to internally reorganize cardiovascular services within the hospital campus, which means timely, efficient access for patients and care teams and reduction of time and effort spent traveling through the hospital corridors. The 19 procedure rooms will align with industry best practices, providing adequate space to treat patients.

The tower is located will become the central entrance to the hospital. John and Leslie Malone earned naming rights to the tower with a donation of $25 million, the largest gift MMC has received to date.

John Malone is chairman of Liberty Media Corp., a holding company that reported revenues last year of $9.4 billion and has ownership in other businesses and sports teams. He built the media company Tele-Communications Inc. and served as CEO before selling it to AT&T for $50 billion in 1999, and is also reportedly the largest private landowner in the U.S., with 2.2 million acres, about half of which is in Maine.

The tower is part of Maine Med’s overall $588.4 million expansion, which officially began in 2018 and will add a total of 160 new private patient rooms. Sixty-four of the rooms were added to the Coulombe Family Tower, funded by a $7.5 million donation from Paul and Giselaine Coulombe and their daughter Michelle, who serves as president of the Coulombe Family Foundation. Their gift went to adding three additional floors to the Coulombe Family Tower for private rooms focused on oncology care. Paul Coulombe, a Lewiston native, is the former owner of White Rock Distillery, which he sold more than a decade ago.

That phase of the project, completed in 2019, also included the new Sisters Heliport that tops the tower, funded by a $3 million gift from sisters Linda and Diana Bean.

An addition of three-levels to the visitor’s parking garage, creating 225 new parking spaces, was also completed in 2019. Construction of a new employee parking garage on St. John Street was completed in 2020. And a new 108,000-square-foot specialty care facility at MMC’s Scarborough Campus was finished in 2021.

The completed facilities have begun benefiting patients. The placement of the Sisters Heliport on the same building housing the emergency department has shaved critical time from the trips trauma patients take to get emergency treatment. And the additional patient rooms in the Coulombe Family Tower provided the flexibility vital to MMC’s pandemic response.

The investments in Maine Medical Center are supported in part by community philanthropy through the NEXT 150| Campaign for Maine Medical Center, which nears its stretch goal of $170 million with the hope that more will be raised to support the build-out.

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