Skip to main content

Sheldon Hackney

PGH’s closing in 1977 unleashed a bidding war for the leveled site that was eventually won by a consortium that included Penn, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), Children’s Seashore House, and the Veteran’s Administration. The consortium, called the PGH Development Corporation, built the Philadelphia Center for Healthcare Sciences, a complex of seven new buildings on the former PGH property.

Sheldon Hackney (second from left) discusses divestment in apartheid South Africa in 1986. Student protests for divestment were part of the turbulent campus politics Hackney experienced during his tenure as President of the University of Pennsylvania.