Supporters of a historic healing garden at Boston Children’s Hospital, have asked the Massachusetts Attorney General to block the hospital from demolishing the garden to put up a new clinical building, according to WBUR website.
Novelist and poet Olive Higgins Prouty gave the garden in 1956 in memory of two of her children who had died.
“The hospital asked her to create the garden and asked her to endow it upon her death, and she agreed, on the terms that it be in perpetuity,” according to the protest.
More than 11,000 people have signed a petition to save the garden from demolition. Many families have brought their children to the garden to spend their final moments of life. At least one family scattered its child’s ashes on the site, the article said.
The hospital plans to build a new 11-story clinical building on the site of Prouty Garden and the Wolbach Building, which is also slated to be torn down.
Hospital administrators say the new building is necessary to create a state-of-the-art neonatal intensive care unit and a new pediatric heart center, as well as private rooms so that there will be no more double patient rooms at the hospital.