Bellevue Hospital (officially NYC Health + Hospitals/Bellevue and formerly known as Bellevue Hospital Center) is a hospital in New York City and the oldest public hospital in the United States. One of the largest hospitals in the United States by number of beds, it is located at 462 First Avenue in the Kips Bay neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. Bellevue is also home to FDNY EMS Station 08, formerly NYC EMS Station 13. Historically, Bellevue was popularly associated with its treatment of mentally ill patients such that "Bellevue" became a local pejorative slang term for a psychiatric hospital. The hospital has since developed into a comprehensive major medical center over the years, including outpatient, specialty, and skilled nursing care, as well as emergency and inpatient services. The hospital contains a 25-story patient care facility and has an attending physician staff of 1,200 and an in-house staff of about 5,500. Bellevue is a safety net hospital, providing healthcare for individuals regardless of their insurance status or ability to pay. It handles over half a million patient visits each year. In 2014 Bellevue was ranked 40th overall best hospital in the New York metro area and 29th in New York City by U.S. News & World Report. History Founding Bellevue traces its origins to the city's first permanent almshouse, a two-story brick building completed in 1736 on the city common, now City Hall Park. In 1798, the city purchased Belle Vue farm, a property near the East River several miles north of the settled city, which had been used to quarantine the sick during a series of yellow fever outbreaks. The hospital was formally named Bellevue Hospital in 1824. By 1787, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons had assigned faculty and medical students to Bellevue. Columbia faculty and students would remain at Bellevue for the next 181 years, until the restructuring of the academic affiliations of Bellevue Hospital in 1968. New York University faculty began to conduct clinical instruction at the hospital in 1819. In 1849, an amphitheater for clinical teaching and surgery opened. In 1861, the Bellevue Hospital Medical College, the first medical college in New York with connections to a hospital, was founded. By 1873, the nation's first nursing school based on Florence Nightingale's principles opened at Bellevue, followed by the nation's first children's clinic in 1874 and the nation's first emergency pavilion in 1876; a pavilion for