Isabella For Sale

Isabella Geriatric Center on Audubon Avenue has room for 705 residents, making it one of the largest nursing homes in the state. It’s a major employer and healthcare provider uptown. 

Now Isabella, which was founded as a charitable institution more than 150 years ago, is transitioning to for-profit ownership.

Paperwork filed with a state agency in May shows that the facility is being sold to an LLC owned by Pasquale DeBenedictis and Alex Solovey, two affiliates of a nursing home chain called Cassena Care.

I sent a list of questions about the sale to Audrey Waters, a spokesperson for MJHS Health System, the nonprofit that runs Isabella. She sent back a brief statement explaining that MJHS “made the difficult decision last year to sell Isabella” and that MJHS was “heavily investing in the Center but experiencing exorbitant annual losses.”

The move aims to ensure the facility’s “long-term sustainability and commitment to serving at-risk members of the Washington Heights and Inwood communities,” she wrote.

I made multiple attempts this week to speak with DeBenedictis, Solovey, or representatives of Cassena Care. But nobody returned my calls and emails.

I’m yet to see any big public announcement of the transition. Already, though, the would-be owner seems to be making a mark. A new website for Isabella launched recently, featuring incomprehensible, maybe-written-by-AI sentences about how Isabella is “shifting to a proactive model” and “pioneering the integration of Blue Zones longevity science.” The new domain name is registered to a staff member of Cassena Care.

A Long Decline

In 1875, philanthropist and publisher Anna Ottendorfer opened a home in Astoria for indigent women. She named it for her deceased daughter, Isabella Uhl.

The home moved to Washington Heights in 1889, and expanded into its current location on Audubon in 1965. 

The last few years have been difficult. In 2017, Isabella joined MJHS. At the time, the facility consistently received four- and five-star ratings from the federal government’s Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, signaling care that’s well above average.

After the MJHS takeover, though, Isabella struggled. Federal data shows that the nursing home’s rating steadily dropped, dipping as low as one star in 2023 and 2024. (It’s currently a three-star facility.) Richard Mollot, who runs the Long Term Care Community Coalition, an advocacy group, told me that Isabella was “a superlative facility” before MJHS arrived. Around the time MJHS took over, he said, “it really started falling precipitously.”

Isabella also struggled during the Covid-19 pandemic. In early 2020, more than 100 residents died at Isabella in the space of several weeks. The overwhelmed facility had to store bodies in refrigerated trucks. Some families criticized MJHS for not doing more to communicate the scale of the outbreak.

Selling Nonprofits

On December 31, 2025, according to paperwork filed with the state, DeBenedictis and Solovey’s LLC entered into an agreement to buy Isabella.

A few months later, an application was filed with state regulators seeking permission to establish the LLC “as the new operator of Isabella Geriatric Center.” The company would be jointly owned by DeBenedictis and Solovey. On the LLC’s incorporation paperwork, they listed the address of Cassena Care.

The sale will be finalized once it receives the necessary approval from state officials. 

The transfer of nonprofit nursing homes to for-profit buyers can cause concerns about a decline in quality. Data suggests that, on average, the quality of care in for-profit facilities is lower than in nonprofits. 

Robert Tyler Braun, a nursing-home policy expert at Cornell, told me that some buyers pick up facilities and “strip the staffing to dangerous levels” to try and turn a profit. But, he noted, there’s a lot of variation. Some private operators do a better job, and some nonprofits, he said, aren’t especially mission-driven: “It’s a mixed bag.”

The New Owners

So what’s the situation with Isabella’s potential new owners? Braun directed me to a tool he and several colleagues built, called HEFTI, that organizes federal nursing-home data. 

The data shows that DeBenedictis and Solovey each have stakes in around a dozen area nursing homes, all affiliated with the Cassena Care chain.

For the most part, those facilities score well with regulators. Cassena’s homes have an average rating of 4.1 stars, including many five-star facilities. 

The chain has taken over other NYC-area nonprofit nursing homes, making it possible to see what happens before and after the transition. In 2018, they got approved to buy the Margaret Tietz Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Queens. Tietz was a five-star facility before the sale, and it retained the same high rating afterward.

In 2021, The City Reporter ran a story saying that Cassena had begun the process of taking over the VillageCare Rehabilitation & Nursing Center, a nonprofit facility on Houston Street. According to the article, workers were complaining that Cassena was taking steps to cut food service and staffing.    

The sale was finalized in 2023. Data in HEFTI shows that some staffing levels did drop between 2020 and 2024. The nursing home, though, has continued to get five-star ratings from federal regulators, with staffing levels generally in line with state averages. 

At a Community Board 12 meeting last month, Marcella Goheen, co-chair of Isabella’s Family and Friends Council, expressed concern that a change to for-profit ownership would “compromise the overall mission” of the facility’s 19th-century founders. She requested a public hearing or town hall to discuss the change.

“We are concerned, as family members, and we are asking that this transition needs to be monitored,” she said.   

“Like a Community Center”

Goheen’s husband has lived at Isabella since 2016. She told me that she received a letter notifying her of the acquisition agreement in January of this year, and explaining that Cassena Care would begin serving as “operating consultants” for Isabella. (Waters, the MJHS spokesperson, declined to confirm that Cassena was playing that role.)

Last Friday, I dropped by an event at Isabella that Goheen helped to organize in celebration of Residents’ Rights Month. 

Goheen had gone all out. At the entrance to a community room, attendees could pose for photos in front of a custom backdrop featuring a photo of Isabella Uhl. (“I found a print shop in Jersey,” Goheen told me. “I literally drove two and a half hours.”)

By 5:45 p.m., the room was filling up. Family members maneuvered their loved ones’ wheelchairs into place at carefully set tables. Two guitarists started playing in a corner. For dinner, an organization called Rethink Food had prepared recipes submitted by residents: chicken/tuna casserole; sweet-potato spoonbread; something called Margo’s salad, featuring mixed greens with walnuts, apples, red peppers, and sweet Italian sausage. 

Goheen spoke about the vibrant communal culture that existed at Isabella years ago: “We were like a community center,” she said. She’s trying to preserve that spirit. One goal of the event, she told me, was to offer residents a sense of dignity and community, in what she described as “the most forgotten-about space in our society.” 

This story has been updated to clarify the context of one of Marcella Goheen's quotes.

I’m continuing to report on the transition at Isabella. If you live, work, or have a loved one there, I want to hear from you: mhschulson@gmail.com or Schulson.17 on Signal. I’ll treat all messages as strictly confidential unless you tell me otherwise.