The opening of the Friese Family Tower at the Providence Cedars-Sinai Tarzana Medical Center is just around the corner.
Ahead of the planned Oct. 1 opening, the tower held a friends and family preview on Aug. 26 to celebrate the tower, which has an expanded emergency department, 150 private patient rooms and advanced-care offerings including intensive care and state-of-the-art imaging.
The tower will stand five stories tall and will include green spaces. It is named after Donald and Andrea Friese and their children. The family donated $50 million to the Providence Tarzana Foundation to build the project, the largest donation ever to a Providence hospital in California. Donald Friese is a local billionaire who sold his glass-products maker CR Laurence in 2015 for $1.3 billion. He had joined the company as a warehouse worker and rose through the ranks, eventually becoming its owner.
“The San Fernando Valley has been our home for decades,” Don Friese said in a statement at the time. “We’ve raised our family and built our business in Southern California. We want to give back to the community that has given us so much. We can’t think of a better way to express our gratitude than to help bring world-class health care close to home.”
“This transformative gift from the Friese family will enable Providence Southern California and Cedars-Sinai to further our collective mission of bringing the highest quality care to residents of the San Fernando Valley,” Thomas M. Priselac, president and chief executive of Cedars-Sinai added.