Once again, the name of a prominent San Diego philanthropist will show itself on a local landmark. Rady Tower joins Prebys Cardiovascular Institute and Jacobs Medical Center, anchoring the tallest buildings in the city’s busiest medical complex on Genesee Avenue.
Scripps announced Tuesday that it will rename the recently completed seven-story tower at Scripps Memorial Hospital La Jolla in honor of a $75 million gift from Ernest and Evelyn Rady, a philanthropic couple that is among San Diego’s most generous.
Once workers hoist new signage into place, three of the biggest names in San Diego giving will be in close proximity. It is the same trio that concert-goers have become accustomed to when visiting the Rady Shell at Jacobs Park which, some will have noticed, is home to Prebys Plaza.
Scripps opened its first new La Jolla medical tower in 2015, naming it Prebys Cardiovascular Center in honor of a donation from the late Conrad Prebys. Less than half a mile to the south stands Jacobs Medical Center, which UC San Diego opened in 2016.
Though the bulk of the Rady’s medical giving has been focused on pediatric medicine, with hundreds of millions allocated to Rady Children’s Hospital, Ernest Rady has more than a passing familiarity with Scripps Health. He served on the private nonprofit health care system’s governing board from 2004 through 2010.
“Supporting the delivery of health care in the San Diego community has always been a priority for our family,” Ernest Rady said in a prepared statement. “The physicians, nurses and employees at Scripps have a long history of providing medical services that are recognized among the best in the nation. We are proud to help extend that legacy of cutting-edge care for decades to come.”
Chris Van Gorder, Scripps’ chief executive officer, said he got to know Rady during the donor’s time on the board and has considered him a friend ever since. The executive noted that Scripps itself is the result of a charitable gift from the late Ellen Browning Scripps.
Often, fundraisers convince reluctant donors to attach their names to big gifts in hopes that doing so will inspire others with similar resources to give, and that appears to be the long-term effect in La Jolla.
“Fittingly, if you look at the quarter of a million dollars that Ellen Browning Scripps gave us back in 1924, and you put it in today’s dollars, that would be about $5 million,” Van Gorder said. “So, this gift, I mean, it just blows it out of the water.
“There’s no doubt that people like Ellen Browning Scripps, and Conrad and now Ernest Rady, go down in the legacy not only of Scripps Health, but also this entire community.”
The $664 million tower, part of a $1.1 billion building project at Scripps La Jolla, opened on June 1, 2025. Fittingly, the new structure, in addition to three stories of beds dedicated to obstetric services, also contains the site’s neonatal intensive care unit. Like many other similar units at other area hospitals, La Jolla’s NICU is run under contract by Rady Children’s Hospital.
Does the Rady gift somehow accelerate Scripps’ building plans at any of its other locations? Van Gorder said that the timelines are expected to remain in place.
But the gift, he said, gives welcome breathing room when federal cuts to Medicaid, and other programs that reimburse medical providers, are expected to arrive at the end of the year.
“Every hospital is going to be stretched; this gift just helps us be a little less stretched,” Van Gorder said.