By JIM AUCHMUTEY
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Tuesday, September 09, 2008
A Midtown hospital’s expansion may claim a piece of Atlanta history.
Emory Crawford Long Hospital plans to demolish the 78-year-old Life of Georgia building, at West Peachtree Street and Linden Avenue, to make way for a medical complex scheduled to open in 2013.
“We considered rehabilitating the building, but it just wasn’t conducive to world-class health care,” said the hospital’s chief operating officer, Dane Peterson. “We’d have to gut it. It would be very expensive.”
Crawford Long’s plans have started to draw opposition. The Atlanta Preservation Center, a nonprofit advocacy group, launched an online petition signed by more than 275 people asking the hospital to reconsider.
But the petitioners are mounting an uphill battle. The building is not landmarked under the city’s preservation ordinance, and the owner of record, Emory Healthcare, holds a demolition permit.
“That doesn’t mean the building isn’t worth protecting,” said Boyd Coons, executive director of the preservation group. “Midtown has never been properly surveyed, and many significant properties have fallen between the cracks.”
The six-story building was erected in 1930 as the headquarters for the Industrial Life and Health Insurance Co. Renamed Life of Georgia, the business remained there until it moved up the street to a new high-rise in 1968. The company has since been sold.
Clad in white Indiana limestone and decorated with pilasters, rosettes and swags across the top, the building was designed in an understated style that Georgia Tech architecture professor Robert Craig calls “modern classic.” The architects, Charles Frazier and Daniel Bodin, were best known for designing posh homes for wealthy Atlantans in the Tuxedo Park area of Buckhead. Frazier also did an estate for one of Coca-Cola magnate Asa G. Candler’s sons that still stands on Emory’s west campus on Briarcliff Road.
After Life of Georgia vacated its building, Doctors Memorial Hospital took over the space. When the hospital folded in 1986, Emory purchased the property and used it for offices and outpatient surgery until 2002.
Crawford Long has considered razing the structure for several years, but preservationists didn’t get wind of it until this summer. Jeff Clemmons, who works for a nearby law firm, discovered the demolition permit as he was researching Midtown architecture for a walking tour he leads for the preservation center.
“I hadn’t noticed the building before,” he said. “You don’t notice how beautiful it is unless you stop on the sidewalk and look. You don’t really see it if you’re driving by because West Peachtree is such a blur.”
That traffic is one reason Crawford Long wants to remove the building. An interstate ramp dumps onto Linden, often creating a bottleneck on the narrow street.
“We’d like to widen it to four lanes, if the city would let us,” said Crawford Long’s Peterson.
The hospital is still fleshing out its plans and does not intend to tear down the building anytime soon. In the meantime, it is conducting an audit of the property’s architectural features that might be worth reusing.
“We’d like to incorporate some of them in the new construction,” said Peterson, who finds some of the marble detailing “neat.”
The hospital plans to set up a meeting with the preservation center to discuss the possibilities. Coons welcomes the opportunity and points out that Crawford Long has managed to preserve two landmarks on its campus: the 1930 W.W. Orr Doctors’ Building and the 1911 Davis-Fischer Sanatorium.
“I’d like to ask them why they can’t build their expansion on the surface parking lot they own across the street,” Coons said. “Maybe we can get them to rethink their plans and save the building — or at least a part of it.”
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) or a great place to take a picture, the bottom line is always the same. I'm glad the city is taking a tougher stance on this. Although I've never felt like I was being 'aggressively' panhandled, I'm sure the average Joe from a small town doesn't read it the same way.
More and more different sorts of people are great. Seems like every couple of weeks I stumble across a local magazine I'd never heard of, a theater company that popped up out of nowhere, that kind of thing. People are really the only treasure a city has and we are getting richer and richer.
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