Sandy Springs Gazette - Heritage Sandy Springs

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6110 Bluestone Rd. Sandy Springs, GA 30328. 404-851-9111. Sandy Springs .... formation of the [Northside] Hospital Assoc
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The Birth of “Pill Hill” - Part II........................4 The Birth of “Pill Hill” - Part I.........................8 A Place for Souls Here and the Hereafter..10 From Ferries to Ford Roadsters....................14 Making The Grade...........................................16 Praying, Playing, and Panthers................... 20 Developer with Sandy Springs Roots..........22 Footprint on Sandy Springs History...........24 L’Chaim Sandy Springs.................................26 Mule and Wagon Rides into Town...............28 The First Residents of Sandy Springs.........30 Parks and Recreation.....................................32 Preserving Sandy Springs.............................34 The Teasure of a New Home.........................36 Johnston Ferry River Crossing.................... 40 Post Office Romance Leads to Home.......... 44 The Lost Corner Nature Preserve................ 46 Ebenezer Primitive Baptist Church.............50 The Oldest House in Sandy Springs............52 Saddling Up to Aging.....................................58 Rise of Historic Glenridge Hall.....................62 A Nurse on Horse Back.................................. 64 Women’s Devotion: Sisters of Mercy..........68 Early Sandy Springs by the River................70 Just Skimming Off The Ground................... 78 The Family Behind the Burdett Legacy..... 80 Water, Water, Everywhere...........................82 Work, Work, Baseball, Work.........................84 Shopping Takes Center Stage.......................86 Living Off The Land....................................... 90 The Sandy Springs Garden Club..................92

Sandy Springs Gazette November 2017; Volume 2 Issue 45 Publisher Chip Emerson Editor Melissa Swindell Production and Design FourWindsAgency.us Multi-Media Editor Melissa Swindell FourWindsAgency.us

Contributors Lesley Nash • Clarke Otten • Coy Wilson • Melissa Swindell Garnett Cobb • Rhonda Lopatin • Burt Terrell • Dorothy Knight HeritageSandySprings.org The Sandy Springs Gazette is published weekly by Heritage Sandy Springs Copyright © 2017 R2R Media, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproductions in whole or part without express written permission of the publisher is strictly prohibited. This magazine is available by digital download. Article ideas are welcome. Email inquiries to [email protected] Heritage Sandy Springs 6110 Bluestone Rd. Sandy Springs, GA 30328 404-851-9111

The Birth of “Pill Hill” - Part II An Interview with Cathy Silverstein (Charles) B Interviewer: Melissa Swindell B Date of Interview: August 3, 2017

By the late 1960s, Buckhead, Roswell, and Sandy Springs 1962 in the waiting room of the Buckhead Clinic—ten years were booming with culture and community. For years, after the clinic opened. Charles and his peers recognized Roswell Road was the primary artery in and out of Buckhead the growing need for a hospital on the north side of Atlanta. and Sandy Springs. However, construction of the interstate Charles’s daughter Cathy remembers, “There was the highway system under the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 formation of the [Northside] Hospital Association, and that led to new thoroughfares such as Interstate Highways 285, was a nonprofit corporation which would eventually build 85 and 75 linking Atlanta to its northern suburbs. Charles M. the hospital. That’s very important. There was a huge, you Silverstein, M.D. and three of his colleagues were prominent know, effort in those days. There was a congressional act medical professionals in that provided funding the Atlanta area at that for new hospitals. They time. Once they realized took advantage of that.” where Atlanta’s growth The initial membership was headed, they began to to the association was conceptualize the future of limited only to licensed medical care in Buckhead physicians, for the and Sandy Springs. Their association would serve ex pansion of medic al as the nucleus of all care from a four-doctor future medical staff for specialty center known as the hospital. The first Northside Hospital for Fulton County Hospital Authority. Abreu & the Buckhead Clinic would challenge in the planning Robeson, Architects, circa October 13, 1969. eventually culminate in of the hospital arose the first hospital to serve rapidly from a developer Sandy Springs. By the and private investment 1960s, Charles and his colleagues had begun their pursuit of group. One potential investor submitted a plan that would a hospital for the area: Northside Hospital. require a physician to purchase most of the stock in the leasing corporation, giving the physicians an abundance The Northside Planning Association was launched in March of control in how the hospital would operate. According to

5 integrated hospital.” In 1962, Grady Memorial Hospital was one of two hospitals in the Atlanta area—and it was a segregated hospital. Two separate facilities existed for both white and black Atlantans. Grady Hospital’s history, or the “tale of two Gradys,” began as far back as 1896 when the United States Supreme Court ruled in Plessy vs. Ferguson that facilities for both races should be kept separate but services should be “equal.” In 1962, over twenty-five percent of the population in Atlanta was black, and despite the ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954, the hospitals remained separate—one for white Atlantans and one for black Atlantans. Charles saw this dichotomy first-hand while he was completing his medical residency in diagnostic radiology at Grady. Cathy remembers: Entrance to Northside Hospital, circa 1996.

Cathy, “You know, doctors didn’t, weren’t businesses. In fact, my father very specifically went into medicine, not only because he cared about people, but because he didn’t want to go into business.” The result of that challenge led to the appointment of the Northside Hospital Planning Association’s first board of trustees, whose tasks included facilitating the planning of the hospital, hiring medical staff, and most importantly—securing a site for the building. ​ The creation of Northside Hospital was never assumed to be an easy task. Indeed, not only would Charles and his colleagues need to identify a trustworthy medical staff, but they also sought to create a nonprofit community hospital that served all residents of the community. As Cathy recollects: “For the purpose of, this is quote, ‘for the purpose of planning, organizing, developing, building, and staffing a nonprofit community general hospital.’ And this is really important, the idea of a nonprofit community hospital was what Northside was started as. They felt it was important to be a community hospital. They felt it’s important to be a nonprofit. And it wasn’t stated in that sentence, but here’s another really important thing. It was supposed to be an

Photograph of Northside Hospital Doctors Center, circa 1996.

”He was just always an honorable person. And he was an excellent doctor.” “And don’t forget in those days, Grady was two hospitals. Grady was a black hospital and a white hospital attached by underground tunnel. And my father told me that...He remembered that...I think he was a resident there. And he, he remembers telling me how, you know, underneath...So there were...When a, when a white doctor was needed for a black patient and they didn’t have a black doctor with that particular expertise or specialty, you know, they would go underground, under the tunnel, and wind up on the other side. That was sort of the obvious thing. So, we’re talking about segregated hospitals at this time. So the idea that this [Northside Hospital] would be an integrated hospital was also an important feature.” The future site of Northside Hospital had yet to be decided or secured. The board of trustees for the Northside Hospital Planning Association (NHPA) and then later the Northside Hospital Association (NHA) needed to acquire thirty acres before beginning their fundraising efforts to build the facility. As Cathy remembers, the trustees took advantage of several programs offered by the federal government and began securing enough acreage for the purpose of building a nonprofit, integrated hospital.

The Birth Of “Pill Hill” Part II continued dad, in the book, states that there was general agreement that we needed the hospital somewhere out here, ‘but just not in my own backyard.’ It was a typical kind of reaction. Yeah, we need one, but just not here.”

Photograph of the Bondurant property (present site of Northside Hospital), circa 1969.

​T he current site of Northside Hospital, near the junction of interstates 75, 85, and 285, was sheer happenstance. One of the first trustees on the NHA, Leo Richmond, was on a fishing trip with his friend Charles Bondurant in the summer of 1963. The Bondurant families lived on twenty-four acres of land on Johnson Ferry Road adjacent to the juncture of Interstate 285 and the proposed cloverleaf of the North Fulton Expressway, or Georgia State Route 400. At the time Leo and Charles Bondurant embarked on their fishing excursion, Bondurant had already made plans to leave the area due to the increasing number of construction sites in the area and their encroachment into the family’s beloved wooded terrain. ​ hile the identification of the site began to form quickly, the W community’s reaction to the proposal of Northside Hospital was not free of controversy. Indeed, scores of area residents met at community gatherings, town hall meetings, and zoning meetings whose purposes included informing the public about potential changes to the area’s social and cultural landscape. Charles attended many of these meetings and made it a priority to help rationalize the construction of a new hospital in a heavily residential area—after all, Charles, his wife Mickey, and their daughter Cathy lived only a few blocks away from the proposed site. Opposition to the proposed hospital site came in many forms, per Cathy: “[Charles] was the only one located near the hospital, so it was his job to explain to neighbors the value of the hospital. There was a lot of zoning meetings. You can imagine all kinds of meetings, and things. You know, one woman tied herself to a tree to try to prevent bulldozers, and this is not an easy thing, you know? So, while he was out advocating for the hospital, my mother was a staunch opponent of the hospital. My mother would be at the zoning meetings arguing on the other side. I think she was…[well] my

By November 1964, the site was accepted by the board and purchased at the overall cost of $7,350 per acre. The board was also able to secure an additional nine acres for the hospital—despite Cathy’s mom advocating against the hospital—for a grand total of $250,000. They subsequently sold those nine acres to the county for the construction of Georgia State Route 400.

​C ountless groups and individuals worked tirelessly to expand medical services to the residents of Buckhead and Sandy Springs. Charles, Mickey, and Cathy spent most of their lives living down the street from Northside Hospital. “[He] was just always an honorable person. And he was an excellent doctor. People know him here…I do remember, one thing I will tell you,” recalls Cathy. “As a child, I do remember him reading xrays at night at the house. He had a little light box in his study, and he would bring films home, and he would dictate in the Dictaphone while he was reading on the films.” Other than the few times Cathy remembers her father reading x-rays, Charles steadfastly refused to bring his work home, preferring instead to make time for his wife and two daughters. Northside Hospital officially opened its doors in 1969 to the residents of Buckhead and Sandy Springs. The following year, Charles developed the hospital’s radiology department, which he led until his retirement in 1992. Today, Northside Hospital’s radiology department includes more than 60 radiologists. They and the hospital that was once just an idea of four dedicated physicians continue to faithfully serve the Sandy Springs and Buckhead communities. For a more comprehensive and fascinating look at the origins of Northside Hospital, Dr. Charles Silverstein’s book First on The Hill: Atlanta’s Medical Camelot: The Founding and Early Days of Northside Hospital, and the Rise of a Medical Center is available for purchase online, or available to view for free in the Heritage Research Library and Archive at Heritage Sandy Springs. B