Grady Hospital

About this property

Grady Memorial Hospital is the public hospital for the city of Atlanta. The hospital is ranked as the tenth largest public hospital in the United States and is a Level I trauma center. Grady Memorial Hospital was founded in 1890 and opened in 1892, as an outgrowth of the Atlanta Benevolent Home. It is named for Henry W. Grady, an Atlanta Constitution journalist and later owner who became a major force in Georgia politics and advocated for a public city hospital. At the time of opening, the hospital officially had 14 rooms. The original building (at the corner of Jesse Hill Jr Dr SE and Coca-Cola Place) is now on the National Register of Historic Places and is known as Georgia Hall, where the hospital's human resources staff now work. The second Grady Hospital (at Butler Hall) opened in 1912 and was for whites only, with blacks being segregated at the Atlanta Medical College. The third hospital was at Hirsch Hall and the current location is its fourth. From 1945 until 2008, the hospital was run by the Fulton/DeKalb Hospital Authority. The current facility was also built as a segregated institution, with one section serving whites (Wings A & B; facing the city) and another section serving African Americans (Wings C & D; facing the opposite direction). Even though it is a single building, and the two sides are connected by a hallway (Wing E), the facility was referred to in the plural ("The Gradys") during the years of segregation. In 2007 and 2008, journalist Mike King of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote a series of "Saving Grady" editorials – dozens of pieces over eighteen months – during the time when Grady Memorial Hospital was nearly insolvent and in danger of closing. Seven infants were abducted from Grady from 1978 to 1996, which was more than from any other hospital in the United States during that time period. Five were recovered within hours or weeks of their abduction. An additional child was abducted from the home of his mother after the kidnapper followed her from Grady. The abductions were covered on season three of the podcast The Fall Line. The hospital board has long been reluctant to make money-saving changes that might reduce its traditional mission. In late 2006, it rejected the advice of financial consultants and its newly hired chief executive to close an expensive outpatient dialysis clinic for the poor, being concerned that many of the clinic's uninsured patients, including many undocumented immigrants, would have nowhere else to turn. Others argued that the board of directors is politically clumsy and prone to micromanagement. In May the board's own consultants concluded that "Grady does not currently have the depth of leadership" necessary to transform the hospital.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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