Which I\u2019d all but forgotten about until earlier this week, when I pulled into the empty parking lot to take a call and looked up afterward to see the faded faces of the hospital\u2019s founders, painted in 1978 by South Dallas students using federal funds, staring into the afternoon sun. A quick search on my phone jogged the memory: Michelle Morgan, a dentist and daughter of South Dallas, had bought the 18,000-square foot building for $200,000 in 2016, with the hopes of reopening the hospital.<\/p>\n
Its promised resurrection was such big news it made the front page of this newspaper in December 2017 beneath the headline \u201cReviving a hospital, filling a void.\u201d But the building looks today as it has for decades. Padlocked. Boarded-up. Trashed. Abandoned. A void, still.<\/p>\n
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A visit to the Dallas Central Appraisal District\u2019s website revealed the previously unreported: Morgan sold the building several months ago to a real estate newcomer with a small Dallas footprint.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was very torn about doing that,\u201d Morgan said when I reached her Thursday to ask about why she parted with a building she\u2019d spent a decade trying to salvage. \u201cI just \u2026\u201d A long pause. \u201cIt just really hurt my heart. But I had to do something. It was just costing me money every year.\u201d<\/p>\n
A decade and dozens of fingers-crossed news stories later, the patient flatlined.<\/p>\n
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The mural featuring the founders of the Forest Avenue Hospital, painted by South Dallas students, has been staring into an empty parking lot since 1984.<\/p>\n
Robert Wilonsky\/Staff writer<\/p>\n
There was no shortage of people wanting to give Morgan money. The Real Estate Council committed six figures to the project in 2017. Six years later, the Dallas City Council approved millions in economic development grants, but none of that would do any good unless she could secure the millions of dollars contractors told her it would cost to rehab the husk of a hospital long ago abandoned.<\/p>\n
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\u201cAnd I just couldn\u2019t get a bank to loan me the money, basically,\u201d said Morgan, owner of the two-location Art of Dentistry<\/a>.<\/p>\n Which is the oldest story in southern Dallas<\/a>, where moneymen have long brandished red pens to cross out areas they deemed unworthy of investment.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t know if it\u2019s redlined or what,\u201d Morgan said. But no one would give her a cent, she said. Not even with a pocket stuffed with IOUs. \u201cNope, because you have to borrow all the money up front, and no bank would loan me $5 million.\u201d<\/p>\n That 2017 Dallas Morning News story treated the building\u2019s rebirth as inevitable, just around the corner \u2014 \u201cwithin the next year.\u201d So, too, did a KXAS-TV (Channel 5) follow-up in 2018<\/a>, and a piece on the National Trust for Historic Preservation\u2019s website (\u201cReviving a Historic Dallas Hospital<\/a>\u201d); and yet another\u00a0News column in 2019<\/a>, which noted that Morgan had pushed back her timeline \u201cwhile patiently fundraising, which has been slow but promising.\u201d A WFAA-TV (Channel 8) story followed in 2021, offering \u201cthe hope that one day this hospital will be reborn<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n There has long been good reason to assume a rebuild was within reach: In the fall of 2017, The Real Estate Council held a highly touted Shark Tank-like competition during which a panel of investors and entrepreneurs heard pitches from people wanting to invest in southern Dallas. There were some 30 \u201ccontestants,\u201d Morgan among them, and the panel liked what she was selling \u2014 not merely rehabbing a historic building, but bringing doctors back to a neighborhood where health care was in scarce supply.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n \u201cI was excited, because I was also involved with the Forest Theater and wanted to bring medical care to MLK, too,\u201d said Frank Mihalopoulos, who, as founder and CEO of Corinth Properties, had resurrected dead malls across the country, including Red Bird.\u00a0Mihalopoulos, who also serves as chairman of Austin Street Center\u2019s board<\/a>, was on the panel that awarded Morgan $500,000 and spoke warmly of the doctor and her \u201cgood intentions, her passion and her commitment.\u201d<\/p>\n An October 1980 photo of Forest Avenue Hospital in South Dallas, which was founded and funded by Black doctors in 1963 and shuttered in 1984.<\/p>\n Ed Hille\/Dallas Morning News<\/p>\n He wasn\u2019t aware, until I told him, that Morgan had sold the building. Neither was Linda McMahon, CEO of the Dallas Economic Development Corporation, who, in 2017, was The Real Estate Council\u2019s president and CEO and working with Fair Park-area nonprofits to salvage this once-thriving stretch of South Dallas<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cShe had some great ideas,\u201d McMahon said this week. \u201cWe worked on it for a long time, then it just died. She circled around TREC four different times with four different ideas, and at one point we even offered to loan her money, but she never got comfortable with it. It\u2019s not an attractive building, but the history of it was really important, which is what\u2019s so frustrating. Dr. Morgan has a heart for its history.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n