In 1928, Henrietta Egleston Hospital for Children opened in the Old Fourth Ward east of downtown Atlanta at 640 Forrest Avenue (now Ralph McGill Blvd.). It opened with the financial support of Thomas R. Egleston Jr. In the first year the 52-bed facility was open, 605 children were treated.HistoryThe original hospital site was on the north side of Forrest Avenue on the east side of Fortune St. . Today the AMLI Parkside apartments occupy the site.The hospital contained the original Dolly Blalock Black Memorial Garden, dedicated to Elizabeth "Dolly" Blalock, wife of Eugene R. Black, Sr., president of the World Bank.In the 1950s Egleston became the pediatric teaching hospital affiliate for the Emory University School of Medicine, and in 1959 relocated to the university's campus.In 1959 the Atlanta Housing Authority purchased the Forrest Avenue site and planned a 350-unit complex there, which Black groups had argued for to relieve overcrowding in the Sweet Auburn area to the west. White homeowners complained that this would mean Black encroachment eastwards, and so City Council aldermen refused rezone the site, offering instead to clean up the Buttermilk Bottom slum.In 1987 the hospital opens a medical-psychiatric unit. Today the unit is one of only six university affiliated units especially for children in the United States.
