ATLANTA — The demolition of the old Atlanta Medical Center, formerly known as Georgia Baptist, is underway.
One of the largest machines of its kind is tearing down the hospital, piece by piece.
For more than 100 years, this site has been home to a hospital.
With the use of technology, real estate experts say they expect to demolish the complex in about 6 months to make way for the latest mixed-use development.
“We’re at a point now where the buildings start to fall,” Conor McNally with Shelton McNally real estate partners told Channel 2’s Michael Doudna.
At the center of it all is an extra-long reach excavator—one of the largest in the world—to reach the tops of buildings and demolish them piece by piece.
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“We’ll do several thousand square feet a day. But the difference is we control everything that happens,” McNally said.
Despite the special machine, the demolition for a mixed-use development is just the latest in a pipeline of projects across metro Atlanta, following in the footsteps of Ponce City Market, Avalon, the Gulch, and more.
“I mean, really, the developments you’re talking about are all large-scale redevelopments of a particular area,” McNally said.
McNally said the reason these large developments have become prevalent is to create a space people want to go to that keeps people around at all times.
“So you need to create a sense of place. You need a reason for people to be there,” McNally said.
But despite so many new developments, McNally believes the demand is still there, keeping up with a growing city.
“I would say there’s maybe not as many relative to the size of the city. I think each has its own unique attributes,” McNally said.
This will also lead to the latest historic building being redeveloped for a mixed-use development.
David Yoakley Mitchell is with the Atlanta Preservation Center, and he said that as Atlanta grows, it can become a battle over its soul and that the things that make communities unique can be left behind in the name of progress and development.
“The thing comes into this concept of who do we want to be?” said David Yoakley Mitchell, executive director of the Atlanta Preservation Center. “You can have a situation where someone lives in a certain place for a certain demographic, for a particular economic, for a specific period of time, then change that in a short period of time and expect them to have a legacy experience.”
As developments continue to go up across the metro, Mitchell told Doudna that he hopes the city can balance development while still trying to keep what makes neighborhoods special.
“Their homes aren’t just simply their neighborhoods. It’s the whole feel. There is something very unique and something very proud about being from Atlanta,” Mitchell said.
The developers of the AMC project say they are trying to keep some of the roots of the hospital.
They are saving the 1920s facade of Georgia Baptist while promising to offer some affordable housing and medical elements at the new complex.
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