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A Takoma Park institution prepares to leave the city

Some see departure as sign of waning Adventist influence

Wednesday, Sept. 28, 2005

Click here to enlarge this photo Photo courtesy of Historic Takoma A north view of the Washington Sanitarium and Hospital on Carroll Avenue offers a glimpse of the four-story structure constructed largely of wood. Click here to enlarge this photo Photo courtesy of Historic Takoma A group of Washington Sanitarium and Hospital nurses pose on the steps leading to the Takoma Park facility in an early photo housed in the Historic Takoma archives.

Many lifelong residents were born there. Many died there. And while few remember its beginnings as Washington Sanitarium nearly 100 years ago, there are many still around who remember its early years and have seen it evolve through the ages.

Now, with this week’s announcement that Washington Adventist will close by the end of the decade and move from Takoma Park, many will see the end of an era and the uncertain beginning of a new one.

‘‘I’m very sad,” said Joyce Seamens. ‘‘It’s very heartrending to see a fixture like that destroyed or moved.”

Seamens was born at Washington Adventist and so were many of her relatives. As she said, ‘‘That’s where life begins.” This week’s news came as a shock to the lifelong Takoma Park resident who calls Washington Adventist ‘‘a statue to what Takoma Park stands for.”

‘‘Seeing an institution like that leave makes you think, ‘What are they doing to Takoma Park?’” said Seamens, who is married to Takoma Park City Councilman Terry Seamens (Ward 4). ‘‘I fear that we’re losing what Takoma Park once was years ago.”

Many residents share that same sense of loss, not only for the hospital, but also for another institution that defined Takoma Park and a way of life that thrived in a city that once defined the Seventh-day Adventists.

Shared identity

A city⁄hospital relationship that had become contentious over the past 35 years started quite amicably in 1903, when a group of leaders from the Seventh-day Adventist General Conference found a 50-acre parcel in suburban Takoma Park while searching for land near the nation’s capital to build a publishing house, college, world headquarters and hospital.

‘‘[Benjamin Franklin] Gilbert [the city’s developer and first mayor] established Takoma Park. But when the Adventists bought this tract of land, Gilbert welcomed them to Takoma Park,” said Lee Wisel, an associate professor and librarian at Columbia Union College, the Seventh-day Adventist school adjacent to the hospital off Flower Avenue. ‘‘There was a line that this area was especially prepared for the Adventists because the [city] councilors were not smokers or drinkers.”

The Adventists, then headquartered in Battle Creek, Mich., bought the land after a Boston physician, Dr. Flower, spent $60,000 clearing the property for a medical institution but ran into financial troubles and had to abandon the project. The mortgage holder ‘‘gladly sold the land to the Seventh-day Adventist group for $6,000,” according to the Seventh-day Adventist Encyclopedia, Second Edition.

Construction on the four-story building began in 1906 and it opened June 13, 1907, as the Washington Sanitarium and Hospital. Modern for its time, the San, as it was known, ‘‘was almost like a retreat,” said Wisel, ‘‘where,” according to the encyclopedia, ‘‘a special diet would be combined with rest and exercise, with instruction in healthy living, and with a friendly Christian atmosphere” that drew the wealthy and well-known to the bank of Sligo Creek.

‘‘A big part of the belief of the church is its health message,” Wisel said.

And that message fueled development and expansion, as well as improved services. A nurses dormitory was built in 1909; the old hospital building in 1918; additions to the main building in 1920; the Lisner Memorial wing in 1940; a new $1.4 million six-story hospital expansion in 1950; a five-bed coronary care unit in 1967; and an addition to the coronary care unit in 1975.

In 1970, the hospital launched its largest expansion project to date: a four-year $12.5 million project that added 180,000 square feet, increased hospital beds to 366 and provided a mental health unit with 43 beds.

That project required the removal of three buildings and marked the beginning of an era of contention.

‘‘The changes came with, I guess, the mayor in town, the people in town and who was running the hospital,” said Dorothy Barnes, 82, a historian with Historic Takoma who has lived in Takoma Park all her life. ‘‘Early on, I think [the Adventists] thought this was their town. They were Adventists. They kept an Adventist on the [City] Council to keep liquor out of town.

‘‘When I was a child, and I’m not Adventist, everything that went on in Takoma Park went through the Seventh-day Adventists and if they didn’t approve of it, they had enough people that it wouldn’t go through. ... We lived with it.”

The city was so connected with the church that ‘‘When I told people I’m from Takoma Park, they’d say, ‘Are you Adventist?’” Barnes said.

But, over the years, some Adventist institutions, the publishing house and the General Conference world headquarters, moved out. And, in turn, some Adventists did, too.

‘‘As they moved out, maybe the hospital didn’t have the support in the community,” Barnes concluded.

That support began to show signs of deterioration in 1976, when the Joint Commission on Hospital Accreditation and the Maryland state fire marshal adopted new fire codes. Because the old sanitarium building was largely made of wood, it was no longer up to code. With renovation costs in excess of $5 million, the hospital sought to raze the building. Residents, however, opposed that plan.

‘‘As it became clear the hospital intended to tear down what the residents considered their most important landmark, they began to feel betrayed by their largest hometown business,” wrote Jim Brady in an article that appeared in the Washington Post on Nov. 15, 1982. ‘‘Hospital administrators, on the other hand, felt the town was standing in the way of medical progress.”

Over the next two years, in a series of well-publicized battles, residents fought the hospital to keep the building from being demolished, but eventually lost. In 1982, the historic building was torn down.

Those battles, coupled with the emergence of a changing demographic of younger professionals in town led to the election of Mayor Sammie A. Abbott, who ran on a movement to give residents more local control.

‘‘To Abbott and others, the sanitarium became a symbol of the power struggle between the old guard and the new,” Brady wrote in an article housed in the Columbia Union College archives.

Resident Ellen Marsh, who fought the demolition of the sanitarium, said that’s when the emerging new guard began to take control and the old began to lose its grip.

‘‘I’ve lived here 42 years,” she said. ‘‘When we moved here, it was a very conservative town dominated by Seventh-day Adventists. They called the shots. Being a liberal, I felt out of [place]. Then Sammie Abbott’s group took over and the Adventists started to leave.”

The pendulum, she said, swung the other way.

‘‘There’s always friction between residents and our institutions — always that town and gown controversy,” Marsh said. ‘‘Sometimes the institution wins and some times the nasty old homeowners win.”

Hospital an asset for city

But the battles aside, residents like Seamens, Barnes and Belle Ziegler, a former city employee, said they would hate to see the hospital leave the city.

While they are aware of the space constraints on the hospital campus, the fights with the surrounding neighborhood, and the traffic and access problems that precipitated the planned move, the news of its pending departure stunned, surprised and angered the longtime residents who call the hospital a dependable institution that ‘‘has always been there,” Barnes said.

Not only do they feel that the old Takoma Park they grew up in is slipping away, they also fear the loss of a nearby emergency medical facility.

‘‘To me, at my age, I just hate to see the city change so radically,” said Barnes, who ‘‘always had that kind of feeling that you can walk to” to the hospital. Barnes’ idea of ‘‘knowing that we had a hospital we could get to in a hurry” provided what Ziegler and others call a sense of security.

‘‘I realize Holy Cross isn’t that far away but in an emergency — and we have a lot of elderly residents in the city — call 911 and Takoma Park [Volunteer Fire Department] will have you there in seconds. You feel more secure,” Ziegler said.

Seamens agreed and sees a shift in the city she finds disturbing.

‘‘It’s been in our back yard for how many years, and only a handful of people have opposed it and the city is letting this happen,” Seamens said. ‘‘It seems the city wants it to go. If not, they wouldn’t let it happen. ... I feel like they’re trying to make Takoma Park a Bethesda or Potomac.”

While hospital officials, in outlining their ‘‘strategic vision” in a Monday press release, said they plan to go forward with a health care center in Long Branch and want to move ‘‘to a new campus within the hospital’s current service area,” Ziegler said having a quality hospital in the heart of Takoma Park is ‘‘one of the attractions of the city.”

‘‘If they move out of the area, we’d have nothing close nearby ... I don’t know why they’re so against it. It just doesn’t make sense to me,” she said. ‘‘I would hate like the dickens to see [the hospital] move out. If they stay in close proximity, that would be a little better.”

Some saw it coming

While some were surprised by the announcement, others like Marsh see the move as almost inevitable.

‘‘I’m not bitter and not stunned. I am in a way surprised, but I can see it. They keep wanting to expand. I think they just got tired of fighting the community,” she said. ‘‘It’s a growing church. When they settled here, this was country. ... Meanwhile, things have grown up and around it, and they needed more elbow room.”

And as the church grew, so did its institutions and their need for more space. It moved its headquarters to White Oak and its publishing enterprise to Hagerstown. Sooner or later the hospital, with designs on improved care and services, would have to do something.

‘‘The site is restricted, and the roads leading to it are itty-bitty two-lane roads, and hospitals aren’t made like that anymore,” Marsh said.

Marsh and others, speculating about the development possibilities for the hospital’s Carroll Avenue land, hope the Adventists would keep a health clinic on the current campus. And Ziegler hopes there’s still time to negotiate to keep the hospital in Takoma Park.

‘‘It’s a low blow, and I feel strongly that the community ought to convince them to stay and accommodate them,” she said.

As it stands, however, the hospital plans to focus on the future and leave by the end of the decade, pending regulatory approval. While there are a lot of questions left unanswered by the announcement, one thing is clear: As Marsh said, ‘‘The pendulum swings back and forth. Takoma Park is going to change again.”