Editor's note: This story originally published in December 2017. We are featuring it again in honor of Black History Month.

On an untended lot on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, surrounded by few buildings and sparse traffic, sits a shuttered Dallas hospital that once paved the way for generations of black doctors and nurtured a community’s health care needs.

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Only remnants of its historic past are visible to passers-by today.

Signs painted on the side and rear of the building’s exterior mark where a clinic and space for oxygen tanks used to be. A mural across the front depicts a nurse in uniform tending to a patient.

It’s a building that once housed one of Dallas’ few black-owned and operated hospitals. And it will soon get a face-lift thanks to an entrepreneurial vision and more than $500,000 in investor funding. Within the next year, the former Forest Avenue Hospital, which closed in 1984, will be revived by Dr. Michelle Morgan, who purchased it for about $200,000 in 2016.

She’s on a mission to reopen the two-story structure at 2516 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. in South Dallas as a community wellness center that offers a range of specialty medical services.

“It’s not just about business. This is home to me,” Morgan said.

The redevelopment of the 18,000-square-foot former hospital is personal for her, an African- American woman who’s frustrated that the South Dallas community where she grew up has become a “medical desert.”

That’s a term Morgan uses to describe the severe shortage of physicians practicing in the neighborhood, which is also burdened with the county’s highest rates of chronic disease.

“South Dallas just wasn’t one of the most profitable-looking neighborhoods,” she said. “I wouldn’t call it neglect, but there’s a lot to be said and done about the area’s overall health.”

So, Morgan is taking matters into her own hands. She plans to bring in a suite of specialists who can offer services like dental and urgent care, podiatry and gerontology, among others.

And her idea is getting serious backing from some notable Dallas investors.

In November, she won more than a half-million to support the project in a competition hosted by The Real Estate Council and modeled after the popular television show Shark Tank.

The competition

Nearly 30 entries were submitted to the contest, in which investors seeking ideas to revitalize the city’s south side would review proposals from local entrepreneurs.

"I do a lot in the southern sector and knew there was a need in the area," said real estate veteran Frank Mihalopoulos, president of Dallas' Corinth Properties. He has invested in reviving dying U.S. malls and paved the way for a Wal-Mart that became a magnet bringing new business to South Oak Cliff.

Dr. Michelle Morgan, founder of the Art of Dentistry, outside of an abandoned building she purchased on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in Dallas. (Ben Torres / Special Contributor)

Morgan, 57, was one of three finalists chosen to pitch her community project directly to Mihalopoulos and four other “sharks,” including real estate investors Michael Dardick, founding partner and chief executive officer of Plano-based Granite Properties, and Tillie Borchers, director of investments at Civitas Capital Group in Dallas.

"My goal is to first understand the community's overall health condition and then to make resources available by bringing doctors in to address those specific needs," Morgan said.

Morgan, who already owns a small chain of dental clinics called Art of Dentistry, is seeking doctors of various specialties to collaborate with her to bring medical care back to South Dallas.

In addition to the $100,000 each shark invested for the initial award, they promised up to $700,000 extra if it’s needed to cover cost overruns during construction, said Linda McMahon, who heads The Real Estate Council. The total estimated commitment to date is just over $1.2 million.

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Disappearing history

In a sense, Morgan’s effort is reminiscent of the facility’s historic roots, which have not been well-documented. The Forest Avenue Hospital was established by a handful of black doctors in the early 1960s, at a time when racial segregation was still commonplace across the United States.

A Dallas Morning News clipping from Feb. 20, 1918, details a petition to create a separate hospital during a spike in tuberculosis deaths. (Dallas Morning News Archives)

At the turn of the 20th century, Forest Avenue — now Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd — was Dallas’ southern city limit, an unincorporated area where black residents were allowed to buy land.

Black doctors often could not work in whites-only facilities, and many hospitals did not admit black patients, forcing entrepreneurs to establish separate medical centers for people of color.

About 500 such facilities existed in the U.S. during the early part of the 20th century, including six in Dallas, of which Forest Avenue was the last to open, said Nathaniel Wesley.

He's a former hospital administrator and health care businesses professor at Florida A&M University. His 2010 publication, Black Hospitals in America, attempted to create a comprehensive list.

Sometimes doctors opened up their own homes to patients. “If a doctor put up six to eight patients in his living room, that became a hospital to the rest of the community,” he said.

Many of the hospitals were never officially registered or licensed.

A News clipping from Dec. 30, 1904, details the start of bricklaying for what would eventually become the Bluitt Sanitarium, opened in 1906. (Dallas Morning News Archives)

Besides Forest Avenue Hospital, the Dallas-Fort Worth Hospital Council has records of Bluitt Sanitarium, opened in 1906 by Dr. Benjamin Bluitt, the first black surgeon in Texas history, and the Pinkston Clinic Hospital, opened in 1927 by surgeon Lee Gresham Pinkston, for whom a Dallas high school is named.

When bricklaying for the Bluitt project began in 1904, it was described as “a negro hospital, the first of its kind in this section of the country.” The three-story building on the corner of Commerce and Pearl streets cost $8,000 to build, the equivalent of just over $200,000 in today’s dollars.

Years later, in 1936, a two-day program would bring 30 black physicians from various parts of Texas to the Pinkston Clinic on Thomas Avenue for a lecture series held by faculty of Baylor Medical College.

The number of black hospitals proliferated by the early 1940s, and flourished until civil rights laws forced the desegregation of public facilities.

“That began the end of the black hospital. The ones that survived had medical schools, and the hospital became a major part of getting people trained,” Wesley said.

Howard University Hospital in the nation’s capital is the only one left, he said.

The mural on the front exterior wall of the old Forest Avenue Hospital shows the busts of three men said to be the co-founders, but their names are difficult to confirm.

Archival clippings list them as including the late surgeon Edward J. Mason and Dr. Emmett J. Conrad, who later became the first African-American elected to the Dallas Independent School District's board of trustees.

There’s also Judge E. Page, whose 1976 obituary describes him as a World War II veteran and a anesthesiologist, and the Rev. Jesse L. Lott, who also formed his own mortuary business. They were among the many to pave the way for blacks in business and medicine and to fill a needed gap in care.

Lingering disparities

But predominantly black South Dallas still suffers from a suite of health disparities. And that’s the problem Morgan is hoping to address through her effort to create a multipurpose medical facility in an area considered the poorest of all Dallas County communities. The issues are stark.

The area has the highest mortality rates in the county from heart disease, cancer and stroke. The average per capita income for the area's population is $13,660 a year and nearly a third of the households fall below the poverty level, according to a 2016 assessment that identified various health challenges facing the neighborhood. Transportation is limited, making it hard for the elderly and residents to travel to providers in other neighborhoods with consistency.

Last year, Morgan formed Vectors Studies, a group that aims to evaluate the reasons behind the community’s troubling disparities and to empower residents with the tools to “be their best self.”

The Real Estate Council contest is among the latest to turn attention to South Dallas’ redevelopment. The more than 2,000-member TREC is a trade organization for commercial real estate professionals that includes a community fund, which typically gives loans to support Dallas-area projects being developed in low- and moderate-income communities.

In 2012, Mayor Mike Rawlings touted a multimillion-dollar plan to spur growth, but that fund's managers have struggled to find qualified projects to invest in. About $30 million remained unused five years after the announcement, The Dallas Morning News reported in July.

In November, The Real Estate Council also awarded $1.35 million for a project to construct and overhaul a hangar at Dallas Executive Airport and $250,000 for a project to develop and sell single-family houses. Morgan and the other finalists had the opportunity earlier this year to pair with mentors holding expertise in finance, construction, engineering and interior design.

This was the first year the group hosted the competition. Equity financing was used to support Morgan’s project, said the council’s community fund manager, Maggie Parker.

The goal is for each project to be completed within the next year to 18 months, and the progress of each initiative will be tracked. The selection process was rigorous and expectations are high, investors said.

And there is huge incentive for Morgan to succeed, said Mihalopoulos of Corinth Properties.

“She’s going to be participating, not only as the investor and developer, but also as one of the operators in the facility,” he said. “I feel optimistic. With our help, they can get it done.”

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