I found this nice aerial view of the Memphis Medical Center, taken sometime in the 1950s, judging from the cars, and the presence of Russwood Park, which burned in 1960.
If you are having trouble orienting the view, I'll tell you that we are looking southwest from the general area of Jefferson and Waldran, looking towards the University of Tennessee campus in the distance.
But if the view is confusing, it's also because almost everything you see in this old picture has either changed drastically — or vanished entirely.
You can see the baseball diamond of Russwood Park, which burned on the night of Easter Sunday, April 17, 1960, and was replaced with a row of modern medical buildings, these days home to the Hamilton Eye Institute and other departments of the University of Tennessee Health Science Center.
The tall smokestack in the bottom right corner belonged to the Memphis Steam Laundry, one of our city's most ornate buildings (designed in the Italian Renaissance style, which is rather unusual, to say the least, for an industrial laundry) but torn down to make way for the Medical Center.
The V-shaped white building at right center is, of course, the first section of the "new" Baptist Memorial Hospital, supposedly designed to look like an open Bible. Here, it is still standing across Madison Avenue from Russwood Park. A matching addition, facing Union, was added in the 1960s, which more than doubled the size of the hospital, but the whole area was cleared -- by dynamite -- several years ago.
You'll have to look very closely, but Union Avenue runs diagonally across the top-third of the photo, recognizable by all the car dealerships that composed "Auto Row." The red-brick cluster of buildings that make up the UT campus is visible at top right.
In the lower left, that tall white building has survived, today serving as an apartment complex, but the tennis courts next to it are gone.
Get on Google Earth, if you really want to compare then-and-now. It's quite dramatic.
