Time marches on. Babies are born. Leaves turn. The sun rises and the sun sets. But through it all, time always dispassionately marches on.
The fool digs in his heels and resists. The wiser among us, however, accept change as inevitable and plan for it – but never without first honoring what came before.
The wiser route was the one chosen by St. Tammany Health System leadership in 2002 when the time came to demolish and relocate its New Family Center – the site of thousands of St. Tammany Parish births over the years – to make way for its massive New Millennium Project expansion.
And that brings us to today’s penultimate installment in 70 for 70, a 70-part series highlighting artifacts from St. Tammany Health System’s history that help tell its seven-decade story.
Installment No. 69: The (new) family stone
Today’s artifact: An old, weathered St. Joe brick salvaged by architect Keith Barré of FLWB from St. Tammany Parish Hospital’s former New Family Center upon its 2002 demolition as part of the hospital’s New Millennium Project.
Why it is significant: When St. Tammany Health System christened its newly constructed New Family Center in December 1988, there was good reason for excitement.
Gone was the old, coldly clinical way of giving birth. Replacing it was a model in which new moms were more active participants in the process. They had a say in their birthing plan, notably including use of anesthesia. Barring complications, each stayed in the same thoughtfully designed room – bright, home-like, comfortable – through her labor, delivery and recovery, and for post-partum care.
Suddenly, giving birth was no longer something to fear. At the New Family Center, every aspect of it was treated as something to be celebrated.
It was no surprise that the women of the Northshore loved the idea, which remains the standard for maternity care.
But time marches on. Babies are born. Leaves turn. The sun rises and the sun sets.
And in St. Tammany Parish, the population grows.
To keep pace, the health system embarked in June 1999 on its New Millennium Project, a three-phase expansion and modernization of the hospital that would go down as the largest capital outlay program to that point in its history.
As part of the project’s second phase, which got underway in 2002, all-new quarters for the New Family Center would be built on the third floor of a new four-floor patient wing.
To make room for it, the circa 1987 building that previously housed the New Family Center would have to go, with demolition crews reducing it to a pile of dusty construction debris.
“Interestingly, people in the community began sneaking into the rubble pile to take ‘souvenir’ bricks in memory of their children who were born there,” wrote Barré, who has been doing architectural work for the hospital since 1992 and whose firm designed the New Millennium expansion.
Making the bricks even more meaningful to Northshore residents is that each – emblazoned with the words “St. Joe” – was literally once part of the parish, made by hand from locally sourced clay at Pearl River’s storied St. Joe Brick Works.
In deference to public safety, but in acknowledgment of local residents’ warm-and-fuzzy pangs of nostalgia, the hospital began leaving out a small pile of old St. Joe bricks from the former building just outside the fenced-in construction zone. They were predictably snapped up.
“I am guilty, too,” Barré admitted, “because I have one representing each of my two daughters who were born there as well.”
Today, the St. Tammany Health System New Family Center is still on the hospital’s third floor, although it was recently updated and expanded to include an Obstetric Emergency Department, among other things.
And those makeshift St. Joe keepsakes plucked from the rubble pile? Today, they adorn countless bookshelves and mantlepieces across the region, homegrown reminders of the unique bond between St. Tammany Health System and the community it has served since 1954.
Do you have a St. Tammany Parish Hospital story or item to share? We’d love to hear about it! Email us at CommDept@stph.org.
Next week – Installment No. 70: Yesterday, today and tomorrow ...
Last week – Installment No. 68: Ghosts of STHS Christmases past