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16 | Community
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Holy Spirit offers to sell 150-year-old house
for $1 to save it from expansion plan
Continued from page 1
land. To Holy Spirit, which says there nev
er was such a permanent deal, it’s anoth
er chance to make a new agreement. In
response to Reporter questions about the
house, Holy Spirit offered a new bargain.
“Since there seems to be interest in pre
serving this cottage, the church would
be more than happy to sell the cottage to
someone for $1, on condition that they
move it from the parish property within a
specified period,” a Holy Spirit spokesper
son said.
Holy Spirit was scheduled to host a June
6 community meeting at Sandy Springs
City Hall about its proposal to expand its
Buckhead campus at Mount Paran Road
and Northside Drive onto an adjacent San
dy Springs site. The proposal includes re
locating the Lower School from elsewhere
in Sandy Springs, as well as a parking deck
and church-related buildings.
The old Sims property - about 13 acres
of woods - is the expansion site and ground
zero for the debate. The local Northside/
Chastain/Mt. Paran Neighborhood Preser
vation Association wants the trees to stay
and says a 2003 legal agreement with Holy
Spirit blocks the expansion. Holy Spirit
says that agreement is no longer valid for
technical reasons due to the NPA’s failure
to file state paperwork.
The dispute about the letter and spir
it of agreements goes back to Sims him
self, who sold the property to Holy Spirit.
There’s no question that Holy Spirit once
spoke strongly about preserving the house
and woods, but there is no sign of a writ
ten agreement to that effect, and commu
nity and family memories differ regarding
Sims’s expectations.
Randy Cherry, Sims’s stepson, only re
called a stipulation that the site remain
undeveloped during Sims’s lifetime. Sims
died in 2006 at the age of 99, according to
newspaper obituaries.
“He just didn’t want anything to hap
pen to the house while he was alive,” Cher
ry said.
The history of the house at 844 Mount
Paran is detailed in old newspaper articles
and in a Georgia Historic Resources survey
conducted by the state in the mid-1990s
and now on file at Heritage Sandy Springs.
Sims, who bought the property in 1945,
estimated the house to date to 1868, part
ly based on old newspapers stuffed into its
walls. Local lore said it was built by a fam
ily named Cates as a home for a tenant
farmer, and that its location was chosen by
fate when wagons loaded with construc
tion lumber got stuck in the mud there.
The house was remodeled in the 1920s by
an attorney who named the nearby High-
court Road.
Despite the alterations, the state sur
vey in the 1990s said the house appeared
to meet the criteria for listing on the Na
tional Register of Historic Places. It ap
pear the house never got any form of of
ficial historic designation. But it did get a
modest, informal one - a sign dubbing it
the Sims House, erected in the mid-1990s
by the Historic Preservation Committee of
the Sandy Springs Foundation, apparent
ly the same nonprofit that went dormant
and was recently revived to support the
new City Springs civic center.
Cherry calls it a “cute house” and re
called it as old-fashioned. “It was not mod
ernized whatsoever,” Cherry said. “[It had]
mostly original fixtures. Squeaky wood
floors and hardwood doors.”
Sims lived in the house until his mar
riage in 1987 to Cherry’s mother, Rebec
ca. The couple's main home was Rebec
ca’s house on Buckhead’s West Paces Ferry
Road. “She had a whole house surrounded
by gardens... She wasn’t going to move into
a little hut with Ben,” Cherry said.
Rebecca Cherry Sims was killed by
a gardener in a notorious 1989 crime in
which Ben Sims was severely injured.
In 1996, Sims sold the Mount Paran
property to Holy Spirit under terms that
essentially let him remain living there for
the rest of his life. In 2003, he gave over all
rights to the property and moved to Flori
da. The exact sales amount is unclear from
available records, but Holy Spirit says it
believes it paid Sims $1.9 million. It’s clear
that both sides talked about the deal in
terms of preservations, but there is no sign
of a legal agreement requiring it.
In 1998, when Holy Spirit was still pro
posing its current Upper School campus in
a controversy that led to the disputed 2003
legal agreement, the Atlanta Journal-Con
stitution wrote about the Sims property
and the house.
“I never wanted to sell,” the paper quot
ed Sims as saying. “I just didn’t want it to
wind up with developers. They build out
rageously ugly houses with 14 feet be
tween them.”
The same story also quoted Monsignor
Edward Dillon, who remains Holy Spirit’s
pastor today.
“Our intent is to preserve the house,”
Dillon was quoted as saying. “We want to
maintain that area perpetually in its nat
ural state, and maybe lay out some type of
botanical meditation garden where people
can go sit or think or pray.”
Those plans have changed. Holy Spir
it says its expansion would requiring cut
ting down a majority of the woodland, and
the house will go, too. At a previously com
munity meeting in April, Dillon referred to
Sims as a “tree-hugger” and suggested that
Holy Spirit lived up to its promise by not
selling the land for a housing subdivision.
A Holy Spirit spokesperson said the
house was maintained for many years,
but about three years ago became unsafe
for occupancy, especially due to floor prob
lems. Holy Spirit estimates it would cost
$600,000 to bring the house up to code.
John Beach, president of the Buck-
head Heritage Society, said his father was
a friend of Sims. Beach recalled Sims as
more interested in the fate of the wood
land than that of the house.
“He was a serious gardener, and loved
his overgrown woods on Mount Paran.
The old cottage was not much more than
a shack,” Beach said.
“Ben was very disillusioned by the
church’s treatment of the woods he sold
them, felt like they went back on their
word about development to him, or at least
that was my perception,” Beach said. But
regarding the house, he added, “I wasn’t
aware of any preservation talk, [and] don’t
know that Ben thought it would be pre
served.”
Besides the $1 house sale offer, Holy
Spirit said it is “rescuing” some plants in
the woodland as well. The Georgia Native
Plant Society as well as church volunteers
and staff members are already moving
various plants from the potential expan
sion site to other parts of the property or
off-site locations, a spokesperson said.
Wildlife and people could benefit from
better tree protections, advocates say
BY KATIA MARTINEZ
Native birds will have a safe place to rest their wings at night if the Atlanta Audubon
Society has its way.
The society has been partnering with several local environmental organizations to
protect the city’s canopy and wildlife, and on April 30 held a “Tree Talks” meeting at At
lanta International School to focus on development and protection of that canopy.
Meeting leaders cited planting more trees, buying forested land to protect, and sav
ing existing canopy as the best solutions.
The City of Atlanta will be reviewing the existing tree protection ordinance later this
year, and Nikki Belmonte, the Executive Director of the Atlanta Audubon Society, said
this is the time for citizens and experts to voice their opinions. Citizens were also en
couraged to sign a pre-filled out letter to the City of Atlanta asking for stricter tree pro
tection laws.
“There are gaps in the [existing] ordinances that just don’t work anymore for our
city,” Belmonte said. “The ordinances are 20 years old, so it’s time for an update.”
There are more than 250 species of wild birds in Atlanta, and the diverse canopy al
lows those communities to flourish. And that tree diversity is what Dekalb County Nat
ural Resource Manager Robby Astrove wants to protect.
“As great as it looks to have a whole street blooming at the same time [with the same
tree species], we're actually creating a susceptibility for the trees if we do that,” Astrove
said. “A disease can come in and wipe out the whole street.”
But disease is not the only concerning issue for these groups. More than 72% of the
canopy is on private property, and while there are fines for cutting trees down without
a proper permit, Tree Next Door founder deLille Anthony believes those are not strict
enough.
“When you hear someone with a chainsaw on a Sunday morning, they’re usually
doing it then because they know there isn’t anyone in the office who can answer those
calls,” Anthony said.
She also said the rising real estate values in the metro area are devaluing the trees
on those properties.
“When you’re spending $400,000 on a piece of a property, a $500 fine to illegally cut
down a tree is a drop in the bucket,” she said.
The group also discussed wanting to charge more for cutting down trees in the more
expensive parts of the city to better correlate the price with the value.
“We need to help people understand the value of trees,” Belmonte said. “And if a
property is worth more, than so are the trees on it.”
For more information, see atlantaaudubon.org.