Meet Mid City: Edgardo Tenreiro

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President and CEO, Baton Rouge General
Mid City campus is at 3600 Florida Blvd.
In Mid City since: 1950

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With the closure of its Mid City emergency room in 2015, many wondered about the future of this Baton Rouge General campus. But the facility remains Mid City’s largest medical center, making it perhaps one of the most important institutions in the area. The campus currently offers behavioral health and wellness, injury and illness recovery, hospice and care for the elderly, and more.

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Tell us about Baton Rouge General’s history in the Mid City area.

I think we’re an anchor to this community. Baton Rouge General was founded in 1904, and we moved to the Mid City campus in 1950. Throughout its history, the hospital has grown with the community and had many notable firsts, including the first pacemaker implant in Louisiana and the first hyperbaric oxygen therapy program in the region.

What would you say is the role of Baton Rouge General in Mid City now?

We offer a wide range of services, including some that our patients can’t find anywhere else in the region. There are also about 1,000 people that call this their place of employment, and most of them live in the area. So there’s a lot that ties us to this community, and we feel a commitment to it.

How have you seen Mid City change?

I’ve been here since 2008, and in those 10 years I’ve seen this sense of rebirth in the area. When Mid City Redevelopment got started in the ’90s, it was because they knew that the vitality of Mid City was essential to the vitality of Baton Rouge. And now we’ve seen that renaissance being accelerated over the last three to four years, with the big push being the Government Street redevelopment.

What does the neighborhood look like today?

Now there are young families moving back here, because they’re looking for a different style of living. Mid City is not the downtown sort of environment, but it’s not the suburbs either. This is more of an organic, neighborhood look and feel. I can’t really put my finger on it, but there’s something special here—a sense of pride, a sense of belonging to the community. It’s just a different culture.

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Read more on Mid City’s rapid growth in Baton Rouge from our October 2018 cover story.