An abandoned hospital in Birmingham’s Ensley neighborhood that was vandalized with racist graffiti last month needs to be cleaned up and soon, city officials say.

“It was already offensive to the community and now it has become an even bigger nuisance,” Birmingham City Council member Carol Clarke said last week. “We can’t do anything, and our hands are tied to remove the graffiti.”

But she said city officials should pressure the property owner to get it cleaned up.

“Our teams are on it,” said Chaz Mitchell, chief of operations for the city, who said city staff are applying “all the weight that we can on this issue.”

The owner, Randal Scott, reached Friday and again Monday by AL.com, said he plans to allow a neighborhood crew to remove the graffiti.

“The community said they were prepared (to remove it),” Scott said. “If they don’t, then I’m going to. I’m a contractor. So, my guys will probably get up there and do it.”

Alex Brewer, an Ensley businessman, said he was gathering support for a community effort to clean off the graffiti.

“We have come up with the resources – we have muriatic acid, we have generators, we have pressure washers, we have water trucks available to remove it,” Brewer said. “We as a community, we’re trying to get it removed. A lot of community people are upset that it’s there and want it down.”

The neighborhood needs permission from the owner, he said.

“It’s private property and trying to get the owner to remove that is our process now,” he said.

Scott said he has written a letter that gives community activists permission to go on the property.

“I’m going to give them permission in writing, so the graffiti can be removed,” Scott said on Monday afternoon. He said he wants to get Birmingham police to “go in and comb the building” first. “Then we’ll take the graffiti off,” he said.

The white supremacist group that vandalized the building shared photos of the Ensley building and other graffiti in locations around the country where they did similar stunts. “There were people spotted on the roof with weapons,” Scott said.

Patriot Front is a white nationalist group that broke off from Vanguard America, a neo-Nazi group that participated in the Aug. 12, 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., where an anti-racism protester was killed when a car drove into the crowd.

On its web site, Patriot Front has a manifesto that makes racist claims.

“An African, for example, may have lived, worked, and even been classed as a citizen in America for centuries, yet he is not American,” the manifesto says. “He is, as he likely prefers to be labelled, an African in America.”

Scott said he had not heard of them before the graffiti vandalism.

“My spirit told me it wasn’t anything good,” he said. “After I read up on who the group was, I began to understand it was derogatory and racist.”

Scott said he has a long-term plan of converting the former Community Hospital, at 1901 19th Street, into luxury housing for veterans. “It’s a $5 million-plus project,” Scott said. “I’m looking for investors.”

Scott’s previous efforts to make use of the building have been hindered by theft and trespassing, he said.

“I renovated part of it for office space,” he said. “The crackheads and dopeheads break in there and steal so much of my equipment and vandalize my office. I was losing so much money, so I stopped.”

Although the back of the hospital is surrounded by a fence topped by razor wire, the fence has been breached by trespassers who cut through the chain-link fence.

“I’ve mended that fence three times,” Scott said.

The hospital was built in 1946 as Holy Family Hospital, run by the Sisters of Charity as a ministry to Blacks whose healthcare options were limited by segregation, until it was sold in 1968 and became Community Hospital. It stopped operating as a hospital in the 1980s, Scott said.

“I was born in that hospital,” said Scott. “I want to do some things in my city, but I have got to have help.”

He said his mother and grandmother worked in the dietary department of the hospital for decades. He said that they told him that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had a minor surgery at Holy Family Hospital in the 1960s, at the time he often staying with his brother, the Rev. A.D. King, who was pastor of nearby First Baptist Church of Ensley from 1961-65.

“That’s where the Black doctors of that time practiced,” Scott said.