The Los Angeles Conservancy had Central Library, and The Glendale Historical Society had the Doctors House, a Victorian home in the Queen Anne/Eastlake style built out of redwood, with a square tower.
It's named after not one but four doctors who occupied the Victorian house in succession, when it was located on the northwest corner of Wilson and Belmont (at the time, Third and B Streets, where an apartment building stand now).
The first physician to occupy it after it was built in 1888 was a Chicagoan, Dr. C.V. Bogue. In 1901, Dr. Bogue sold the house and practice so he could move back to the Midwest.
His buyer was Dr. David Winslow Hunt, a Minnesotan who owned the first automobile within Glendale limits, while it was still just a hamlet of 300 residents.
The third doctor to take up residence in the house was Dr. A. L. Bryant, who bought the house from Dr. Hunt in 1907 and then sold it back to him in 1908. Some historical records don't even count him and keep the narrative to just three doctors.
Dr. Hunt turned around and sold it again, this time to Dr. Leon H. Hurtt—the fourth and final doctor to occupy the house and the first president of the Glendale Chamber of Commerce.
Although it's been restored as a "doctors house museum," replete with tools and instruments and medical tomes...
...it was actually built by a real estate developer and was occupied by others before and after the four doctors...
...including Canadian actress and animal trainer Nell Shipman from 1917 to 1920.
Reportedly, her onsite menagerie included two bear cubs.
The Glendale streets used to be lined with homes like this when they were fashionable—but by 1979, the Victorian style had fallen out of fashion and a demolition permit was issued for this one, while it still stood in its former location.
The newly-formed Glendale Historical Society mobilized and maneuvered a move to Brand Park in 1980. They opened it as a museum four years later and still conduct tours today. Now, it's only one of couple Victorians left in Glendale.
The saving of the Doctors House is considered the birth of the preservation movement in Glendale—but 40 years later, it's still got a long way to go (especially judging by its complete neglect of the Rockhaven Sanitarium property the city owns and refuses to do anything with).
How much do we have to lose and subsequently regret before we actually learn our lesson?
How many ugly yet utilitarian apartment buildings have replaced historic structures that provide a looking-glass view into the 19th century (or even farther back in time)?
How many more coalitions have to form to fight the good fight?
California owes a certain debt to the Spanish for its current existence—and the conquistadors who held a certain fancy for the local indigenous women, which spawned generations of Mexicans to come.
We celebrate the Californios—or, those born in California of Spanish descent—who pioneered the creation of our pueblos.
In LA, we've got Chinatown, Little Tokyo, Historic Filipinotown, Thai Town, and Koreatown to remind us of the cultural (and financial) contributions of our neighbors to the East. There's the Byzantine-Latino Quarter with its annual Greek festival, Little Armenia, Little Ethiopia, Little Osaka, Persian Square, and Little Bangladesh.
We've even got an Italian-American Museum.
But let's not forget about the French.
The French began to immigrate to El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de Los Angeles in 1827, despite the fact that it was, at the time, a tiny Mexican village—and it took them less than a quarter-century to rise to prominence here.
A French winemaker named Jean-Louis Vignes was one of the first—but the French vines he brought here and the wine-friendly climate lured many others of his kind to follow in his footsteps.
One of those immigrant French winemakers was Georges Le Mesnager, who arrived in 1885 and purchased land in the Dunsmore Canyon area of La Crescenta (now known as Deukmejian Wilderness Park). There, he planted vines and grew grapes for a winery he opened at Main and Mesnager Streets in Downtown Los Angeles.
At the time, the canyon was wild and steep, subject to runoff, flooding, and mudslides—but nevertheless, Mesnager tried to develop the land with the help of his son Louis, who, in 1905, began building a stone barn for their winemaking business. (Some reports say that the barn was built from 1914 to 1918, along with some other buildings that no longer exist.)
For a while, the barn was primarily used as a stable and a storage facility—not only for vineyard equipment but also for the grapes that would be shipped off to the family's winery in Downtown LA. That is, until Prohibition hit in 1920.
The ratification of the 18th Amendment of the Constitution pretty much put an end to the Le Mesnager winemaking business (and the winemaking industry in general, save for places like San Fernando Mission and San Antonio Winery that could continue to produce sacramental wine), although the Le Mesnagers sold table grapes and produced non-alcoholic, grape-based drinks like brandy (which is typically created by distilling wine).
When the 21st Amendment of the Constitution repealed Prohibition in 1933, as we learned on our guided tour, winemaking resumed in the barn. But by then, Le Mesnager and his wife had returned to France, and he'd passed away a decade before after suffering a stroke.
Also in 1933, a fire in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains (now known as Angeles National Forest) gutted the barn—destroying the equipment inside and leaving only the original stonework. And, as is typical after a fire clears a hillside of its vegetation (in this case, chaparral and sage scrub), the rains that followed brought massive flooding—and more devastation to the vineyard.
Still, the early families of the LA area were a hardy lot, so the remaining members of the Le Mesnager family rebuilt the stone barn with an arched roof instead of the original pitched roof, taking the opportunity to add living quarters on the second floor and moving in. They lived there from 1937 to 1960, which helped preserve that stone barn as a rare example of a two-story vernacular rock structure.
And fortunately, the non-profit group the Stone Barn Vineyard Conservancy—led by, in large part, local historian, author, and winemaker Stuart Byles—has preserved not only the barn itself, but also the legacy of winemaking in this area of the Crescenta Valley.
The vineyard now has 81 grapevines—none original, all planted since 2004 and regularly maintained by volunteers. But, after being sold to a developer in 1968, the 709-acre property almost became a housing development. Fortunately, the City of Glendale stepped in, purchased it, and turned it into a park in the 1980s.
Now, you can find both red and white cultivars growing on the vines there, from Alicante Bouschet and Red Flames to Early Burgundy (a.k.a. Abouriou).
How does it taste? Well, I've yet to find out. The Conservancy isn't legally allowed to sell the wine it makes from these grapes.
So, I may just have to join as a member to get my complimentary bottle. After all, I do love underdog wine country.
And despite how big winemaking once was in LA (and not yet Malibu), there's no bigger underdog than LA when it comes to California wine.
If there's a mental hospital I can visit—abandoned, or not—I'm gonna go.
But when I do, I always think maybe they'll want to keep me there. Maybe they won't let me go back home.
For my latest jaunt to a psychiatric ward, my friend Joanna (who also introduced me to Rockhaven Sanitarium) turned me on to California's second state mental hospital, the former Norwalk, now known as Metropolitan State Hospital.
Over a century ago, when choosing a location to follow Patton State Hospital—and to help relieve some of its overcrowding—the state government originally considered Beverly Hills.
But Beverly Hills has always had a way of dodging infrastructure and other facilities—like the freeway or the subway—that might bring property values down.
So a parcel of over 300 acres was chosen in an area then known as "North Walk" for its "country air."
The hospital started taking in patients 100 years ago, when the Imperial Highway was just a cow path and had to be improved for arrivals by horse and carriage.
At the time, I don't think many were too concerned with handling departures.
Norwalk might've been a "cow town" in the first decades of the 20th century, but there were as many as 1990 oil wells in Santa Fe Springs, the next town over.
At the peak of the oil drilling, the Norwalk hospital was surrounded on three sides by derricks.
By 1923, oil activity had slowed down, and Norwalk continued on as a self-sustaining community...
...whose patients farmed, raised cattle, and performed other (many agricultural) tasks to keep the hospital running.
It wasn't really "work therapy"—it was just work.
Nothing can provide free labor like a bunch of captive patients who are physically able but mentally unstable.
Even today, although some buildings have been demolished, Metropolitan State Hospital is like its own little town.
Many of the structures are from the early 20th century, as well as from the 1920s Southern California building boom...
...and the 1947 Post-War building program, which gave rise to a new 504-bed Receiving & Treatment Center in 1954.
Overcrowding was relieved tremendously in the 1950s with the development of psychotropic drugs (like Thorazine and lithium), which meant people with even severe mental problems could actually get better—and hospitalization didn't have to be a life sentence.
Now, there are lots of campus buildings standing in disuse, their windows boarded up.
No longer do patients have to sleep in beds that have been "stacked," surrounded on every side by other beds. And they don't have to sleep on the floor anymore, either.
And now that they're all adults—the children's ward having closed a few years ago—most of them can move about freely within the fenced-in campus perimeter, with restrictions.
After all, nowadays those who are admitted to "Metro" aren't just mental "defectives," as they were once called. Many of them have some criminal record. Almost half of them are incompetent to stand trial. Almost as many are considered a danger to themselves or to others—without having already committed a crime.
Given its 100 years of history, Metropolitan State Hospital (like Patton) took on the task of creating an on-site museum to tell stories and display some of the artifacts that have been collected over the years.
The museum is located in a 1920s-era residence, probably used by a doctor and his family.
So far, most of its visitors have been from the community or from other hospital facilities. One can assume that anyone who works at Metropolitan probably just wants to go home after their shift is over.
Some of the archives include an admissions system used to create nameplates...
...and putting names of those committed into the registry.
There are vintage academic texts, other scientific and educational support materials, and equipment...
...like an antique cork press (for corking pharmaceutical bottles)...
...a welder...
...and, of course, an electroshock therapy machine.
Because a greater percentage of Metropolitan's population is now of a forensic nature—and the hospital doesn't even accept people who are voluntarily admitted—security is of paramount importance.
Long gone are the days of the "camisole restraint," involuntary sterilization...
...and the freezing cold or boiling hot hydrotherapy confinement techniques.
The facility is considered low security (compared to the prison-like operations at Patton), and it doesn't accept patients who've been convicted of violent crimes like murder or sex offenses or who have a history of setting fires or escaping. But it still must provide protection for its staffers, who've been frequently subjected to violent patient outbursts and attacks.
While patients may pose a threat to the staff (even if they weren't violent before they were committed), they themselves aren't entirely safe while they're "institutionalized"—not from each other, and not from their caregivers.
Poor use of restraints, mis-prescribed medications, and negligence have all led to patient deaths that would've otherwise been preventable. One female psychiatric patient died in 2009 after her neck was somehow mysteriously broken, while a nurse keeping watch nearby slept through the whole thing.
Some manage to make their escape—at least, to the morgue—by committing suicide. But even if someone were to walk off the grounds of Metro and go AWOL (which some do), they may never escape the thing that sent them there in the first place.
Then again, at least they would escape the treatments, which are sometimes worse than the disease.
For a peek inside Norwalk Hospital in the 1970s, there was a black-and-white documentary film that was shot there called Hurry Tomorrow, directed by Richard Cohen and Kevin Rafferty.
