A Revised View of Kimball Sanitarium – Part 2

I’m continuing with a new view of Kimball Sanitarium, which was on Foothill Boulevard right where Ralphs is today. It was a mental institution and it ran from 1922 until 1960. I have written previously about its history, but I’m revisiting that history with new info gleaned from Dave Kimball, who grew up in the sanitarium his dad ran. Some info I’ve already covered, but some is new.

The Kimball family had deep roots in the medical and mental health fields. Dave Kimball’s great grandfather was a doctor in the Civil War who suffered greatly from PTSD. His son, Frederick Kimball, was a pioneer in mental health becoming in the late 1800s the first superintendent of what is today Patton State Hospital, a state mental institution. Frederick Kimball retired and started his own mental hospital in Hollywood in 1910. In the late teens/early ’20s Frederick’s wife owned a sanitarium in Tujunga. In 1922, she purchased a large Victorian mansion in La Crescenta near the intersection of Rosemont and Michigan avenues (today’s Foothill Boulevard) and moved her Tujunga patients to that location. It was to be called Kimball Sanitarium.

Her son Merritt dropped out of college and took over management of the new Kimball Sanitarium, along with her other son Donald. Donald had a podiatry practice in Los Angeles, so Merritt was in charge.

The old two-story mansion was used as an administration building and kitchen. The comfortable first floor living room was used for interviewing patients and their families. Dave Kimball remembers that it had a massive fireplace and a big radio. The Kimball family lived in another house on the property closer to Rosemont (about where Baja Fresh is today).

Merritt built a patient building next to the Victorian mansion, just to the west. It was an odd shape. It was three wings arrayed from a center point where a recreation room and sunroom was located. Rooms were off a center hallway of each wing. One wing was dedicated to difficult or violent patients. The rooms there were fitted with padding on the walls and restraints for the safety of the patients.

Dave remembers: “Capacity was 45-50 beds, although in the years when I helped out (ages 12 to 17) we rarely had that many patients ­– usually somewhere in the mid-30s. All rooms were single occupancy. Meals were delivered to the patients on an insulated cart which held up to about a dozen (perhaps more) trays of food to a little distribution room where the nurses and other helpers distributed the trays to the patients in their rooms or in a common area.”

In front of the buildings, where the Ralphs and Rite-Aid parking lots are today, were lush orchards left over from the previous owners of what had been a large estate. Grape vines and hundreds of avocado, orange and apricot trees created a huge several-acre front yard. Dave remembers the orchards were heavily populated with rattlesnakes.

Besides the acreage in front, the Kimballs also owned several acres to the north, where Rosemont Middle School is. Above their property along Rosemont Avenue was the Reynolds property, where Alfred Clark lived. I wrote about him in a previous article. And above that was the estate and studio of an extremely successful artist, Stephen Seymore Thomas. While Thomas loved to paint outdoor landscapes, his bread and butter was portraiture. He painted portraits of the rich and famous of the teens, ’20s and ’30s, even a presidential portrait that today hangs in the White House.

The Kimballs didn’t own the large corner lot at Rosemont and Foothill. That was the location of the three-story La Crescenta Hotel. It had been built in the late 1800s as an opulent resort hotel. In Dave’s childhood memories of the 1940s, it was abandoned, although it served as a cheap boarding house in its last years. It fell when the rest of the property was cleared in 1962 for the shopping center.

That gives you the origin of Kimball Sanitarium, along with the lay of the land. Next week, the patients and their treatments will be discussed.