Kimball Sanitarium Part 4 – Anti-Sanitarium Movement As I’ve documented in previous columns, the sanitarium business was booming in the Crescenta Valley in the late ’20s. One old-timer stated that at that period there were some 20 different sanitariums locally for the aged, for lung diseases and for mental illness. During that same period […]
Sanitariums in CV – Kimball Sanitarium Part 2 Last week I wrote about the background of Merritt Kimball, owner of Kimball Sanitarium. He had been raised in the fledgling mental health industry in Southern California, his father having been head of the first state run insane asylum in San Bernardino, and later a large private […]
Sanitariums in CV – Kimball Sanitarium Part 1 Finding information on the local sanitariums has been difficult. There’s this code of ethics called “patient confidentiality” that has been terribly inconvenient for local historians. A lot of what I have on Kimball Sanitarium is pieced together from random news clippings, eyewitness accounts from old-timers, and some […]
Sanitariums in CV – A Little More on Hillcrest Sanitarium Before I launch into Kimball Sanitarium, the most infamous of the local sanitariums, I’ll backtrack a little and add some new info about Hillcrest Sanitarium. As regular readers know, Hillcrest was located at the top of Lowell Avenue on a plateau overlooking the valley. It […]
Sanitariums in CV – Rockhaven Sanitarium Part 3 Last week I covered the physical aspects of Rockhaven Sanitarium – about its founder Agnes Richards, and its growth and development. But the history of Rockhaven would be incomplete without discussing the women that lived there in its decades of operation. Because it was upscale, it had […]
Sanitariums in CV – Rockhaven Sanitarium Part 2 I wrote last week about the brutal nature of the treatment of mental illness during the ’20s, particularly for women, and how one woman, Agnes Richards, thought she could do a better job. She believed that with humane, caring treatment, in a home-like setting, some minds would […]
Sanitariums in CV – Rockhaven Sanitarium Part 1 After hearing about Hillcrest Sanitarium, one might get the impression that all the sanitariums were somewhat nightmarish. Not so. Hillcrest had a bumpy career, starting as a high-end sanitarium and slowly declining as its age began to show. It had that brief interlude during the war as […]
Sanitariums in CV – Hillcrest Sanitarium Part 3 Continuing with my series on Hillcrest Sanitarium, once located at the top of Lowell Avenue, we conclude with its post WWII career. It had a pre-war run as a high-end sanitarium for lung disease and various other chronic ailments, and its wartime function was basically as a […]
Sanitariums in CV – Hillcrest Sanitarium Part 2 As I wrote here last week, Hillcrest Sanitarium was a large, high-class sanitarium at the top of Lowell in what is now Markridge Estates. In 1942, the U.S. government set up 10 relocation camps in the western U.S., into which were crowded 120,000 U.S. citizens of Japanese […]
Sanitariums in CV – Hillcrest Sanitarium, Part 1 Hillcrest Sanitarium was one of the larger sanitariums in the valley, housing from 50 up to nearly 200 patients in several buildings between the late 1920s until the late 1960s. Although they started as a tubercular sanitarium, they treated a wide variety of chronic illnesses, and morphed […]