by Paul R. Spitzzeri
There are several receipts and statements in the Homestead’s collection pertaining to the April 1929 stay of 7-year old Barbara Smith, whose family resided in the Larchmont area of Los Angeles, at Children’s Hospital. The child spent almost three weeks at the facility, still located at the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Vermont Avenue, a few miles from the Smith house, where she underwent an unspecified two-part operation.
These documents present an opportunity to share a little of the early history of the hospital, dating to the meetings in 1900 that led to the opening of its first location in January 1902 and its operations there until a new campus was inaugurated in February 1914. The establishment of Children’s Hospital was an outgrowth of advances in health care, the activism of women and a growing understanding for the need to provide free treatment to underprivileged children in a burgeoning Angel City as the 19th century gave way to the 20th.
The first hospital in the community dates back to the 1850s and the efforts of the Sisters of Charity, a Roman Catholic order of nuns, which established a school and orphanage, as well. In 1869, the Los Angeles Infirmary was incorporated and it moved fifteen years later to a location at Sunset Boulevard and Beaudry Avenue and became known as St. Vincent’s Hospital. In early 1927, another move was made to a much larger complex at Third and Alvarado streets, but the medical center closed in 2020 and Los Angeles Surge Hospital opened soon after.
Another post here covered some of the story of the Clara Barton Hospital, opened in 1904 by Dr. Herbert P. Barton, a great-nephew of the famous nurse, who achieved renown for her work on Civil War battlefields and who was a founder of the American Red Cross. The institution later became Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center, which then merged in 1989 with the Queen of Angels Hospital.
Then, there is a recent post that touched upon part of the history of Angelus Hospital, which opened in May 1906 on Washington Boulevard, between Maple and Trinity streets, with a publicly-traded firm leading its establishment and with a College of Physicians and Surgeons attached to it. Angelus, which counted the well-known lawyer Earl Rogers as among its founders, operated under a few different names until its closure in 1985 and, after the complex was razed, the site became dedicated to retail stores, restaurants and a Da Vita dialysis center.
The main impetus for Children’s Hospital initially came from one of the few women doctors of the era, Dr. Helen O. Anderson (1865-1934), a longtime local teacher who received her state medical license in 1896 and specialized first in “diseases of women and children” with “especial attention” towards the latter. After three years of study in London, Paris and Vienna, she returned to the Angel City in 1910 to become an “oculist,” or what we now would refer to as an “optometrist” and continued in that profession until her death.
A meeting was held at the city’s Y.M.C.A. on 13 November 1900, with the Los Angeles Times of the next day paraphrasing Dr. Anderson’s remarks as “she believes that it should be charitable in its nature,” although parents should be expected to pay in whole or in part, “but that no child should be refused a place in the hospital for lack of money.” Her idea was to solicit donations and yearly and life memberships through an association, with an annual donation day targeting gifts of anywhere from fifty cents to $1,000.
Other speakers at the confab were Dr. Rebecca Lee Dorsey (1859-1954), an obstetrician and credited as being the first woman endocrinologist in the world and who came to the Angel City in 1886 and became the predominant surgeon at St. Vincent’s, and Dr. Elizabeth Follansbee (1839-1917), a great-granddaughter of Declaration of Independence signer Roger Sherman who also worked with women and children after her arrival in Los Angeles in 1882 and was the first woman member of the county medical association as well as a longtime professor at the University of Southern California medical school.
By the end of the year, a Board of Managers was established for the nascent facility, including the wives of Myer J. Newmark, Joseph B. Banning, Bernard Baruch as well as Frances Wills, Mrs. Edward R. Brainard, and Elizabeth Workman, daughter of Maria Boyle and former mayor and soon-to-be city treasurer William H. Workman (whose uncle and aunt, William Workman and Nicolasa Urioste, were the founders of the Homestead.) Later, Elizabeth’s sister, Charlotte, was invited to the board.
In mid-December, Blanchard Hall, which opened the prior year on Broadway just south of 2nd Street, hosted a benefit concert for the hospital with pianist Lucia Burnett, whose father was the vice-president of the Los Angeles Terminal Railroad, performing selections from Franz Liszt and accompanied by contralto Sibyl Conklin, whose father was a prominent San Diego judge and whose brother was a sheriff in that county. A follow-up performance a little over a month later, featuring the First Congregational Church Orchestra, proved disappointing in attendance if not musical merit.
On the last day of February, Anderson spoke at the First Congregational Church and “delivered a masterly address upon the subject of a children’s hospital” such that the Times of the following day gushed that “the very air of Los Angeles rings with the notes of sweet charity” as “men and women seem to vie with each other in their desire to benefit the unfortunate.” The physician told the assemblage that “there is no way in which a people or a municipality more certainly shows its intelligence than in the fostering care of its children.”
She observed that schools, libraries, museums, parks, orphanages and “hospitals for sick children are all expressions of the highest kind of altruism,” but added that the Good Samaritan Hospital had only one free bed for ill youngsters “and this is only a very little help in a city having fully 25,000 children.” Adding that nearly all doctors in the Angel City supported the concept of a children’s hospital, Anderson continued that
Many little cripples, whose future usefulness and happiness are sure to be impaired by their deformity, might be made straight and beautiful if only a place were provided for that work by either public or private generosity.
Anderson continued that two doctors (she undoubtedly being one of them) and a pair of lawyers drafted “carefully formulated” by-laws with “a very broad and liberal policy” for the hospital’s administration, which should be “strictly non-sectarian, open to doctors of all recognized schools of medicine and free to all needy children.”
By spring, however, a schism emerged in the Los Angeles Children’s Hospital Association, with one faction holding elections under the moniker of the Children’s Hospital Association and the other, led by Dr. Anderson, protesting that it did not represent the will of the organization or was sanctioned by the board of managers. When a set of by-laws were drafted, the Times of 15 March reported, Anderson balked at its contents and enlisted attorney Charles Cassat Davis to draw up a new document, which was rejected.
Moreover, Anderson was asked to return the old bylaws, but she consigned them to the flames based, apparently, on Davis’ opinion that they were not valid. Mrs. Brainard, chosen as president of the breakaway group, which met at the Woman’s Club House on Figueroa Street and immediately filed for incorporation, claimed “there is no friction in the association” that conducted this election and added that architectural drawings for a facility were being prepared and $1,000 subscribed toward it.
Anderson, however, told the Times of 2 April that “I was at the meeting, but did not vote” and asserted that the actions of the Children’s Hospital Association were at the instigation of Frances Wills’ physician father and prearranged. She asserted “this was illegal” including the gathering of dues from some members, but not others, including a friend of hers” and that the thirty or so persons who voted were not representative of the Los Angeles Children’s Hospital Association. The paper paraphrased Anderson as concluding, “that the board of managers has virtually repudiated the society, its bylaws and the spirit which animated it at its organization, thereby practically withdrawing from the association.”
A little over a week later, the Los Angeles Express noted that a meeting was held at the clubhouse on the 10th and “the much disputed by-laws adopted” by the elected board members led by Brainard and Wills, while Dr. Folansbee was among those who voted in the affirmative. The paper reiterated that “Dr. Helen O. Anderson seems to have made the chief objections to the by-laws . . . and she with others who believe as she does, were conspicuously absent this morning.
The paper further reported that Anderson proposed having control of funds under a board of trustees comprised of five men, while the board of managers would oversee the establishment and operation of the hospital, while “other women . . . determined that unless they could control the funds they would have nothing to do with the movement.” Moreover, it was commented upon that “the dissatisfaction . . . caused considerable ill feeling among some very prominent and estimable people” and this led the Children’s Hospital Association to press forward with its own agenda.
Another point of contention was the intent to place the facility next to the Los Angeles Medical College, which Willis’ father ran, on Buena Vista Street (later North Broadway), with Anderson and her allies contending that having the hospital adjacent to the college meant that medical students, not licensed doctors, would be tending to the young patients. A Children’s Hospital Association officer contended that no such decision had been made and added,
In regard to the by-laws, I would say that we found it impossible to work under the restrictions prescribed by Dr. Anderson, and many of the women would have dropped the proposition altogether rather than to have undertaken it under such regulations . . . Everything was harmonious at the meeting this morning, and we believe that we shall be able to go forward with the work without much more difficulty.
Unnamed opponents, presumably Anderson and those aligned with her, offered “that the attempt to build the hospital under the present circumstances will be a miserable failure, and that they will have nothing to do with it.” The article ended by observing that the need for a children’s hospital was great and that the project should received widespread support, while it remarked “Dr. Anderson was one of the earliest instigators of the movement and it was through her knowledge of the suffering and neglected little ones of the city that the great need was first brought to the notice of the public.”
There were significant efforts in following months toward generating support and funds for the project, including from the “Westlake Willing Workers” in the well-to-do neighborhood surrounding what is now MacArthur Park, as well as with the Terminal Island Tuesday Club, where many prominent Angelenos had beach residences. At the end of October, the Women’s Club House was the scene of a “parcel party,” in which boxes with food, clothing and other items were auctioned for as low as 50 cents and as much as $3, with up to $300 brought in. Notably, among the elite women involved were those with such recognizable names as: Banning, Barlow, Botsford, Clark, Elliott, Otis, Hunt, Newmark and Sartori.
In its 11 November edition, the Times reported that “the Children’s Hospital Society of Los Angeles has at last secured a building and expects to open the hospital about December 15, with a full hospital staff.” The structure was the house of General Edward Bouton, located at the southwest corner of Alpine and Castelar (soon renamed as the northern extension of Hill) streets in what is now Chinatown. Bouton, who served in the Union Army during the Civil War, recently moved, and the locale was considered ideal, as
The Franciscan fathers displayed their usual wisdom and foresight in selecting what is now known as “Sonoratown” as the location for the pueblo, on account of its healthfulness and sanitary advantages. It lies high and has splendid drainage. The hills to the north and west shut off the raw winds so that the air is always mild, pure and balmy. Malaria or typhoid fever is a thing unknown.
This statement is notable in that Sonoratown was long considered an unhealthful and unsanitary section of town, where poor Latinos and other ethnic minorities lived in ramshackle adobe buildings and where crime was also determined to be rampant, though Bouton’s residence was a little further north and west of where the worse areas were considered to be.
It was added that Dr. John S. Griffin, an early physician in the Angel City, having come with the invading Army during the Mexican-American War, and other “old-time” doctors “used to say that if they could get patients in the French Hospital, which is near this location, they were able to treat them more successfully on account of the healthfulness of the locality.” Yet, it was also noted that those most likely to need the services of the hospital lived close by, but these would be the poorer members of Angeleno society. Incidentally, the French Hospital, a block north on Hill at College Street, closed down in 2017.
With the Bouton house acquired, the work began to prepare it for occupancy and use and we will return with part two of this post and carry on with the story.