Whenever there is talk among people of a certain age, ahem, about where one might live in retirement if it isn’t here, someone always chimes in, “But is there a good hospital nearby?”
Obviously, in greater Los Angeles, there are plenty of good hospitals, although it also seems that there is plenty of kvetching about just how good they really are if they haven’t attained a No. 1 ranking by U.S. News & World Report in cardiovascular surgery.
But if you so much as mention in the conversation the attractions of little Lee Vining, on beautiful Mono Lake, and the gateway to Yosemite, touting especially the pizza at the Whoa Nellie Deli, folks will say, “But is the Mayo Clinic nearby?”
Or Hanalei, the Sea Ranch, Morro Bay. Good docs are nice to have when you’re old, and tend to live in the metropolis.
Anyway, there is a hospital so famous that it is America’s ur-hospital, the Art Deco image of which has been shown to the millions of viewers of the TV soap opera “General Hospital” essentially every day since April 1, 1963.
Now called Los Angeles General Medical Center, the hulking building in Lincoln Heights has also long been empty. But its 20 stories hummed with patients, nurses and physicians for decades, when we called it County/USC. I remember visiting my Blair High classmate Amy Marshall there in the 1970s, when she had a job literally washing bottles, and what a maze it was to get through to find her secret laboratory.
Now it’s coming back. Not entirely as a hospital. But as one of the best chroniclers of L.A. history in our era, Doug Smith, writes in the Los Angeles Times, as “a health-oriented village to be developed over a decade on the 41.9-acre property in Boyle Heights.” (Lincoln Heights, Boyle Heights — it borders both.) The Board of Supervisors has authorized $120 million to be spent on its conversion into mixed-income housing, medical offices and retail. There will someday be something over 1,500 apartments on the site. The 19-acre hospital campus will join a remade 41 adjoining acres of mixed-use that city planners call “a national model for equitable urban development.”
A paradise of doctors — plus lunch.
Good for Supervisor Hilda Solis for championing the project, and for noting that the main iconic building — and there is no more iconic building in L.A. — though long eligible, has never been listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It should be, with its ceiling murals by Hugo Ballin, who also painted the murals in the old Times building and at Griffith Observatory. Doing so will make possible tax credits for the development plan “that would meld private investment with public grants and low-income housing and climate tax credits,” Smith reports.
It’s a better, and, though complex, more doable idea than the 2022 proposal to just take the dusty, seismically challenged old place “and move all the homeless into it.”
May our children live long enough to see it through to fruition and the possibility of making Boyle Heights / Lincoln Heights an attractive place to retire.
Wednesday at random
Bobby Bradford, the Altadena trumpeter, cornetist, bandleader and composer, is at 90 years old one of the grand pioneers of free jazz, playing with everyone from Ornette Coleman to Nels Cline. He and his wife Lisa also lost their home to the Eaton fire in January, escaping, according to my friend Emma, “with only the clothes on their backs. Bobby lost his instruments and countless other items of personal and historical significance.” And yet he’s still performing, and will do so on Thursday, Aug. 14 at 8 p.m. at the Hammer Museum in Westwood as part of the 18th season of the Hammer’s JazzPOP series, curated by Bay Area bassist Lisa Mezzacappa. The show, written by him, is themed “Stealin’ Home: A Tribute to Jackie Robinson,” with a big band of stellar musicians. So, two Dena giants. See you there … The elegant Main Lounge at Caltech’s Athenaeum sits in as the setting for a very long country club dinner in the wonderfully silly “Happy Gilmore 2,” with celebrity cameos from everyone from Jack Nicklaus to La Canada’s Collin Morikawa to Bad Bunny and Eminem. … If Edison now says it’s going to bury over 150 miles of power lines, I say, good idea. But where were you with such a plan when those of us who have backed undergrounding for decades kept pushing for it? Expensive, up-front. Very cheap, compared to creating a tragedy for Altadena.
Write the public editor at lwilson@scng.com