{"id":632,"date":"2010-02-20T15:12:12","date_gmt":"2010-02-20T15:12:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.slowtale.net\/diary\/?p=632"},"modified":"2015-05-19T10:41:16","modified_gmt":"2015-05-19T16:41:16","slug":"downeys-open-secret","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.brunner-sung.com\/?p=632","title":{"rendered":"Downey, CA"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Rancho Los Amigos is a county hospital in Downey, California, originally founded during the state’s post-gold rush hangover, when thousands of migrants found themselves stranded: destitute, sick, and far from home. I came to this place the other day with my friend Emily, whose good friend, a landscape architect, showed us around and told us about its history.<\/p>\n

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There are two campuses: the south, which dates from the 19th century, and the north, from the mid-20th. Prior to the 1950s, the modern site was all farm land. The director had believed that wellness required exposure to and interaction with nature, so the patients all worked in these orchards and gardens, and the dormitories (located on the southern site) had windows facing outward, surrounded by plants and flowers.<\/p>\n

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Perhaps the most remarkable part of this story is that for years the place was actually self-sufficient — they harvested enough food to support their entire population (at its peak, around 5,000), and even had surplus to distribute to other facilities in the region. Amazing. Below, some old fruit trees, still standing on the north campus.<\/p>\n

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After the polio outbreak, the Rancho became a nationally renowned center for treatment and rehabilitation. New buildings were constructed on the farm site, and the old south campus was eventually abandoned completely… except by an apparently huge number of feral cats.<\/p>\n

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The Greek Revival power plant — note the Doric smoke stack!<\/p>\n

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The fact that this place has been abandoned for years and years brings back memories of working on my thesis film. But the scale is different; this is truly a huge site. The oddest thing is that it’s actually open to traffic<\/em>. You can drive through! It’s even on Google Street View.<\/p>\n

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I can’t help coming back to the problem of ruins: their beauty, and the way it enables us to lose sight of the very concreteness of a place’s existence and demise. After all, these facts surely still hold lessons for us today.<\/p>\n

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I like to think of structures as mnemonics. Really, it’s the past (passed) life of a site, the people who made it and inhabited it and used it, that have an important story to tell about the world we live in. I always hope — and, in some cases, make films — so that this memory does not disappear irretrievably with the brick and mortar.<\/p>\n

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\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rancho Los Amigos is a county hospital in Downey, California, originally founded during the state’s post-gold rush hangover, when thousands of migrants found themselves stranded: destitute, sick, and far from home. I came to this place the other day with my friend Emily, whose good friend, a landscape architect, showed us around and told us about its history. There are two campuses: the south, which dates from the 19th century, and the north, from the mid-20th. Prior to the 1950s,Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[59],"class_list":["post-632","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-diary","tag-diary"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brunner-sung.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/632","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brunner-sung.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brunner-sung.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brunner-sung.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brunner-sung.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=632"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.brunner-sung.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/632\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3262,"href":"https:\/\/www.brunner-sung.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/632\/revisions\/3262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brunner-sung.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brunner-sung.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brunner-sung.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}