Added to the National Register of Historic Places on June 9, 2016

There are so many paths into the story of Rockhaven Sanitarium. It was a pioneering mental health clinic, one of the first in America run by and for women. It’s important from a medical history perspective, and an architectural/landscape design perspective. Its story ties into the health and wellness boom that drew folks with respiratory troubles to southern California in the 20th century. There’s plenty of Hollywood history at Rockhaven, an interesting preservation story that’s still playing out, and if you’re into the minutiae of municipal water policy, well there’s something here for you, too. 

We’ll tackle all of that, but any story about Rockhaven needs to begin with its founder, Agnes Richards. Born in Germany in 1881 and raised in Nebraska, Richards was widowed at the age of 24 when her husband was struck and killed by a car in Chicago. She worked in two Midwestern asylums in her twenties and thirties. During WWI, she volunteered with the Red Cross at a demobilization center in Des Moines for combat veterans. Once the war was over Richards enrolled in an RN degree program at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, and then moved to Southern California with her new husband, James Richards. She worked as a head nurse at Patton State Hospital in San Bernardino, then moved to LA General Hospital in 1922, the year before she founded Rockhaven. 

Mental Health at the Turn of the 20th Century

In the late 19th century, California was idealized by boosters as a healthful place where sunshine and clean air could cure all sorts of respiratory diseases. The community of La Crescenta, where Rockhaven is located, was founded by Dr. Benjamin Briggs in 1881 for the purpose of opening his own sanitarium; by the 1920s, the area was full of private sanitariums and health resorts, attracting wealthy patients looking to treat their tuberculosis, rheumatism, asthma, etc. 

When it came to mental illness though, the options were very different. All of the hospitals where Richards worked prior to Rockhaven were massive facilities run by local governments, products of a 19th century philosophy of mental illness that viewed the insane as a population to keep under control, rather than treat. Conditions were often deplorable at these large public institutions, more like prisons than healthcare facilities. A 1903 article in the LA Times reports on a grand jury investigating Patton, where Richards would later work, on the basis of “evidence both as to the cruelty to the patients and misuse of State funds.” To make matters worse, a California statute from 1917 compelled asylums to sterilize certain kinds of patients before they were discharged. According to the 1937 study The Mentally Ill in America by Albert Deutsch, more than 10,000 eugenic sterilizations were performed in California between 1907 and 1936 – more than half of the total in America.

The situation was especially dire for women in institutions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. You could be committed at the whims of a father or husband who found you insufficiently servile. Women were sent away for grief, postpartum depression, even masturbation. In her famous exposé series for the New York World, journalist Nellie Bly faked insanity to report on the conditions at Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum in New York. She found a whole range of inhumane treatment, including abusive attendants, forced labor and starvation. 

By the end of her time at LA General Hospital, Richards knew she wanted to provide a different kind of care. So she invested $1000 in a stone house (dubbed “Rockhouse”) in the Crescenta Valley, hired a small staff and in January 1923, opened Rockhaven with six patients.

The Rockhaven Difference

So how was Rockhaven different? First off, Richards exclusively hired women and only admitted women, with the idea that this would help make her residents feel safer, and lessen the likelihood of any predatory behavior by staff. 

Second, the dignified care that Rockhaven residents received. Richards insisted that the women living there were called “ladies” or “residents,” never “patients.” She planned regular activities – holiday meals, art projects, gardening, concerts – to keep their minds and bodies active, and keep them focused on the here and now. When their health deteriorated, the ladies still received the medical attention they needed and were encouraged to remain as independent as possible.

The third big thing that made Rockhaven different was the layout of the place. Public mental institutions tended to be large, multi-story complexes with fortress-like facades and long halls, not the kind of thing that would set you at ease as a patient, or as a visitor. In contrast, all but one of Rockhaven’s 15 buildings are one story tall, and the rooms look much like what you’d find in actual homes. They reflect Richards’s belief in environmental determinism, the idea that your physical surroundings will impact your behavior. The buildings at Rockhaven are connected by winding brick pathways, and faux bois furniture abounds. The landscaping played a big role in the feeling of serenity, too. Pictures from the decades when Welsh nurseryman Ivan Cole was working for Rockhaven show impeccably curated gardens, with ornate flower beds and tropical plants blending in with mature oak trees. His work was rewarded with a Los Angeles Beautiful Community Award in 1966.

The 1930 census shows 44 women living at Rockhaven, and 20 years later that number had increased to 100. As Rockhaven expanded and grew more successful, Richards bought up some of the small craftsman houses on the adjoining land, and had workers turn them inwards to face the center. In the late ‘20s and ‘30s, she hired the contractor Peter Prescott & Sons to build more housing, treatment and common buildings in the Spanish colonial revival style that was so popular at the time. When the Sylmar earthquake damaged the original “Rockhouse” in 1971, a new administration building was built to replace it, again in the same Spanish colonial style. The cohesiveness of the architecture adds to that feeling of walking through a cozy village, methinks. 

Famous Residents

The dignified care that Rockhaven afforded its ladies attracted all sorts of people, including plenty of Hollywood entertainers – or their relatives. Billie Burke, the actress who played Glinda the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz, lived at Rockhaven in the 1960s where she was treated for dementia. Josephine Dillon, first wife of Clark Gable, and Spike Jones’s mother Ada both stayed here. The respected bandleader Babe Egan too. 

Probably the most prominent resident at Rockhaven was Marilyn Monroe’s mother Gladys Baker Eley, who stayed there from 1953-1966 and was treated for paranoid schizophrenia. Eley attempted to escape on several occasions, once by tying together a rope out of clothing and tossing it through the closet window of her one-story room. She was found the next day in a church about 15 miles away. 

The Patricia Traviss Years and Beyond

By the 1960s, Agnes Richards was getting on in years, and much of the day-to-day care of Rockhaven had transitioned to Patricia Traviss, her granddaughter. Traviss took over in 1967 after Richards died. Mental healthcare was changing during that era, and antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds were available to effectively treat illnesses at home. Women that might have stayed at Rockhaven were often turning to private therapists instead. During the Traviss years, Rockhaven shifted to a nursing home for older women. 

Traviss retired in 2001, after nearly half a century at Rockhaven. It was sold to a nonprofit called Ararat Home, who operated it as a nursing home for five years, and then considered scrapping it to build a more modern facility. The City of Glendale bought Rockhaven in 2008, but it’s been closed to the public ever since in a state of arrested decay. The nonprofit Friends of Rockhaven offer regular tours, and the Crescenta Valley Water District opened a well on the corner of the property in 2016, which now pumps 10% of the district’s water supply. On a tourless day though, passersby would be forgiven for assuming it was abandoned.

Rockhaven’s Future

So what does the future hold for this historic property? The Friends of Rockhaven want to turn it into a museum about Rockhaven’s history, perhaps with a few local businesses leasing out some of the buildings. They got a step closer to that goal in 2021, when State Senator Anthony Portantino announced $8 million in funding to rehabilitate Rockhaven and usher in its next phase. 

When I visited in late 2022, there were tarps up across the property, and work still hadn’t begun. So the window of opportunity may be closing for a grand reopening during Rockhaven’s centennial in 2023. Whenever it opens though, I’ll be first in line. Rockhaven has so much to teach us about medical history, about the growth of Los Angeles, and about how an institution can continue to adapt and thrive over time if people care about it enough.

Sources & Recommended Reading

+Rockhaven’s nomination form @ the NRHP website

+“Rockhaven’s History” (friendsofrockhaven.org)

+Garrova, Robert: “The Site of a Historic Glendale Sanitarium Will Become a Mental Health Museum” (LAist, 2021)

+Jordan, Elisa: Rockhaven Sanitarium: The Legacy of Agnes Richards (The History Press, 2018)

+Meares, Hadley: “The sunshine cure” (Curbed Los Angeles, 2019)

+Mikailian, Arin: “Crescenta Valley Water District Dedicates Well at Rockhaven” (Glendale News-Press, 2016)

+Widdoes, Adriana: “Rockhaven: L.A.’s First Feminist Sanitarium” (KCET, 2015)

+“Patton Asylum Cases Before Grand Jury” (Los Angeles Times, November 23, 1903, accessed via ProQuest)

+“Senator Anthony Portantino Secures $8 Million for Rockhaven Sanitarium” (sd25.senate.ca.gov, 2021)