A couple of weeks ago I was at a celebration of my university's (commuter state) founders day. It was very hot (in what passes for Fall in Southern California) and we had been in the celebration tent for far too long. The speaker, when he finally arrived, was decent. He's the author of a book about the sub-region in which commuter state is located. He talked at some length about the history of the place. Much of what he said I knew, but some of it was new to me. The following weekend, Honey and I happened to be near campus and I drove her around a little telling her about the new information I now had lodged into my brain from the talk. About the fair and the horse races and about the now disappeared football team.
I like thinking about the history of places, both recent and distant. I'm especially intrigued by that living in Los Angeles. Because I grew up in Atlanta, the places were all new and exurby. Post Sherman, Atlantans love nothing more than tearing down and redoing.
Los Angeles, on the other hand, keeps some (but not, by any means, all) of its history around. You can see Victorian homes, mid-century ranches, Greene and Greenes, missions, and new mcmansions. There are even restaurants (see how the brain makes loops) that date back 100 years. Beef French dip, hot mustard, chili with, and a custard at Philippe's please.
I've always liked that about LA. I love our O'Keefe and Merritt brown stove with its NuTone copper hood.
Ok, so we don't live in a mid century architectural masterpiece. No one was selling a Lautner for the mid-200s when we bought our house. Still, it's got some fine mid century touches. And laminate flooring. You don't get laminate flooring in a Lautner. Nope.
Anyway, I was thinking yesterday, while waiting in traffic about these things we don't pay attention to until it occurs to us to do so. I was not far from commuter state, where the preserved orange groves remain and I noticed a sign waver. Sign wavers are not an unusual sight in LA, so I looked, noted that he was holding a sign for a Halloween store and wearing a mask. He was dancing and waving the sign, as was to be expected. But he was also occasionally stopping his dancing and moved in a threatening manner at particular passing cars. I'm sure he was doing this because of the scary mask he had on. His intent was, no doubt, benign.
The effect was chilling. Really. I felt relieved when he did it to the car in front of mine and accelerated quickly through the intersection when the stuck traffic allowed me to. I thought most of the way home about why he seemed so scary. It was, I suppose, the juxtaposition of his easy dancing, the sign, the normal street corner, and these quick, sudden violent movements that kept intruding on that scene. Normal. Then not.
It happened that I had been at another campus in my University's system earlier that day. I had not been to that campus before, even though it's our closest sister campus. It, in fact, started as a satellite campus of ours. (I am aware, by the way, that this level of detail makes figuring out which campus is which pretty easy. Since I don't think I have many non-friend readers, I'm going to persist with the semi revelatory. Non-California friends are welcome to ask privately for details in case you don't want to figure out which campuses are which).
Anyway, sister campus has a lovely setting. It's in a valley, near the ocean, surrounded by mountains and touched by sea breezes. Commuter state, on the other hand, has a hot tent. No, let me be fair, it's a beautiful campus, just in a hot part of SoCal.
Sister campus was a long time coming and many many sites were considered. Several of them were met by strong community opposition. Finally they settled on the site of an about to be closed mental hospital. A rather notorious one.
We met in sister campus' spectacular library, the only modern architecture building on campus. It looks out across this series of smaller Spanish colonial buildings. Some of them have been converted into office and classroom space. Many of them sit empty, waiting to be retrofitted with modern HVAC (rather than steam heating through asbestos laden walls) and ADA compliant entrances and bathrooms. As a colleague from sister campus said to me yesterday, "it costs a million dollars to walk into one of these buildings."
My boss and I walked around a little after the meeting and I bought Honey a t-shirt from the campus with their cheesy mascot on it. (Not that commuter state's mascot lacks cheese-factor, mind you).
I realized that I had taken that the normal that was a quiet Friday at a small University for granted. But somewhere in my head and in that space there were other echos. Echos of people whose lives were trapped in that place. Of the past that is being written over with each of the million dollar entrances into each of those unrefurbished buildings.
It's the same kind of echo that I have always tried to make myself hear on the battlefields of the Civil War. It's easy enough to stand in Sharpsburg or Mannassas and think that Antietam and Bull Run are theoretical battles where theoretical people died. (Speaking of the Civil War and battlefields, I cannot recommend enough the recent Slate series on touring them. Go read it when you're done with me today).
Same building, different purpose, different era.
Seems innocuous enough on first glance, right?
As one commenter on a 2002 Los Angeles Weekly article said about this place, where he had been confined as a child:
Now and then, when I think about those days, I Google the names of the people I knew there. So far, only two staff members have shown up--and no patients. It makes me wonder whether I'm a rarity because I'm still alive. Another possibility I've considered is that they've changed their names and don't want to be found. It's hard to face the ghosts of such a twisted past without someone who shared it to reflect with.
Since I don't share that past, I can't know what that person experienced, any more than I can know what Sullivan Ballou thought as he wrote his wife before the First Battle of Bull Run, where he was killed:
But, O Sarah! If the dead can come back to this earth and flit unseen around those they loved, I shall always be near you; in the garish day and in the darkest night—amidst your happiest scenes and gloomiest hours—always, always; and if there be a soft breeze upon your cheek, it shall be my breath; or the cool air fans your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by.
Sarah, do not mourn me dead; think I am gone and wait for me, for we shall meet again.
What I do know is that when I stand in these places, rich with the sacrifices and mistakes of the past, I would do well to pay attention to that small voice echoing in my head or in the space. I should have stopped and looked more closely. The interactive map of sister campus has all the unrefurbished buildings in gray. They don't "do" anything when you click on them. But standing near them, they do speak to what was once there. I will go back to sister campus soon and look at them again, I think. And listen.
I am not nostalgic for the time of service porches, copper fixtures, and steam asbestos heating.
Things go away, sometimes, for good reasons. Sister campus is surely and better use for that space than its previous incarnation. Soon enough, Halloween will come and go and the guy with the mask will leave the corner.
And we will all remember. And all forget.
1 comment:
Psychiatric hospitals are such a loaded concept. So many people are drawn to the horror aspects of old hospitals and their imagined patients; hence the number of TV shows and movies that use them again and again in garish ways. Most people with psychiatric illnesses, I think, are repelled by them and would rather not think about being locked up therein, especially under 1950s standards of care.
So what do you do to mark that kind of past? You can go the Colonial Williamsburg route, where one can walk through an old hospital made into a small museum of salacious mental illness horrors. You can alternatively build over the property and pretend it was never there. Or you can preserve and repurpose the buildings, as in the case with sister campus. The question is how to acknowledge the history of those buildings without drawing a pall over the university, particularly for students who have perhaps spent time on modern psych wards and might find on-campus indicators triggery. I don't know the answer. But I love that you pose the question so sensitively.
I do know that I miss Phillippe's. After 100 years in business, they really should mark the present with a vegetarian sandwich.
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