December 10, 2014

December 10, 2014

   I live on Waverly Drive, and there is a location on the corner of my street and at Glendale Bouvelard that's a total mystery to me.  But due to its mystery, I find myself attached to this location.  I often wander around my life without asking questions.  I find things by chance, and I feel the nature of chance-taking is what leads me to another place.  Even now, when I reach the location, I try to imagine what was there, which is often not based on fact.  Or is it?

The location is on the corner of Waverly Drive and Glendale Bouvelard.  It is now a building condo complex, but for years it was a vacant property.  I never knew who owned it, but there were the remains of a staircase leading towards the lot, and then nothing.  At first I thought there may have been a mansion built on this property, but many years later I discovered it was once an osteopathic hospital called Monte Sano.  It was built 1931 and it closed during the 1970s.   When you research the hospital on the internet, there is so very little information about the hospital and the location.  One never gets a narration, but just snips of the story - that is a great deal like memory itself.  There seems to be births that took place in this hospital, and I have read that it was a location that un-wed mothers would go to, to have their child delivered to this world.  Also there was also a very vague report that an African-American serial killer by the name of Robert Nixon, threw a brick at either a nurse or a fellow patient at the hospital sometime in the 1930s.  I read on a blog “Red Car Property” that Monte Sano was California’s first osteopathic hospital, and was founded by Dr. Brigham.  He had a son, Dr. Creighton Brigham, who was also a doctor at the premise.  According to a resident whose family lived on Waverly Drive, claims that the Doctor and his family had a home on Waverly Drive; that was the first house built on that street.  He remembers a huge cage unit on their property that was concrete and wire.  His initial impression was that it was an aviary “although it always seemed large for that. ”

It also appears that at one time, there was a red-car station called “Monte Sano” but there are no longer any traces of either the station or the sign.   I often walk by this property, and I always think about what was there, and why is such a structure, a medium sized hospital, and yet there is no real record of it existing - except from people’s memories and the few photographs that are found on the Internet.   What is intriguing is that young people used to go into the deserted building, hoping to find the morgue.  Perhaps they did find it, God knows that there must have been a lot of deaths at this location.  Also there is not any record of why the building was torn down, and what happened to the hospital itself?   Some may feel that this location is haunted with ghosts who went to the hospital and not make it back alive.  For me, the ghost is not the people, but the building itself.

I had a vision one night, while I walked by the empty lot, and I imagined that there was the building - and at the time, I thought to myself, “that’s funny, I never noticed that structure before.” When I took another walk, about a week later, the property was vacant again.  At the time, it was late at night, and was very dark. Perhaps I mistaken the structure for some of the trees that were on the lot at the time.  Although I clearly have a memory of an entrance way, and maybe even a large window.  As I have mentioned before in another blog, I find buildings more profound than humans.  Even though humans build the structures, it is what is left on this world - often way past a human’s life span.  So it always seems cruel to me, to destroy a building because it is not being utilized or nature taking over the structure.   Even though the new condos are built on that property, when I go in the middle of the night, I see not the condos, but the original building.   I know it is not actually there, but for whatever reasons, that is what I see.