![]() “A place like Rockhaven-one run by and for women-was especially significant at a time when new and dangerous ideas about women’s sanity were taking hold.” -April Wolfe (writer and filmmaker based in Los Angeles) Within a year, Richards had 24 “ladies”-never called “patients”-and was expanding the facility rapidly. Determined to create a kinder, gentler alternative to the abuses she had witnessed, Richards used a thousand dollars she’d saved to purchase a small rock cottage on a lush, tree-lined lot in an area that was then called Verdugo City. It was founded in 1923 by the nurse Agnes Richards, who had spent much of her career working in asylums in California and the Midwest. Patients at the state-run asylums of the time generally fared far worse-and the growing fascination with eugenics meant that some of them were also forcibly sterilized. Generally, these private sanitariums were high-end establishments, with quality food and care, but with little official oversight. But by 1923 when Rockhaven was founded, private sanitariums for mental illness were popping up locally. The Crescenta Valley was founded in the late 1800s on the sanitarium industry, mainly for the treatment of tuberculosis and other lung diseases. ![]() Rockhaven was conceived as an antidote to the prison-like atmospheres of the asylums of the time, where women patients were often imprisoned indefinitely and sometimes abused. But for much of the 20th century, the property was home to the Rockhaven Sanitarium-a feminist institution for mentally ill women. ![]() These days, the only people who set foot on the Glendale, California property are the Friends of Rockhaven volunteers, who tend the peacefully empty grounds and buildings, and the groups of visitors who come through on guided tours. On a shaded lot in a quiet residential enclave in the La Crescenta valley sits a collection of Spanish Colonial buildings and Craftsman cottages. ![]()
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