The iron chain falls with a clang as the old man steps into the dark,
deserted hallway of Linda Vista Community Hospital. Lights flicker and
a stench of mold hangs in the air. Down the main corridor, a lone metal
gurney rests against a wall.
More than a century ago, the
six-story building in Boyle Heights opened to much fanfare as Santa Fe
Coast Lines Hospital. The Mission-style building — with verandas, a
dome tower and sweeping views of downtown Los Angeles — catered to
railroad workers across the Southwest. Patients were cared for by a
surgeon who once tended to Howard Hughes; they drank fresh milk from
the hospital’s own Jersey cows.
They were brought into the
lobby in wheelchairs, taken up an elevator operated by the simple
pressing of a button and delivered to a heated room that could swiftly
be evacuated by automatic fire escape.
"So complete and unique
are the automatic features of the new hospital that it will not be
strange if all who enter therein for treatment are healed
automatically,"announced a 1904 newspaper article.
Now
the wheelchairs are gone, the elevators broken. The heating-and-cooling
system hasn’t worked for 16 years. Jesus Mena walks the halls alone —
flashlight in hand, keys clinking on his leg — like an orderly making
his final rounds. The 73-year-old watches over a building that in less
than two decades went from community hub to haunted house.
–Emeralda Bermudez in Boyle Heights
Photo: A crew member is silhouetted against the exterior of Linda Vista
Community Hospital during a film shoot at the allegedly haunted site in
Boyle Heights. The abandoned hospital, where railroad workers with
tuberculosis once were cared for in furnished tents, has been used as a
location for the movies "Outbreak," "End of Days" and "Pearl Harbor"
and the pilot episode of the television show "ER." (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)