Glendale's dream of turning Rockhaven property into a mental health museum moves closer to reality

Behind a set of towering metal gates, a 3.4-acre site in Glendale that was once a pioneering mental health facility run by women for women has laid in decay for years.

Now, the city has approved a plan — estimated to cost nearly $8 million — to turn a portion of the Rockhaven Sanitarium site into a mental health museum.

The plans call for renovating the part of the property known as the Pines Cottage, built in 1931, to preserve its architecture, restore the surrounding courtyards and landscaping and make it a place where people can gather.

Conceptual drawings for the site envision rooms, many of them staged with period-specific furniture, that tell the stories of the women who lived there.

“We want the site to be alive and active, and we want things that are going to draw people to come there again and again and again,” Glendale City Council member Dan Brotman said at Tuesday’s meeting.

Local preservationists have said the move by the City Council is an important step toward opening the site for public use and bringing the history of the place back into view.

But there are some concerns that the design plans would strip the buildings of architectural details and character.

Compassionate mental health care

When it opened in the 1920s, Rockhaven was groundbreaking for its time because it was owned and run by women and offered holistic care on beautiful grounds.

Over the years, the facility treated Hollywood types, including Billie Burke who played Glenda the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz and Marilyn Monroe's mother, Gladys Baker (also known as Gladys Monroe), who a tour guide called the sanitarium's “most infamous resident.”

“There were a couple of times that she attempted to escape," Joanna Linkchorst, president and co-founder of Friends of Rockhaven, told LAist in 2015. "She managed to get out a couple of times. One of them, she tied her bedsheets together and made a dramatic escape through a tiny window in her closet."

The psychiatric nurse who founded Rockhaven, Agnes Richards, was an innovator when it came to compassionate mental health care, historians have pointed out. Richards was appalled by the conditions she’d seen while working at Patton State Hospital in San Bernardino and wanted to offer an alternative to the carceral mental “asylums” of the time where women were known to have been abused.

So she resolved to do things differently.

In contrast to some of the gothic dormitories that dominated state hospitals of the time, Rockhaven had stand-alone cottages, called The Willows and The Coulter, that opened up to the outside. Patients were encouraged to venture outdoors and enjoy the oak trees and meticulously landscaped rose gardens.

Eileen V. Wallis, a history professor at Cal Poly Pomona, said Richards worked to de-stigmatize mental health conditions, referring to those under her care at Rockhaven as “ladies” rather than “patients.”

Wallis, a Glendale resident who wrote a book that explores the history of mental health care in California , said Rockhaven was a safe place for its residents to live healthy lives. With its focus on dignified, holistic care for women, Rockhaven patients gardened on the grounds and dined together in home-like settings.

“It was really sort of compelling both in terms of just being very different and distinct from what the vast majority of mental health care looked like in the early 20th Century,” Wallis said. “But also being quite deliberately and self-consciously gendered.”

She said it’s been frustrating seeing the property closed off to the public for so long.

A time capsule

The facility has been closed since the early 2000s. The saga to preserve Rockhaven and reopen it to the public as a museum goes back more than a decade.

Linkchorst has been working for much of that time to save the place from demolition and neglect. Back when the public could get onto the property, Linkchorst led tours of the property and its 15 structures, bringing Agnes Richards’ story to life, pointing out architectural details and retelling at least a couple ghost stories.

There’s a 1921 statue called “Reclining Nude” in the middle of the Rockhaven property that’s become a mascot for the place. The statue was created by one of California’s oldest ceramics manufacturers, Gladding McBean .

Linkchorst dubbed it “The Lady of Rockhaven."

She said she’s happy to see the city inching toward reopening the site to the public, but she’s concerned that the approved design plans would remove features like colorful 1930s bathroom tile and other era-specific details that make it, in her words, “a time capsule.”

“I just so desperately want to not touch this, because when it’s gone, it’s gone,” she said.

The Rockhurst site was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 2016.

Eventually, Linkchorst said, she hopes to bring young women back onto the property for tours. She said there are important lessons they could learn about mental health, and how people living with mental illness can be treated humanely.

“It gets hard for a lot of people,” she said. “And the way that it was handled for these ladies is they were removed from their situation, treated with dignity and then allowed to go home stronger and able to handle it.”

What’s next for Rockhaven

On Tuesday, the Glendale City Council unanimously approved plans to get what’s known as The Pines building museum-ready. The motion directs city staff and the design firm SWA Group to proceed with construction drawings and a bid package.

The development comes about three years after state Sen. Anthony Portantino secured $8 million from the state to turn the property into a mental health museum. The city bought the property in 2008 for $8.25 million.

“Converting the Rockhaven grounds into a museum dedicated to the legacy of Agnes Richards, women’s history, and telling the story of compassionate care for women with mental health challenges ensures that we honor the historical significance of this site and the legacy of those who created it,” Portantino said in 2021 .

The project must be completed by March 2026 in order to not lose the state funds.