History
Laguna Honda has been a civic icon in San Francisco since 1866. It opened as an almshouse to care for one of the first generations of San Franciscans, the Gold Rush pioneers. Over the decades, as the city grew up around it, Laguna Honda embraced generation after generation of people in need.
To meet the changing health care needs of San Francisco, Laguna Honda has served many purposes over the years. It provided important care during a smallpox epidemic in 1868, served as a place of refuge for people displaced by the 1906 earthquake and fire, and now provides the Bay Area’s only dedicated skilled nursing services for people with HIV and AIDS.
Notable moments in the hospital's history include a visit in 1909 by President Theodore Roosevelt, who was in San Francisco observing earthquake recovery efforts; installation in 1934 of five murals by South African artist Glenn Wessels, one of the first depression-era federal art projects in San Francisco; and annual holiday performances in Gerald Simon Theater in the 1960s and 70’s by Bing Crosby, Merv Griffin, Frankie Lane, Donald O’Connor, and other hoofers and crooners of the Greatest Generation.
Read more about this topic: Laguna Honda Hospital And Rehabilitation Center
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“I believe that history has shape, order, and meaning; that exceptional men, as much as economic forces, produce change; and that passé abstractions like beauty, nobility, and greatness have a shifting but continuing validity.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“I saw the Arab map.
It resembled a mare shuffling on,
dragging its history like saddlebags,
nearing its tomb and the pitch of hell.”
—Adonis [Ali Ahmed Said] (b. 1930)
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)