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
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“The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man’s right to his body, or woman’s right to her soul.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“One classic American landscape haunts all of American literature. It is a picture of Eden, perceived at the instant of history when corruption has just begun to set in. The serpent has shown his scaly head in the undergrowth. The apple gleams on the tree. The old drama of the Fall is ready to start all over again.”
—Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)
“I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a “will to renewal.” This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of “crises”Mof rupture, repudiation and resistance.... When there is no “crisis,” there is stagnation, petrification and death. All thought, all art is aggressive.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)