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:
“Every member of the family of the future will be a producer of some kind and in some degree. The only one who will have the right of exemption will be the mother ...”
—Ruth C. D. Havens, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“We said that the history of mankind depicts man; in the same way one can maintain that the history of science is science itself.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)