‘Bed Pan Alley’ : Health Care Facilities Changing Character of Hollywood’s East Side

In case a visitor doesn’t notice the construction cranes or the signs announcing new medical office buildings, there is another easy way to discover why the east side of Hollywood is widely considered to have the most concentrated--and growing--collection of health care facilities in Southern California.

Look at what the people on Sunset Boulevard and Vermont Avenue are wearing.

Lab coats, uniforms and smocks appear to be everywhere during lunchtime. The most popular accessory is a beeper, hanging from belts or clipped to pockets. And the shoes, if not sensible gum-soled white oxfords, are usually sneakers that have done a lot of walking down hospital hallways.

A veritable army of doctors, nurses, technicians, orderlies and clerks (estimated at 10,000) descend every day on the nine-block stretch of Sunset between Hillhurst and Normandie avenues. They work at Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center, Childrens Hospital of Los Angeles, the sprawling regional medical center of Kaiser Permanente, as well as at the psychiatric care Edgemont Hospital and the many nursing homes, pharmacies and private practices in the neighborhood.

‘More People in Uniforms’

“You can’t help but notice that there are far more people in medical uniforms here these days,” said Denyce Pine, a nurse consultant for 32 years with Kaiser Permanente. “It used to be that the hospitals were surrounded by the community. Now its practically the reverse.”

This trend is gathering steam as the area continues through a health facilities building boom pushing deeper into the side streets of small apartment houses occupied mainly by Armenian, Filipino and Latino immigrants. Changes in zoning, which designate more side streets open for commercial development, and in medical insurance, with increased emphasis on outpatient care, are helping to fuel the growth, officials say.

And although there have been complaints about congestion, many in the neighborhood appear to welcome all the activity.

“Once you have that many facilities there, it does tend to draw other medical offices, special nursing type of facilities and labs,” explained Michael Davies, the city planner assigned to the neighborhood. “It sort of builds on itself.”

Individual medical institutions elsewhere may be larger and other cities may have their “Pill Hill” or “Bed Pan Alley,” but planners and hospital officials say no district on the West Coast has such a cluster of large hospitals. “I don’t know of any place other than in Boston where there are so many major medical facilities right next door to each other,” said Richard McCarthy, director of planning and public affairs for Childrens Hospital.

Two Spiritual Institutions

Adding to the competition for turf are two institutions which, despite their critics, purport to heal illnesses of the spirit. After Cedars of Lebanon Hospital merged with Mt. Sinai, the Cedars complex on Fountain Avenue was sold to the Church of Scientology in 1977. Scientology painted the buildings an eye-catching turquoise and created a bustling training center. Just in front is a temple of the Self-Realization Fellowship, with a golden-domed archway and a garden where followers of its mixture of Hindu and Western precepts can meditate.

“If you have a physical problem, this is the neighborhood. If you have a spiritual problem, this is the neighborhood. And if you are hungry, this is the neighborhood,” joked George Goodrich, co-owner of New York George, a Fountain Ave. restaurant where expatriate Easterners come in search of pastrami sandwiches and cheesecake.

“There is a certain quickness here because medical people are always on the go,” explained Karen Constine, director of public affairs for the Kaiser Permanente center. “Sometimes you hear a beep in a restaurant and everyone grabs for their own beeper.”

That pace is expected to pick up. Although the overall hospital bed capacity won’t increase, there is a lot of medical-related construction recently completed, in progress, or on the drawing board:

Hollywood Presbyterian, with 389 beds, is in the midst of a $70-million overhaul. A nine-story patient tower is under construction to replace the 60-year-old overcrowded main building, which will be renovated for offices.

And in an arrangement to help pay for it all and keep affiliated doctors close by, a development company has leased land on the premises to build a seven-story medical office and garage.

With 632 beds, about 3,800 employees and numerous clinics, Kaiser Permanente’s Sunset facility is the largest of that chain’s eight full-service care centers in Southern California and the largest health maintenance organization (HMO) hospital in the nation. Over the years, Kaiser has taken over almost all the north side of Sunset Boulevard west of Vermont Avenue to Kenmore Avenue, and administrative offices for the entire system recently moved to Pasadena to make more room for medical facilities.

Last year, Kaiser Permanente continued expanding across Sunset by building an eight-story oncology and radiology center and converting a defunct dental clinic into a 42-bed center for overnight surgery.

Two private medical-professional office buildings with retail space are in the early stages of construction on the same strip of Sunset Boulevard. “I think there’s money coming back into the area. The medical plants will never leave there. That’s the key,” said Ted Taylor, a partner in a six-story project on the corner of Vermont Avenue which is replacing a popular restaurant, Norm’s.

The 331-bed Childrens Hospital, after weathering a financial crisis four years ago, recently finished a master plan to shoehorn two buildings for research and outpatients into its nine-acre campus. The institution’s board is trying to raise $33 million for the project, to begin construction in three years. Childrens is so cramped that it recently took over a bank on Vermont Avenue for its personnel office.

Health experts point out that three major hospitals can be next door neighbors because they don’t really compete. Kaiser Permanente, an HMO, serves only members of its pre-paid insurance group; Childrens draws young patients from all over Southern California while Hollywood-Presbyterian treats patients primarily from surrounding neighborhoods.

There has been cooperation on joint disaster drills, training seminars and the like, but not much. “We could be five miles apart because, other than geography, we have no real linkage,” said McCarthy of Childrens.

Some doctors live in the affluent hills of nearby Los Feliz and some hospital employees live in the east side of Hollywood, but most medical personnel commute from all over the Los Angeles Basin.

A Crowded Neighborhood

Except for the open space of Barnsdall Park, the neighborhood is crowded. The main avenues are peppered with uniform shops, fast-food stands, drug stores and medical offices. The side streets are lined with bungalows and small apartment buildings, some run-down and overcrowded with immigrant families.

According to census figures, 90% of the units are occupied by renters. And projections from census data show that current median household income is relatively low: $14,000, compared to $23,780 for all of Los Angeles County. Police say serious crime is not as bad as in other parts of Hollywood, with car break-ins the most frequent complaint.

Dennis Gano, pastor of the Bethany Lutheran Church on Sunset Boulevard, described the east side of Hollywood as a declining community and said that the hospital expansions have generally improved the neighborhood. He is concerned, however, that Kaiser one day may try to acquire the church property and that his congregation, which has been losing members, may be unable to resist.

“Sometimes we wonder how long we are going to hold out,” he said.

Leon Deller, the architect for Kaiser’s Sunset property, said there are no plans for further expansion. Kaiser’s next project, scheduled for 1987, is to build an elevated pedestrian concourse linking many of its buildings on the north side of Sunset, he said. The goal is to reduce sidewalk congestion and improve security.

‘Some Undesirable People’

“There are some undesirable people who hang out on the street,” Deller said. “This is not the top neighborhood, but it’s not terrible either. . . . Frankly, a lot of the building we’ve been involved in has replaced smaller, older commercial or residential buildings and increased the density there quite a bit.”

The 1970 Community Plan calls for eliminating the residential zoning on most of the side streets between Sunset Boulevard and Fountain Avenue, from Vermont to Alexandria avenues, and replacing it with commercial designation. “Increased encroachment by medical-commerical uses is inevitable and probably makes sense,” according to city planner Davies, instead of having isolated houses scattered among medical facilities.

To be sure, some residents complain about hospital traffic and how difficult it is to find parking. The noise from ambulance sirens bothers them. They bemoan the demolition of Norm’s restaurant, where they used to get an affordable meal. Some resent how Kaiser Permanente, in particular, has pushed into side streets, displacing merchants and constructing buildings which tower over adjacent homes.

‘Better Than Prostitutes’

But, as in many immigrant neighborhoods with housing owned by absentee landlords, there is no neighborhood association and, city officials say, there have been no formal protests.

“It is better having the hospitals on Sunset Boulevard than the prostitutes who were there before,” said Hagop Ovayan, a leader in the Armenian community and a vice principal of Rose and Alexis Pilibos Armenian School. Hospital expansion, he said, “is a good thing. It will raise the level of the neighborhood.”

Business people, not surprisingly, welcome the changes.

Myung Hee Kim and her husband have owned the Hollywood-Cedars Uniform shop on Vermont Avenue for 10 years and are happily watching the construction at Hollywood Presbyterian across the street. “I can tell the neighborhood is growing,” she said, “and I think it’s very great, especially for our kind of business.”

Said Bill Welsh, president of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce: “We’re very proud that Hollywood in this way has a different image than tinsel.”