WESTSIDE / COVER STORY : FAMILY MATTERS : A Long History of Helping Children

The Westside’s two major orphanages, Hollygrove and Vista Del Mar, were established in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century at a time when more than 100,000 orphans were living in about 1,200 children’s homes throughout the United States.

According to Hollygrove lore, its founders drove in a horse-drawn carriage through the dust of small-town Los Angeles one day in 1880, stopping to pick up 12 abandoned or orphaned children living on the streets. There was already a Catholic institution--the Los Angeles Orphan Asylum, established in 1856 on the site of what is now Union Station--but Mrs. Frank A. Gibson and Mrs. Dan G. Stephens set up a secular institution, the Los Angeles Orphans Home Society.

Its first permanent home was a looming pile of brick towers and mansard roofs at the corner of Yale and Alpine streets, in what is now Chinatown. Later, a benefactor granted a five-acre tract in the country, and the orphanage moved to its current site, then an open field, now a quiet refuge in the heart of Hollywood.

Independently supported by a cadre of charitable donors, the home built three brick dormitories and other facilities, sheltering thousands of homeless youngsters over the years.

“If anyone had told us 50 years ago that we would one day have an endowment fund of $250,000, we would have sent him to the psychopathic ward, if there had been one,” Mrs. Stevens commented at an anniversary celebration in 1930.

In 1955, the name was changed to Hollygrove, reflecting the home’s evolution from being a classic orphanage to what it is now, a treatment center for abused children. It also arranges foster care.

Although it lost two acres when streets were laid out on its boundaries, Hollygrove retains a broad playing field, a swimming pool and long paths where children zip back and forth on in-line skates.

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Although existing orphanages served all comers, Jewish leaders in the first years of this century determined that the surge in immigration meant they needed an institution of their own.

Despite what were described as the dangers of the gutter if children from broken homes remained without supervision, “our poorer co-religionists refused to place their children in non-Jewish institutions in order not to jeopardize their religious training, and those children’s future was thus jeopardized instead of their religion,” Siegfried G. Marshutz, the founding president, said in 1910.

A collection was taken, and the Jewish Orphan’s Home of Southern California opened its doors on a palm-shaded lot in Huntington Park.

The orphanage’s records in its first year of operation describe the desperate family backgrounds of some of its charges: mother dead, father dead, mother in state insane asylum, father sick with consumption, father in prison. . . .

After moving to the West Adams District, the home took over the sprawling grounds of what was then a ranch in Palms, where boys and girls lived in different rooms in two-story cottages under the watchful eyes of housemothers.

Led for 43 years by one man, an inveterate fund-raiser named Joseph Bonapart, the home gradually took in more and more troubled children until it became the therapeutic community that it is today.

George Konheim, a builder and developer, served as president for more than two decades, overseeing the removal of the old cottages and replacing them with low-lying brick buildings on a eucalyptus- and oak-shaded campus.

Although its residents once were all Jewish, the institution now houses children of various backgrounds. Most of them go to a special school on the grounds staffed by educators trained in teaching children with troubled backgrounds. Vista also offers adoption and foster care services.