Glendale hears plans for former Rockhaven site

The City Council recently heard two sets of plans for converting some of the historic buildings at the former Rockhaven Sanitarium, which ranged from turning them into a trendy mall to reverting the site back to a mental health institution.

The closed-session meeting on Oct. 6 came more than a year after local stakeholders decided against moving forward with outside proposals that included a college preparatory school or more than 100 units of market-rate housing for seniors.

“Enough time had passed from the [request-for-quote] process that we decided to allow that interest to percolate up in the form of this closed session where the council was briefed on a spectrum of interests,” said City Manager Scott Ochoa.

Built in 1923, Rockhaven is a 3.4-acre property bounded by Pleasure Way, Honolulu, Hermosa and La Crescenta avenues. About 1.2 acres of the parcel is vacant.

Crescenta Valley preservationists as well as city officials have pushed to have as much open space as possible at the site, while the amount varied in last year’s proposals.

Earlier this month, city staffers presented council members with combined plans from developers Brooks Street and Lab Holdings, LLC, as well as proposed plans from a collective of four doctors. No representatives from any of the parties were at the meeting, Ochoa said.

He said he couldn’t go into details because closed-session matters are not discussed publicly.

He did say, however, that council members remain noncommittal on what to do with the Rockhaven property.

“Hopefully, we will be in a position to make a decision in this fiscal year,” Ochoa said, adding that possible options are to act, not act and, if action is desired, what kind.

Joanna Linkchorst, president of the Friends of Rockhaven, a nonprofit that maintains the site, said both interested parties reached out to her and shared their plans.

She said Brooks Street and Lab Holdings, LLC want to work together to add housing on an undeveloped part of the property while converting some of the structures for retail use.

Newport Beach-based Brooks Street, a real estate company, declined to comment about a proposal for Rockhaven. One of its recent projects was a 265-unit condominium complex in San Jose in a refurbished fruit-packing plant.

Costa Mesa-based Lab Holding did not return phone calls for a comment and also has experience repurposing properties. A 1993 project called the “anti-mall” retrofitted an old night-vision goggle factory in Orange County into a retail complex.

Linkchorst said the four doctors proposed using Rockhaven as a mental institution again and house patients in some of the existing structures. Their plans call for subterranean parking, new medical offices and creating a strip of parkland facing Honolulu, she said.

Timothy Pylko and Annett Ermshar, two of the doctors tied to the proposal, were out of the office and could not be reached for comment.

But what Linkchorst has long pushed for is to open all of the Rockhaven site as a public park.

“If [Rockhaven] goes to a developer, the historical significance of what we have the opportunity to take advantage of right now is gone,” she said.

Rockhaven closed in 2006. The city bought the campus two years later for $8.25 million to protect it from development. However, in recent years the city has opened up to talks of public-private partnerships.

The Friends of Rockhaven offers tours once a month to groups of no more than 20 people, the maximum the city allows because of safety concerns.

Linkchorst said the group can do its own part by applying for grants to have the site comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act and repair other liabilities. Then, it could at least open its doors to the community, she said.

“Once the property is opened, then we can start holding fundraisers,” Linkchorst said.

But even with the 20-person cap lifted, it would take lot of donations to maintain the site.

Currently, the city spends about $50,000 annually to maintain Rockhaven. If the property became a full-fledged park, the cost would escalate into the hundreds of thousands, said city spokesman Tom Lorenz.

There is no traction on what to do with Rockhaven and when there is, it will begin with direction from the City Council, Ochoa said.

The goal has been and will continue to be preserving the sanitarium’s historical relevance along with a way of rallying the community around an adaptive reuse, which may well end up being a public-private partnership, he said.

“If we keep those two goals in mind, I’m confident that we’ll be able to put together a program for the site that balances everybody’s interest,” Ochoa said.

The Crescenta Valley Community Assn. will hold a status-update discussion on Rockhaven this week. The meeting will be held at 7 p.m. on Thursday at the La Crescenta Library, 2809 Foothill Blvd.