Olive View Sanatorium

Olive View Sanatorium
Opened	1920
Closed	1970
Demolished	1973
Current Status	Demolished
Building Style	Single Building
Location	San Fernando, CA
Alternate Names

History

Olive View Sanatorium opened Oct. 27, 1920, as care facility for tuberculosis patients. In 1962 the San Fernando Valley's first successful open-heart surgery was performed there. That same year, on Aug. 28, a brush fire that started at the Circle J Ranch in Saugus was driven south by fierce Santa Ana winds, devastating Gene Autry's Melody Ranch movie town in Placerita Canyon before cresting the ridge and spreading to Sylmar, where it took out Olive View's infirmary-surgery building and two garages. Eight hundred patients were evacuated.

As medical science conquered tuberculosis and Olive View was no longer needed for that purpose, it aligned with the UCLA School of Medicine and became Olive View Medical Center, an 888-bed teaching hospital that opened in December 1970. Six weeks later, the 6.6-magnitude San Fernando-Sylmar Earthquake of Feb. 9, 1971 (which epicenter was in the Iron Canyon section of Sand Canyon in Santa Clarita) felled the hospital's four stairwell wings and its parking structure. The rest of the facility was damaged beyond repair; it was demolished in 1973.

Part of the county-funded healthcare system for medically indigent and low-income patients in the San Fernando and Santa Clarita valleys, the hospital's staff delivered care at a site in Van Nuys until May 8, 1987, when Olive View reopened as a 377-bed hospital. It became Olive View-UCLA Medical Center in 1992 and is the principal intake facility for North County patients experiencing a psychiatric emergency.