The original Torrance Memorial Hospital was located at 1425 Engracia Avenue in downtown Torrance. (Photo courtesy USC Regional History Collection.)
Torrance's founder, Jared Sydney Torrance, recognized early on his new city's need for a first-class hospital. He founded the Torrance Hospital Association in 1920, but he died on March 29, 1921, three years before the hospital was completed.
He provided for the hospital in his will, and money from his estate continued to arrive at the hospital well into the 1980s.
Helena Childs Torrance, right, at the hospital's opening in May 1925. Others, L to R: Brian Welch, Dr. J.S. Lancaster and Jared Sydney Torrance's brother Lewis Torrance. (Photo: Torrance Historical Society.)
His second wife, Helena Childs Torrance, saw the Jared Sydney Torrance Memorial Hospital through to completion after his death. The one-story structure was constructed at 1425 Engracia Avenue. Dedicated in 1924, its first patients were admitted in 1925. 521 patients were admitted that year, and 72 babies were born.
Mrs. Torrance was actively involved in the hospital and made sure that it stayed solvent during the Depression. she died in Pasadena on October 18, 1940.
A 23-bed wing was added to the hospital in 1947, the first addition to the facility. But by the mid-1960s, it had become apparent that Torrance Memorial Hospital had outgrown its Engracia Avenue location.
Plans for a brand new medical center were set in motion in earnest in 1966, as this artist's rendering published in the Daily Breeze on May 2, 1966 shows. A 35-acre site near Lomita and Hawthorne boulevards was purchased and an architectural firm, Verge and Clatworthy, was selected to design the new facility.
The new hospital under construction on Lomita Boulevard in 1968. Daily Breeze photo.
Ground was broken for construction on Tuesday, July 9, 1968 during a ceremony featuring an address by speaker Sam Stewart, who was then the executive editor of The Daily Breeze. Almost three years later, the new Torrance Memorial Hospital was dedicated on May 1, 1971.
President Nixon's assistant secretary of health, Roger O. Egeberg, delivered the keynote address at the dedication. According to the Daily Breeze account of the dedication, the ceremony was interrupted when a a speaker located atop the entrance to the new hospital came loose in the wind and fell into the crowd. Mrs. Violet Obuchon was grazed on the side of the head: "She was taken immediately to the hospital's emergency room and treated for her minor injuries, a spokesman said."
The hospital changed its name to Torrance Memorial Hospital Medical Center in 1979 and adopted its current name, Torrance Memorial Medical Center, in 1989.
The original Torrance Memorial Hospital building served for years as a senior care facility until it was torn down in 1995. A new patio home development has been built where the hospital once stood. A bas relief nameplate from the old hospital is encased in the wall surrounding the development (see below).
"Historic Timeline," Torrance Memorial Medical Center Web site, http://www.torrancememorial.org/About_Us/Mission_History/Historic_Timeline.aspx.
Images of America: Old Torrance Olmstead Districts, By Bonnie Mae Barnard and Save Historic Old Torrance, Arcadia Publishing, 2005.
Daily Breeze files.
My husband and his siblings were born in that old hospital. My sweet mother-in-law died there. I felt so bad when they tore it down, too bad they didn't keep it as a museum. It was a very interesting example of hospitals of its time. Just one more thing shoveled under.