It was the graffiti with the word “kindness” scribbled on a cabinet that caught our eyes. My 13-year old son and I spotted it next to a spray-painted depiction of an eyeball with horns. We were looking through a broken glass door a few steps past a nursing station littered with crumbling ceiling tiles and old telephone wires. Someone had clearly been living there and looted part of the floor. The eyeball reappeared in other rooms.
We had already explored a bright, white-tiled room housing the surprisingly pristine valves and pressure gauges of a built-in autoclave from the 1920s. In another dustier, jade-tiled operating room, we ducked under several metal surgery lamps hanging from the ceiling like the legs of a dried spider. We imagined the patients whose lives had been saved or lost in this room. A broken x-ray light box remained on. 
It was both eerie and beautiful. An operating theater illuminated by tall, church-like glass windows on the 15th floor brought indirect afternoon sunlight in. In 1951, this was the room in which a thyroid surgery was broadcast live on color TV for some 700 doctors to observe miles away at the Shrine Auditorium. It was in rooms like these that you could feel how important this giant public hospital was to its city.
We were wearing N95 masks to avoid inhaling remnants of asbestos and lead-tainted dust that, we were warned, would be stirred into the air by the morning’s foot traffic. We were inside the old Los Angeles County General Hospital, one of the largest public hospitals in the nation before it closed in 2008. And we were among several hundred guests to receive this unusual glimpse inside by the Los Angeles Conservancy.
The building was a public health landmark from the start
The county built the general hospital nearly a century ago at the top of a small hill in East Los Angeles, making it one of the most recognizable landmarks in the city. The county’s commitment to a public hospital went back much further. In 1878, the county opened a 100-bed hospital for the indigent. A few years later, it formed an academic partnership with the University of Southern California’s medical school and became a training hospital.
In 1933, the county replaced that original hospital with the massive, state-of-the-art hospital we toured. The new Los Angeles County General Hospital, also known affectionately by some as the Great Stone Mother was sized to serve the rapidly growing county population. It is a 19-story Art Deco concrete structure, containing more than one million square feet of space. As of August 2026, the National Register of Historic Places listing awaits final approval.
Its public mission was literally carved in stone above the entrance:
Erected by the citizens of the County of Los Angeles to provide hospital care for the acutely ill and suffering to whom the doctors of the attending staff give their services without charge in order that no citizen of the county shall be deprived of health or life for lack of such care and services.
And it is easy to sense the scale and weight of that mission. At the entrance, millions of footsteps had worn the marble floors into a subtle trough. The foot traffic of patients, families, clinicians and staff had gently shaped the narrow passage into the building over many decades. Feeling that groove beneath our feet told us everything we needed to know about how busy the hospital was.
In 2008, the hospital stopped being a hospital
For 75 years, the Great Stone Mother served its original purpose. But by the early 2000s, even a million square feet of concrete couldn’t overcome the building’s biggest problem. It could no longer meet California’s seismic requirements for an acute-care hospital, and suffered some damage in the 1994 Northridge earthquake. 
Los Angeles County built a replacement hospital next door, and in 2008 the patients and most medical services moved out. The old hospital largely went quiet. That’s how, nearly two decades later, we found ourselves wandering through operating rooms and wards that looked as though someone had simply turned off the lights and left. Boxes of gloves and other medical equipment remained unopened.
But not everything stopped
In 2014, the county re-invented the ground floor as a Wellness Center, where community non-profits began providing health, wellness and social services to residents of the surrounding neighborhoods. With philanthropic support, the Center envisioned transforming the Eastside of Los Angeles into a healthy village.
Many visitors to the historic hospital will vividly remember the multi-colored painted lines on the floor, stretching the length of hallways, separating and then turning corners, and leading patients, families and staff into various offices and elevators. Like the roots of a tree, these were foundational maps of the hospital leading to various departments for treatment. 
The Wellness Center gave the old hospital a second life and the painted lines became maps to new services. One led to the low-cost daycare at the far end of the hall. Another led to a fitness center for “walk with ease” and yoga classes. Still another led to enrollment services for Medicaid, food assistance, and other social services. Roughly fifteen nonprofits served the Center and reached nearly 33,000 enrolled clients.
The difference between its first and second lives is striking. For most of the twentieth century, people came through those marble hallways because they were sick or injured. For the first part of the twenty-first century, people visited to stay healthy–a flip from treatment to prevention that is expanding with new redevelopment plans.
From hospital to homes: a massive adaptive reuse project
The Los Angeles Conservancy brought hundreds of us through the abandoned upper floors to help people see what an abandoned hospital could become. For years, the Conservancy and others have been working to preserve the Great Stone Mother and find a new use for the 1.2 million square feet of largely empty space.
Los Angeles County is now pursuing a much larger redevelopment of the hospital and the surrounding campus. Part of that vision for an expanded mixed-use village means some of the rooms we were peering into through broken doors may eventually become homes. Rooms once arranged around hospital beds are expected to become apartments, some of which may be low-income and affordable housing. The Wellness Center will move into one of the surrounding historic building.
The work has already begun. Los Angeles County released its master plan for the village in May 2026. And construction has begun on upgrading the seismic stability of the main hospital structure. As a public-private partnership with developers, the final shape of the new village is far from certain. The County and developers will have to balance the needs of the local community with unstable economic conditions. 
After the tour, we talked about the balance between preserving the old hospital and making it feel like someplace people could actually live. We thought the painted lines should stay, almost as a memorial to the generations who followed them through the hospital. Perhaps an old operating room or two could remain open as small public exhibits. The Art Deco exterior seemed equally important to protect, while additions like balconies could make future apartments more livable and signal from the outside that the Great Stone Mother had entered a new life.
The public health mission of housing
Housing has an enormous influence on health. A stable, affordable place to live affects stress, safety, environmental exposures and people’s ability to manage chronic illness. Oddly enough, this isn’t the first time we’ve gone looking at some unusual Los Angeles housing and come away thinking about public health.
In 2021, we visited one of the city’s new tiny-home villages for people experiencing homelessness. Each of those tiny homes, shared by two people, measured about 64 square feet. At more than a million square feet, the contrast with the Great Stone Mother couldn’t be greater. At least at first glance.
The public health mission behind them is strikingly similar. The tiny homes didn’t try to solve homelessness by themselves. They provided shelter alongside services to help residents stabilize their lives and eventually move into permanent housing. The vision for the old hospital also recognizes that affordable homes are healthier when they are embedded in safe, vibrant, public spaces and surrounded by social and health services.
The mission carved in stone
Nearly a century ago, Los Angeles invested in this enormous building because the community needed healthcare. The needs of Los Angeles have changed. So has our understanding of what makes communities healthy. Maybe the most interesting thing about this old hospital isn’t that it stopped being a hospital. It’s that Los Angeles finds new ways for it to serve the public’s health.
Want to see more? Take a look inside the historic hospital in this PBS video.
Gregory Stevens