The Rise and Fall of the Soldiers Home

The winning bid came from a powerful trio that had incorporated the nearby City of Santa Monica only a couple of years prior: industrialists Sen. John Percival Jones and Col. Robert Symington Baker, along with Baker’s wealthy landholding wife, Arcadia Bandini Stearns de Baker.

The group offered the federal government 300 acres of free land, 150,000 gallons of water a day, and $100,000 for property improvements (equivalent to more than $3 million today). In 1888, the Los Angeles Times praised the location, writing, “It will cause land in that section to advance in value, and the trade thrown into the way of our merchants will be considerable.”

Veterans in need awaited the Pacific Branch with great interest, even though its opening came two decades after the Civil War’s end. The first resident, Pvt. George Davis of New York, did not even wait for the completion of the construction of the first barracks; he camped out on the campus grounds in 1888. By February of the following year, around 50 disabled veterans had made their home on the property.

Two years later, the campus had more than 600 occupants. There were four two-story barracks, hot water, and about 40,000 ornamental trees that provided shade. Vets could visit a commissary, blacksmith, shoemaker, and tailor — and a beer hall that poured free suds on July 4. “The arrests at the Home and in the town have been very few,” wrote the branch’s governor in his annual report. “The only dissatisfaction has been on the part of the proprietor of the ‘Blazing Stump,’ a disreputable saloon near the Home.” The campus also had a hospital that included influenza patients during the pandemic from 1889 to 1890. As of the report date, 47 people had died there.

By the turn of the century, a couple thousand pensioners were using the property, which by then had become a working farm, producing 640,000 pounds of vegetables and 100 tons of hay annually — all harvested by veterans.

Some 2,300 veterans lived there by mid-1910, and they enjoyed the benefits of a small town. The landscaped campus included two recreation halls, a library, billiard and pool tables, and a 20-piece brass band that played daily concerts. Retired soldiers kept to strict military protocol, slept in close quarters in the barracks, ate communally, and were made to wear dark blue uniforms. Veterans also needed permission to leave the campus for longer stretches of time and answered to codes of military discipline.

Though idyllic in many ways, the Pacific Branch was not immune to challenges. Returning soldiers sometimes carried illnesses that included yellow fever, tuberculosis, and smallpox. Some veterans were robbed in their sleep, beaten by the Home’s police force, or left for dead when they couldn’t work the fields, according to newspaper reports from the time. And though the strict military protocol was familiar, it wasn’t always preferable. In 1911, muckraking journalist John S. McGroarty found the conduct in the mess halls and barracks was “such as to degrade the men, not to speak of the sufferings it imposes on them.” Documents from a Senate hearing the following year described the Pacific Branch as “a vast detention barracks, under an unnecessarily rigid system of discipline,” and led the inspector general of the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers to assume control of the campus for a stretch.

Though the Pacific Branch served only male veterans, women made up the majority of the facility’s 162 nonmember employees in 1919, some working as nurses. In 1925, a Soldiers Widows Home was constructed on three acres using donated funds — a notable example of civilian housing on land meant to exclusively house veterans. Today a National Guard recruitment office stands on that plot, just one of many federally owned properties on the campus — including staff housing, office buildings, parking and storage lots, a university’s baseball fields, a high school athletic center, Army and Air Force facilities, a post office, and an interstate freeway — that do not principally benefit veterans.

This was not the first time Pacific Branch land was considered for nonveteran purposes. In 1912, branch officials ceded land to Los Angeles County to extend San Vicente and Wilshire boulevards. A Los Angeles Times article noting the transfer stated that the “regal boulevards” were “bordered by the beautiful lawns, shrubbery and graveled walks bespeaking the true manorial homeplace” — signs the tony adjacent neighborhood of Brentwood, “the perfection of suburban home places,” had arrived.

Later, in 1926, Congress explored the sale of 160 acres of the Pacific Branch to the State of California, which sought to establish a larger campus for what would become the University of California, Los Angeles. In return, the federal government would receive $1.5 million, which it could use to create fireproof barracks. Ultimately, UCLA struck a deal with a different landowner in 1929, cutting the ribbon on a Westwood campus abutting the Pacific Branch to the east. The 160 acres of Pacific Branch land later became a large part of the Los Angeles National Cemetery, which, as of 2024, has interred more than 90,000 veterans.

Four years after the scuttled deal, UCLA’s baseball team relocated from Westwood to the Soldiers Home, where Pacific Branch and American Legion-fronted teams played. The university continues to field its collegiate baseball team on the West LA VA campus as of 2024, while the veteran-associated clubs do not.

As the 1940s drew to a close, the West LA VA’s hospital bed count outnumbered that of the domiciliary: 3,545 to 3,200. Women veterans also began receiving medical treatment on the grounds, with three wards providing care for around 500 women service members.

The VA also began to form associations between its hospitals and medical schools. In 1947, it formalized a medical research partnership with UCLA that took over four buildings on the north side of the VA campus. The following year, Congress passed another law allowing the VA to transfer 35 acres of the Soldiers Home property to the state of California through a quitclaim deed so UCLA could use it as a medical school. Its doors opened three years later.

“Our aim, actually, is to be in such proximity that we are actually almost one in operating in a very integrated manner,” Dr. Charles Modica, director of the Veterans Administration Center in Los Angeles, later testified to Congress in 1967.

Though health technology breakthroughs came as a result of the campus partnership — including the first nuclear medical scanner, the foundations of MRI and CT scanning to diagnose brain injuries, and research leading to the invention of the nicotine patch — veterans were subjects in sometimes risky research, including for illnesses as varied as alcoholism and epilepsy.

As postwar patriotism reached its peak and the VA was awash in resources, the campus offered a wide array of occupational therapies, including rug and basket weaving, book binding, and on-campus work programs. Residents had access to two theaters, three libraries, a softball field, croquet courts, a horseshoe pitch, and a nine-hole golf course — christened the Heroes Golf Course — that had been donated by nearby Hillcrest Country Club in 1946. In the 1950s, in the midst of the Korean War, the West LA VA saw its population top out at about 5,000 resident veterans.

But a landmark shift arrived in September 1958, when Congress formalized the VA’s evolving role by passing Public Law 85-857. The law established the comprehensive veterans’ benefits system that we know today — but also, according to Veterans Affairs, removed the VA’s authorization to build and manage permanent housing for veterans. Instead, the agency, and therefore its West LA campus, would narrow its focus to healthcare, cemetery services, and other benefits.

Neighboring institutions interpreted the change as an opportunity to use “surplus” VA land for their own purposes. UCLA campaigned for 44 more acres of VA land. Brentwood officials floated building a road through the property. A local official advocated for building a community park. By the early 1960s, none of these deals had materialized, but the borders of the Soldiers Home had begun to erode.

Everything changed on February 9, 1971. At precisely 6 a.m. local time, the 6.6-magnitude San Fernando earthquake rocked Los Angeles, destroying a Veterans Administration hospital in Sylmar, about 20 miles north of the West LA campus. Though the VA’s West LA buildings didn’t collapse, the Sylmar devastation triggered a review to determine the structural integrity of the West LA buildings. Thirty of them, including Wadsworth Hospital, were deemed uninhabitable and ultimately demolished. In January 1972, the VA ordered the approximately 1,500 veterans living on the grounds to vacate the property. They were given just one month to move out.

For the once-proud Soldiers Home, the earthquake proved to be a mercy killing. It snuffed out the congressional inquiry, buried the scandals, demolished decrepit structures, and sent remaining resident veterans packing for good.

Where did they go? A 2015 congressional report on veterans and homelessness states, “In the 1970s and 1980s, the number of homeless persons increased, as did their visibility,” but it does not take responsibility for evicting veterans from land designated to house them. It does, however, state this telling government statistic: “The exact number of homeless veterans is unknown.”

Since then, for more than 50 years, unhoused veterans have been trying — vocally, fiercely, and in some cases in recent years, somewhat successfully — to again live permanently at the West LA VA. With fresh challenges to the government’s stewardship of this property winding their way through the courts, just 233 veterans live in permanent housing on the campus as of this writing. It’s a small army whose ranks pale in comparison to the thousands of veterans who once called this land home.