Casa de Rosas/Sunshine Mission

Casa de Rosas/Sunshine Mission. . , Offering Light Amid California Sunshine , An amazing variety of people have called this place home: turn-of-the-century debutantes, science fiction writer and Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, luckless women - and an evangelist with a mission of her own. , Sunshine Mission - Casa de Rosas has served as a kindergarten and a finishing school, a residential hotel and an Army barracks, and, finally, as Los Angeles’ first shelter for homeless women. , Its true mission began in the 19th century as it continues into the 21st century: educating women. , It was built in 1892 as part of the then-novel "kindergarten movement," training women to teach children with such ordinary objects as blocks and drawings. But it wasn't until after World War II that it assumed its current role, assisting women with histories of prostitution, drugs and drinking and victims of domestic abuse, to the ways of productive and independent living. , The woman who gave the Sunshine Misson its start in another neighborhood in 1941 was Essie Binkley West, the so-called "Angel of Skid Row," who ministered to women's minds and souls as her mission cared for their bodies. , "I want to show the world that there is no such thing as a bad girl," West once told a newspaper. "I may have been gambing with my money, but I wasn't gambling on the girls." , Her first evangelical efforts began in the 1920s, when she played trumpet and organ and sang for the flamboyant evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. , By the 1930s, West had opened her own home in Glendale to unwed mothers, and took to preaching on the pavements of Skid Row, playing her trumpet on the streets and stopping in bars to preach and pass the hat. , In 1940, she and her husband, Wilfred, bought a church and an apartment building at 6th and Wall streets, and opened the Old Time Faith Church and Sunshine Mission, the city's first shelter exclusively for homeless women and especially, West said, those who "courted the companionship of the devil." , In 1950, as the city condemned the dilapidated Old Time Faith Church on Skid Row, she went looking for new property. She bought the Froebel Institute and transferred the name "Sunshine Mission" to it. , A Landmark Building With A Lively Past , The 25-room Mission Revival-style building had stood vacant for a year or two, since future Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard and some of his students moved out. The building was designed in 1892 by architect Sumner P. Hunt, who later designed the ornate Automobile Club of Southern California a few blocks away. , Its original tenant, the Froebel Institute, emphasized teaching children forms and shapes, and was an early promoter of "educational toys." Architect Frank Loyd Wright remembered that as a boy he fashioned his first buildings out of Froebel's maple blocks. , In 1904, it had been turned into the Girls Collegiate Boarding School, and by the 1930s, it had become a hotel-restaurant where University of Southern California students lived, and in World War II, it sheltered soldiers. , Even before it became the Sunshine Mission, the building was known as Casa de Roses, a guidebook landmark for the profusion fragrant roses growing over its walls and in its courtyard. , The Founder Dies, The Work Lives On , West restored the place in 1951, still serving women in need. But in 1975, West was forced to close the Sunshine Mission for fire and safety code violations. She prayed that someone would come to the rescue with $50,000 for repairs. "God will see it through," she said. But that didn't happen in her lifetime. , She died in 1976, in her bedroom at the mission. A year later, her prayers were answered. A retired reporter named Joseph "Sparky" Saldana became executor of her will, and was determined to reopen the mission in her memory. He enlisted family and friends - and hundreds of USC student volunteers with paint and brushes - and reopened the mission in 1980. , In 1981, the building was designated a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Landmark. But the born-again mission found itself forced to work not only to save women: it had to save itself. In 1984 and again in 1987, an arsonist torched the building; each time the place struggled back to life, and to its mission.