For a hundred years, they have been coming to St. Anne's, teenage girls whose adolescence was stolen by pregnancy. Unmarried, life on hold, they've taken their places in the long, historical queue to receive the comfort and care of a place named after the mother of the Virgin Mary.
Not that everything at the tidy, six-acre campus just west of downtown Los Angeles has remained constant, for the line of girls snakes through vastly different social eras. Much has changed from the days when getting prematurely pregnant typically meant being shuttered away, coming to term in secret and having one's infant quickly whisked away for adoption.
"The traditional maternity home services began to change in the late '80s and early '90s," said St. Anne's Chief Operating Officer Steven Gunther. "More and more women were staying in the community to have their babies, but at the same time we started getting calls regarding women who were in the foster care and juvenile justice systems."
Today's line-standers have been far more brutally battered by fate than the typically genteel girls of old; pregnancy is only one of the issues besetting them. Accordingly, St. Anne's has evolved from a traditional maternity home to a multifaceted social-service agency.
St. Anne's was established in 1908. Over the years, it migrated from Boyle Heights to Glendale to Highland Park to Venice to Hollywood before settling in on North Occidental Boulevard near Beverly Boulevard in 1938.
Until 1976, babies were born on the premises. Now the births take place at nearby hospitals.
The history of the place resonates with tales of school friends who later discover they were born at St. Anne's, with the stories of troubled girls who righted their lives and of babies brought into the world there who returned as adults to play important roles in the organization.
Cathie Capp came to live at St. Anne's as a pregnant 16-year-old in 1990. While waiting for her son to be born, she was inspired by the example of her social-worker counselor.
Capp got her bachelor's in social work from Cal State L.A., and now works in the agency's community service program, visiting client families in their homes. Her son Anthony is a college-bound 18-year-old.
One St. Anne's baby, Joyce Walter, born in 1944, now sits on the agency's board of directors. "To me, St. Anne's has always been a place of my heart, of my beginnings, and it was a good beginning."
