Growing up as a hospital grows old

Many people who have worked at the Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center can tell tales about the countless souls plucked, Lazarus-like, from death. A veteran security guard can recall a man who leaped from a ledge of the building in a suicide attempt and crashed through a skylight, only to land on a gurney in the emergency room, where doctors saved him.

My stories are different. I can talk about the potted kumquat trees that used to bloom outside the residents' housing, about lacing up my synthetic leather "Pro Wings" high tops and shooting hoops on an asphalt court beneath the young doctors' inelegantly retro apartments. I can summon memories of the ill-tempered homeless man who floated between the hospital and the surrounding neighborhood and who, according to local legend, had a brother who was a famous Hollywood actor.

I can tell a relatively blood-free tale about how an institution is sometimes more than the sum of what it does.

Today the doctors and nurses, the technicians and other occupants of the 1930s Art Deco structure will begin to move across a courtyard to the gleaming new County-USC Medical Center. The old building will be used for office space.

As a boy, then a teenager and then a young adult, I grew up in Boyle Heights near that hulking old building, with its underground tunnels and nooks and various pathways. People were busy living and dying in that place, but for me it was also part of the neighborhood, a playground.

I was reminded of this as I stood at the back of a Ventura County church on a Sunday in September, two days after the doomed Metrolink 111 collided with a Union Pacific freight train. A parishioner had been on that commuter train; he had been taken to County-USC with massive head injuries and died there the next day.

Toward the end of his sermon, the pastor tried to take his flock into the county hospital by way of description.

"If you've ever been to County-USC, it's almost like downtown Detroit," he said, eliciting chuckles even among the mourners. "There's a police officer in every corner inside the hospital. You have to go through a metal detector to get in."

I cracked a smile because I could envision the scene he described. But I also had the momentary feeling that my neighborhood had just been dissed. I've never been in the hospital as a patient. But County-USC is part of you -- if you grew up where I did.