Los Angeles Nurses' Club

The Los Angeles Nurses’ Club building is interesting because of the niche it fills in the history of nursing, nursing organizations, and residential housing for nurses. Prior to approximately the 1920s, hospitals were staffed by student nurses and a few supervisors who trained them. Student nurses lived in dormitories or houses owned and operated by the hospital in which they worked or by their religious order. When they graduated, the nurses became private duty nurses. They either worked in the patient’s home or if a person with sufficient means was hospitalized, they arranged for their own private duty nurse to care for them in the hospital. 

Then two important factors completely changed the profession of nursing. One was the 1930s Great Depression because patients could no longer afford private duty nurses. Second, and more important, was the technological revolution in healthcare which was taking place during the period. Obstetrics, in particular, was changing. At the beginning of the century, most babies were delivered at home by a midwife. During the 1920s and 1930s, most women had their babies in a hospital with a ten-day stay expected for a routine delivery. The development of x-ray led to better diagnosis and this, coupled with improvements in anesthesia and safer blood transfusions, made possible a tremendous expansion in surgery capabilities. There were many other areas of medicine where new techniques were being developed and more people were treated. More skilled nurses were needed to staff the hospitals. As nurses’ salaries began to rise, society took a different view of a working woman living alone in her own apartment. It is into this transition period, when nursing was changing from one kind of career and lifestyle into a very different one, where the Los Angeles Nurses’ Club fits. It was a safe and respectable residence as well as an economical one. It filled the place of the “Mother House” of the religious order for independent graduate nurses who were starting to work in hospitals rather than in homes as private duty nurses. 

The beginning of this clubhouse movement goes back to 1898 when Miss Irene Sutliffe, the superintendent of the New York Hospital School for Nurses, prevailed upon ten members of the graduating class of that year to rent a small house and live together. That little group all unconsciously formed the nucleus around which the present organization has been developed. In 1904, the plan had proved to be so successful that two apartment houses, accommodating one hundred nurses, were rented on 32nd Street. On May 1, 1918, they began to occupy the present house at 317 West 45th Street, which was built for their special needs by Vincent Astor and for which they pay him a liberal amount of $16,000 a year for rent.  

A cornerstone on the current Los Angeles Nurses’ Club building gives 1921-1923 for the date of construction, which has a singular place in the socio-historic development of Los Angeles. In the days before the women’s movement, the Los Angeles Nurses’ Club embarked upon the ambitious project of providing their members with an elegant residence. They began to raise money and solicit donations. The old deed shows that they acquired the land upon which the Club was built at the corner of Lucas Avenue and Third Street for a nominal sum. The local was ideal, as it was in an elegant section of town and within walking distance of several hospitals. Records have been found in the archives of the Good Samaritan Hospital which indicated that the nurses held bake sales and raffles to raise money for their building. Doctors donated and so did surrounding hospitals.  

Los Angeles Nurses' Club, National Register of Historic Places. Accessed January 5th 2021. https://catalog.archives.gov/id/123859285.

Nursing Through Time, Penn Nursing - University of Pennsylvania Nursing. Accessed January 12th 2021. https://www.nursing.upenn.edu/nhhc/nursing-through-time/.