Metropolitan State Hospital

Metropolitan is the cottage-plan asylum — the 1915 Norwalk State Hospital built on the 'Green City' and Cottage Plan principles that rejected the congregate asylum model. Patients built the buildings and landscaped the grounds as therapy; the campus was designed to look like a village instead of a prison, with human-scale cottages instead of wards.

The hospital was self-sufficient — the farm and dairy and livestock feeding the patients who worked them, the 300 acres on the Norwalk-Santa Fe Springs border that were rural when the hospital opened. The first 105 patients came in 1916, 'accommodating male patients of a quiet working class' transferred from Patton — the second LA-area hospital for the population that was outgrowing the first.

The campus is still working — still a state hospital, still on the cottage plan's surviving buildings, with a museum opened in 2015 for the centennial. The file keeps the experiment's survival: the hospital that tried to be a village, the patients who built it, and the cottage plan that's still legible in the buildings a century later.

Metropolitan is the archive's cottage-plan file — the 1915 Norwalk hospital built as a village, the patient labor that made the campus, and the cottage-plan asylum that's still operating.