Ruth Home School and Arts/Crafts Building (demolished) – El Monte CA

Description

Between 1934 and 1935, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) constructed a school and arts & crafts building at the former Ruth Home in El Monte, CA.

According to a New Deal official’s scrapbook, “the work consisted of the construction of a frame and stucco school building, all of which is complete except for the installation of plumbing and lighting fixtures, tile roof, miscellaneous painting and other interior finishing. While there was still some $1600.00 for labor remaining unexpended, the Applicant ran out of money for materials. […] The project was officially closed April 19th, 1935, because of the inability on the part of the sponsor to raise sufficient funds.”

The Ruth Home “provide[d] housing, treatment, and schooling to girls and babies infected with gonorrhea. The Pacific Protective Society, which opened the home as its only facility exclusively for infected girls, was a nonsectarian charitable organization for protective and rescue work with adolescent girls and prostitutes in the Pacific Northwest and California. […] The society built a fifteen-acre, multibuilding campus in El Monte, a sparsely populated suburb east of Los Angeles. No expense seems to have been too great. Visitors commented that the new campus, which consisted of Spanish-mission-style architecture, picnic facilities, and ‘artistic landscaping’, seemed to be more like a lovely residential neighborhood than a medical facility. […] By 1935 the Ruth Home was treating an average of 320 girls and babies annually, most of whom were younger than 12 years of age and whose stay ranged from two months to two years” (Sacco, pp. 203-204).

The original buildings were torn down when the county took over the facility. Four photographs at the Pasadena Museum of History show the East Entrance of the school, the open air theater in the patio of the school, the north side of the building, and an arbor enclosing walkway which led from the dormitories to the school building. Two photos at the El Monte History Museum show the original facility and a mural painted for the school building by Frank H. Bowers and Arthur W. Prunier in 1937.