One-Two Punch : 2 Fires in 2 Years Put Women’s Mission on Brink of Ruin

It has served variously, through its 95 years, as a finishing school, an elegant hotel, an Army barracks and a women’s shelter. Everyone from turn-of-the-century debutantes to women down on their luck have called it home.

But twice in the last two years, fire has brought the landmark Moorish-style building perilously close to being no one’s home.

And the latest blaze at the Sunshine Mission for Women, current tenant in the venerable building just north of the USC campus, has been, say its directors, “disastrous.”

“We’re working so hard to get out of the hole,” said assistant mission director Nora Chavez, “and someone just kicks us back in.”

For the shoestring operation just struggling back from the ruinous 1984 fire that gutted 16 of its 42 hotel rooms, the arson fire two days before Christmas was doubly hard.

The second fire to hit the mission in 2 1/2 years began about 1 a.m. Dec. 23, said director Patty Broussard, and rendered its shelter for homeless women uninhabitable.

Course of Flames

Someone evidently broke in through an office window, walked down a hallway and set fire to a pile of donated clothes that had not yet been handed out.

The fire swept up one stairwell--scorching 45-year-old Army-green paint still coating the carved balustrades--and seared one room whose fire-door was open, before coursing down the hall, popping vintage fanlight windows and setting off an alarm.

No one was hurt. Rooms usually housing 14 homeless women held only three that night, Broussard said. The mission’s “house mother” was planning to take her first vacation in years and the other women had already been sent temporarily to other shelters.

Whoever set the fire had not entirely finished, Broussard said. In the mission’s “sitting room,” appointed with castoff furniture and pale photos of nameless people (except one of a young Franklin D. Roosevelt), the arsonist pointedly set fire to one more object: an elegant old wedding gown, draped on a dressmaker’s dummy.

And today, the former hotel called Casa de Rosas, whose fragrant climbing rosebushes earned it a place in early tourist guides, smells only of charred wood.

The shelter carries no fire insurance, said Chavez. Agents who don’t laugh at them outright usually quote a figure of $25,000 to insure the landmark building.

An arson investigation is continuing, said Broussard, but the six dormitory rooms are uninhabitable, and the two dozen women living in the hotel wing “are very scared,” she said. “One, they’re afraid of the fire (recurring), and two, they’re afraid they’ll lose their homes.”

Of the few shelters for dispossessed women, even fewer offer the wallpapered homeyness of the Sunshine Mission, with ruffled curtains on mullioned windows and pink-glass tumblers in the white dining room.

“There isn’t a whole lot out there for women,” agreed resident Barbara O’Neill, 58, who has lived in the mission’s hotel wing for almost eight years, on disability. “We can’t afford to lose any more of these places.”

Women in the dormitory stay free, temporarily; in the hotel wing, women pay $175 a month, which includes a hot meal each day. One or two have lived there for 25 years.

Without the mission, which moved to the Hoover Street building in 1951 after 10 years in downtown Los Angeles, “you have to go down to Skid Row,” O’Neill said. “Women don’t want to go down there; it’s horrible. I was down there before I came here. I was scared to death.”

Already, some of the displaced women are saying they don’t care that there is no heat and no light in the smoky dorm rooms--they want to come back.

“It isn’t Beverly Hills,” said Broussard, “but I think we all feel safe.”

Although homeless causes have begun to raise a lot of money of late, the Sunshine Mission has seen little. “I don’t think a lot of people even know we’re down here,” Broussard said.

The mission skimps by on the tenants’ $175 monthly hotel rent and donations from about 200 contributors. Elderly donors remember the mission’s now-dead founder, Sister Essie Binkley West, the so-called “Angel of Skid Row,” a disciple of flamboyant evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson.

The mail brings their contributions--a dollar or two or five, and a note in quavery handwriting. Monthly yard sales can bring as much as $400.

But repair costs from the two fires are probably well into six figures, and will take more than yard sales and elbow grease.

“Really, you don’t know where to start,” said Broussard, surveying the charcoal-crusted walls. They mopped the fire-stained floors that morning, “just for our morale,” and now, like Cinderellas, “we’re just sitting here waiting for that millionaire to call.”