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“We look forward to working with the administration to make the right things—housing, community, workforce development— available to veterans at the historic Pacific Branch property,” Allman said, using the historic name for the disabled soldiers home created there in the 19th century.

And so the Disabled Soldiers’ Home arose on the land, with a rich water supply and a $100,000 gift from the land donors that made the place into a vast, ornamentally gardened neighborhood of splendid trees set along artistically meandering paths, and the less flashy greenery of vegetable and fruit gardens.

When these men died, aged before their years, many were buried in the national cemetery to the east of the Soldiers’ Home, now divided from it by the 405 Freeway.

One ex-soldier was dishonorably discharged from the Soldiers’ Home for running a gambling parlor just outside the gates.

Four years later, thoughtfully but perhaps unhelpfully, a federal judge decreed that 28 bottles of champagne seized from a drugstore not far from the Soldiers’ Home be donated to the old fellows.