La Crescenta-Montrose is an unincorporated community in Los Angeles County, California that serves as a bedroom community for neighboring cities. It began as a land grant to a Spanish cavalry officer named Ignacio Coronel, who named the land La Canada Valley. The valley floor was arid and had little water, leading settlers to believe that taming the desert land and building homesteads were impossible. At the end of the civil war, more settlers began to arrive and one of them, an ill-tempered and unpopular man named Colonel Theodore Pickens, deforested the valley floor, turning the vegetation into firewood. In 1881, a doctor and ex-fruit magnate, Benjamin Briggs, discovered that the warm, dry air was a tonic for people with lung diseases. He bought the vast majority of Rancho La Canada, renamed it La Crescenta and began building a sanitarium. As word spread about the sanitarium and the dry air, more and more sanitariums began to appear, Hollywood celebrity patients began to appear as well as people wanting to live close to but not in Los Angeles City. Today it continues to be a family-oriented community as well as a recovery destination for the famous, wealthy, and powerful.