Then and Now: Consuelo Apartments

Mon., Feb. 23, 2026

Present day: After its use as a nursing home starting in the 1930s, Jane O’Brien sold the Consuelo Apartments in 1965 to Pearl and Jack Bright, who remodeled it and changed the name to Highland Court. Today it is a treatment facility operated by New Horizons Care Centers, Inc., offering treatment for substance abuse, mental health, gambling and other issues. (Jesse Tinsley/THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW)

By Jesse Tinsley jesset@spokesman.com (509) 459-5378

The Social Security Act of 1935 changed the care of older people and allowed entrepreneurial caregivers to make a living while doing it during the Great Depression.

One of those was Jane Bagnall, born in Canada around 1885. She moved to Spokane around 1916 and studied nursing. In 1918 she accompanied Dr. J.E. Drake to Rossland, British Columbia, to help stop the worldwide flu epidemic there. Drake had been fighting an outbreak of smallpox that year at Lewis and Clark High School, where he was the school physician, by giving vaccinations.

She married Andrew O’Brien in 1920 the pair moved into the Consuelo Apartments at Sixth Avenue and Browne Street, just down the hill from Sacred Heart Hospital.

The Spokane Chronicle reported in 1926 that she was one of 23 women from Spokane who had passed the state exam for licensing of nurses that was given in Seattle.

Starting some time in the late 1930s, Jane O’Brien began operating the Jane O’Brien Nursing Home out of the Consuelo Apartments. In 1944, she purchased the building.

In 1939, the city of Spokane cracked down on care centers without city permits. The ordinance applied to all hospitals, sanitariums and rest homes, and had strict rules for building safety and the number of patients allowed. The Spokane Chronicle quoted O’Brien saying she would abide by the ordinance by lowering the number of patients. Courts later upheld the city’s right to make rules for nursing homes.

Andrew O’Brien died of a heart attack at 61 in 1941. The two had no children.

Chafing under the restrictions, O’Brien forged ahead, often having a few more patients than allowed because of the high demand, saying she turned away several patients every day. She was ordered by the fire department to remove more than a dozen patients in 1947 to meet the limit of 50 patients or fewer.

O’Brien ran the home until she sold the building in 1965.

The entrepreneurial nurse told the Chronicle in 1946, “The old men are more pathetic than old women,” she said. “They don’t knit or sew or listen to petty things like women do. No matter how old a woman is, she retains her love of gossip and pretty things.”

O’Brien died in 1980 at the age of 95.