Welcome to the blog of writer and musician Andrew Martin. Here I'll post original photographs and observations as I encounter the history and culture of the San Fernando Valley, the City of the Angels, Alta California and the far-flung Pacific Rim… but mostly the Valley.
This is one of the best local history articles I’ve read in a while; it filled in huge gaps in my knowledge of a place I thought I knew intimately. If there is any Patient Reader with a direct line to Santa Claus: please ask him to support local journalism in LA this year, with an LAist donation. It’s worth it just for this article alone.
I lived for a few fantastic years in my twenties on 4th Street just above Rose. Our apartment house was just over the border of Venice, so my daily life straddled this old Black neighborhood of Ocean Park and the old Black neighborhood of Venice, Oakwood. All of these were a few blocks from, indeed overlapped with, the old Gay neighborhoods around the music-dance-dine-and-drink nightlife of Ocean Park pier, and the poet-and-artist colonies along the Canals and the walk-streets. When I arrived in the late eighties, these cultures were dead but still warm — or rather, I showed up just as the awesome but fleeting ghost of this old beach culture was leaving the corpse. My God — why was this amazing place, with its funky/grand architecture, magnificent beaches, diverse attractions, and cheap rents lying empty, vacant, forlorn? It was part of the mystique of the place it took me years to really understand. And believe me, once gentrification sets in, YOU SUDDENLY UNDERSTAND. The old Belmar, Ocean Park, Oakwood, Canals didn’t die, they were killed so richer people could move in. Sic semper Californienorum.
Before choir practice in Santa Monica one night, I turned down La Mesa Drive, north of San Vicente, and found an accidental paradise. Apparently the story is that these trees were sold to the developer as magnolias — which are excellent street trees for SoCal. But they turned out to be these majestic ficuses, imports from Australia, outsized giants with a prodigious thirst. One of the oldest and most famous of these trees is in the courtyard of the Miramar Hotel (remember folks?) The story is that an Australian sea captain had no money to pay his tab at the rooming house, and so gave the fig to the alewife in payment. It’s possibly true — the Long Wharf at Santa Monica might indeed have attracted an Australian merchantman in the 1880s. Anyway here is the LA TImes feature on the trees. It seems as rain-forest dwellers, they want a bit of help from the homeowners to thrive in our dry climate. But if anyone can afford to nurture exotic trees it’s the Santa Monicans; and thrive these trees certainly do.
As a feat of urban arboriscaping, now 100 years old, the street is marvelous. As the article says, these trees have had to make their own microclimate to survive. Haven’t we all?
Nature contributes the sea, the sun and the wind; but the astonishing gardens on the cliffs are the legacy of three fascinating individuals, each, in a way, a genius. Each is well-known in the history of the region, for doing other things. The garden was merely a happy accident in each of their lives, but in the view of posterity, these bluffs have become a grace upon the coast Southern California, and the credit of our gratitude is due.
Until 1872, the mesas overlooking Santa Monica Bay were part of the Rancho San Vicente y Santa Monica, the rich grasslands of the Sepulvedas; and Rancho Boca de Santa Monica, the equally lush ranges of the Marquez family. The vague grants overlapped by several thousand acres; and disputes before the (notorious) U.S. Land Commission were not settled until 1872, when the ranchos were consolidated, parceled, and sold off. The principal buyers had big plans for the sun-drenched coastal cliffs.
Arcadia Bandini de Stearns Baker
Sen. John P. Jones
Chief visionary was Dona Arcadia Bandini de Stearns Baker, a true grande dame, the social lioness of the Old Californio Families. Arcadia foresaw luxury hotels, wealthy retirees, and pleasure gardens in her new city. But her partner was mining magnate and Montana Republican Senator, John Percival Jones, who hoped to turn Santa Monica into the Entrepot of the Pacific, distribution hub of the combined products of North America and Asia. Jones conspired with the Southern Pacific’s Collis P. Huntington to build the Long Wharf rail terminus right at the bottom of the cliffs. They hoped a bustling port-railhead on Santa Monica Beach would eat San Pedro’s lunch (see “Los Angeles Harbor Fight.”)
“Santa Monica”
Eugene Morahan, sculptor. WPA, 1934.
These formidable speculators named their city, as did the rancheros, for twin springs (now on the grounds of University High School.) These wells had seemed to Fr. Juan Crespi in 1769 like two gushing eyes, “The Tears of St. Monica.” They formed a creek which flowed through Santa Monica Canyon, splitting the bluffs at its mouth (“Boca de Santa Monica”). This verdant canyon would attract our third genius to the shore of Santa Monica Bay.
Abbot Kinney. Wealthy New Jersey tobacco magnate, millionaire gadabout. He came to California to cure his athsma; became a pioneering forester; saved the San Gabriel Mountains by establishing what became the Angeles Crest National Forest; propagandized the eucalyptus; and founded Santa Monica’s southern neighbor, Venice-by-the-Sea..
Senora Baker had agreed with Sen. Jones that if he had his railhead under the northern bluffs, then the land of the southern bluffs would be given to the public forever as a promenade. Dona Baker then enlisted Abbot Kinney, the new California State Forester, to cover them with his exotic plants from all over the world.
Kinney was the apostle of the eucalyptus, that Australian import that he hoped would cover the “bare, treeless, arid plains” of California with marketable timber. Urbane, handsome and cultured, Kinney had cultivated the socially susceptible Dona Baker, and gotten her to grant him a research plot in Rustic Canyon, the first forestry research facility in the U.S. In gratitude he filled Arcadia’s public park on the bluffs with the exotic specimens of the Antipodes. The trees are now over a hundred years old, and gloriously sculpted by the constant Bay breeze into the fractal forms of frozen time.
Kinney’s hopes for eucalyptus as an American hardwood were dashed, as fast as a falling eucalyptus branch; the cracking, twisting, splitting wood is no good as timber. The legacy of Kinney’s crusade means a California plagued by useless and destructive, but beautiful, naturalized eucalypts; but it also includes the arboretum that is Palisades Park.
More fortunate, was that Sen. Jones’s Long Wharf also failed. Santa Monica never became the Gateway to the Indies; today the area isn’t choked by diesel and warehouses, but a world beauty spot. Maybe that became clear to the Senator, who also loved the bluff gardens, and reputedly came here every day with his dogs to watch the sunset, until the day he died.
Sen. Jones’s memorial, with traditional palm.
View south to Palos Verdes
…and north to Malibu.
The California Incline
Arcadia’s paradise awaits the intrepid soul that dares look over the western rim of the world.
Link
It’s gorgeous, of course, but it’s still too damned tall! Towers, on the beachfront, are ego-driven monstrosities. They lead inevitably to cliff-like walls of identical boxes (even if artully crumpled). This allows the high-spending tourists to feel that they “own their own personal piece of paradise for a week”…well, no, you don’t, you just plopped down in front and stuck a big gritty finger in the eyes of the locals, and guests in other hotels.
Gehry disappointingly followed this trend, and massed it all up front on Ocean – thus the building is sure to block the maximum of sunlight, breeze and view from all other buildings in the neighborhood. Does Santa Monica really want to turn Ocean Avenue into the Wilshire Corridor?
He could easily have massed the project more evenly, like cutting the tower in half, and putting the two blocks side by side, or sloping up front-to-back…which would have allowed the rest of the city to continue to enjoy the maximum of sunshine and sea breezes. I mean, seriously, the guy is supposed to be a genius… now he comes up with something not too different from the age-old developer mandate, “block it out to the maximum square footage the frontage will allow, seal it in stucco, and call it a building.” For stucco read egg-white chiffon, or extruded polyvinyl, or whatever Gehry intends to use here that hopefully won’t blind the neighbors, like Disney Hall did.
When will beach towns learn that their only real appeal, over decades, is the commons? The air, the breeze in the trees, the sunlight, the peace and quiet, the caw of gulls? Real estate booms have a nasty way of turning into orgies of urban diminishment, with effects that nag and persist for decades. (Hashtag Pershing Square.)
“Phantom wealth, to get real, always run to ground.” – me.
The Valley Village View 