Railroad Stations: Connections by Pacific Electric Ry. interurban, and Los Angeles Motor Coach Co. with trunk railroads. Offices: Union Pacific, 309 Santa Monica Blvd.; Southern Pacific, 416 Santa Monica Blvd. and 3011 Trolleyway; Santa Fe, 312 Santa Monica Blvd.
Interurban Stations: Pacific Electric Ry. Station, 1504 Ocean Ave. Fare within city limits, 6¢; to Los Angeles, 20¢.
Bus Service, Local and Interurban: Santa Monica Municipal Bus Line, terminal at 1613 Lincoln Blvd.; Bay Cities Transit Co., station at 1726 4th St., local and to bay cities. Los Angeles Motor Coach Co., from Wilshire Blvd. and Ocean Ave. to 5th and Hill Sts., Los Angeles, via Wilshire. Pacific Greyhound Lines (through traffic only), station at 1349 4th St. Minimum fare, 6¢.
Airport: Clover Field Municipal Airport, 3300 Ocean Ave., registered with U.S. Government as A.I.A. airport. Sightseeing flights over Bay District. Charter planes available.
Taxis: Mostly privately owned, yellow cabs, 114C Santa Monica Blvd. Rates 25¢ up.
Piers: Municipal Pier, foot of Colorado Ave.; Lick Pier, foot of Marine St.; Dome Pier, foot of Ashland Ave. Water taxis to deep-sea fishing.
Traffic Regulations: Uniform traffic ordinances for California cities, as compiled by the Automobile Club of Southern California, prevail.
Information Bureaus: Chamber of Commerce, Broadway and 4th St.; City Publicity Commission, City Hall, 4th St. and Santa Monica Blvd.; Southern California Automobile Club, 1810 Ocean Ave.
Streets and Numbers: The numbered streets, from 2nd to 26th, and name streets from Princeton to Franklin, run N. and S. Principal avenues and boulevards run E. and W. City boundaries are: N., San Vicente Blvd.; S., Commonwealth Ave.; E., Centinela Ave.; W., Pacific Ocean. Street arrangement somewhat irregular in Ocean Park section, due to number of short streets between shore line and Pacific Electric tracks.
Hotels and Apartment Houses: 43 hotels and 130 apartment houses.
Theatres, Concert Halls, and Amphitheatre: 5 modern movie theatres. Music halls include Convention Hall on Santa Monica Pier, and auditorium of Santa Monica Junior College, 7th St. and Pennsylvania Ave.
Art Galleries: Public Library, Santa Monica Blvd. and 5th St.
Schools: 1 evening school, 1 technical, 1 junior college, 1 high, 2 junior highs, 8 elementary, 8 kindergartens.
Newspapers: Evening Outlook, daily, except Sun.
Parks, Playgrounds, Picnic Grounds: Palisades Park, from Adelaide Dr. to Municipal Pier, 21 acres on bluff overlooking ocean. Lincoln Park, Lincoln and Wilshire Blvds.; Douglas Park, near Wilshire Blvd. and 25th Sts., with fly-casting pool; and Clover Field, 100 acres, largest of community’s recreation spots.
Numerous other play centers on sands along ocean front. Parks generously equipped with facilities for outdoor games and picnics.
Boating and Yachting: Stone breakwater in bay provides anchorage for more than 300 boats.
Swimming: City owns and maintains 1 mile of public beach with police and lifeguard service throughout year.
Golf: 18-hole course at Clover Field.
Tennis: Lincoln Park, scene of Dudley Cup annual tennis tournament, Douglas Park, and Clover Field.
SANTA MONICA (79 alt., 53,500 pop.), a city and beach resort independent of Los Angeles on crescent-shaped Santa Monica Bay, lies 15 miles west of downtown Los Angeles on the coastal plain that slopes gently southward from the base of the Santa Monica Mountains. Roughly rectangular in shape, some eight square miles in extent, it is encompassed on three sides by Los Angeles, and on the fourth faces the Pacific Ocean. Santa Monica has an air of small town ease and comfort, combined with the holiday spirit of a shore resort.
Ocean Park, as the southern section of the city is known, is “the Coney Island of the West,” with roller coasters, shooting galleries, shoot-the-chutes, and similar appurtenances. Back from the beach are some slum-like streets, but most are lined with the neat small houses of workers in the neighboring industrial plants, the largest of which is the vast Douglas Aircraft Company Plant.
More characteristic of the city is the shore line north from Ocean Park to Santa Monica Canyon. Palisades Park, a narrow attractive strip of greenery, follows the edge of the cliffs and overlooks large beach clubs and elaborate “cottages,” some with private swimming pools; in the bay appears the Municipal Pier, with a long breakwater beyond it, providing a sheltered haven for sail and motor craft. Santa Monica’s principal residential district stretches back from Palisades Park for several miles, a section of substantial and attractive houses, graced with lawns, shrubs, hedges, and a profusion of flower beds. Except for exotic trees bordering the streets, it might be the comfortable, well-to-do residential section of any medium-sized midwestern city. Farther north, near Santa Monica Canyon, houses and gardens become mansions and estates, spreading along the water-front and into the wooded foothills within and beyond the city.
Santa Monica was so named, according to one story, because Father Juan Crespi, while on a journey in 1769, camped near the present site of the city in a grove of sycamores on May 4, Saint Monica’s Day. Another tale has it that Father Crespi, Father Gomez, and two soldiers, searching for a trail up the coast during Portola’s stay in Yang-na (Los Angeles), slaked their thirst at two springs they found in a grove of sycamores and named the Pools of Santa Monica. The springs and grove, now gone, were situated close to the eastern edge of the city, near the present Sawtelle Soldiers’ Home (see Beverly Hills).
Provisional grants were made to “the place called Santa Monica” as early as 1827, but the region was only slightly developed for many years, though the sycamores were a favorite camping spot for parties from Los Angeles. In 1871 a Los Angeles entrepreneur erected a big tent which housed 20 to 30 families during the week and on Saturday nights was turned into a dance hall. Its popularity led in 1872 to the building of a two-story hotel, with eight rooms. “Come and enjoy yourself,” the owner advertised, “a week spent at the beach will add 10 years to your life.”
In that same year Colonel Robert S. Baker of San Francisco, a forty-niner, paid $54,000 for the Sepulveda ranch, one of the large early land grants; he also acquired two adjoining ranches and stocked all with sheep. Colonel Baker appreciated the value of the water front as a townsite; lacking sufficient capital, he interested English capitalists in 1874 and newspapers announced that a wharf and railroad were to be built and the town was to be called Truxton, but nothing happened. In January 1875 Senator John P. Jones of Nevada purchased a two-thirds interest in the Baker ranch; construction of a wharf and of a railroad to Los Angeles was begun; a town was laid out, and the survey plat of “Santa Monica, Cal.” was filed in the office of the county recorder at Los Angeles on July 10, 1875. Home builders and speculators streamed in from San Francisco by boat, from Los Angeles by stage, for a widely advertised auction of lots by Senator Jones’s factotum, Thomas Fitch, a Los Angeles newspaperman. The day was hot; there was no shade; horses, wagons, buggies, and stagecoaches raised clouds of dust, but Fitch’s eloquence easily vaulted these hurdles.
“At 1 o’clock,” Fitch thundered, “we will sell at public outcry to the highest bidder the Pacific Ocean, draped with a western sky of scarlet and gold; we will sell a bay . . . a southern horizon . . . a frostless, bracing, warm yet unlanguid air . . . odored with the breath of flowers. The purchaser of this job lot of climate and scenery will be presented with a deed of land 50 by 150 feet. The title to the ocean and the sunset, the hills and the clouds, the breath of the life-giving ozone, and the song of birds, is guaranteed by the beneficent God. . . .”
The first lot brought $300. Within a few months the Santa Monica Outlook began publication, and the first train pulled out of Santa Monica for Los Angeles. On November 24, 1875, the Outlook reported, “Santa Monica continues to advance. We now have a wharf where the largest Panama steamers have landed . . . two hotels, one handsome clubhouse . . . two private schools and in a short time we shall have two churches and a public school.” Santa Monicans envisaged their town as the great port of southern California, but this hope was blighted in 1876 when the Southern Pacific Railroad was completed to Los Angeles, having been given as a bonus the narrow-gauge railroad that ran from Los Angeles to San Pedro. A rate war began, and within a year Senator Jones was forced to sell his Los Angeles and Independence road to the Southern Pacific, which immediately raised freight rates and diverted business to San Pedro.
Hard times fell on Santa Monica. An epidemic of smallpox followed a severe drought that ruined local sheepmen. The population began to dwindle. Baker and Jones strove to make a resort out of the town during the next two years but were not very successful. The 1880 census revealed a population of only 417. Lots bought for hundreds of dollars sold for as little as 10 cents down.
POINTS OF INTEREST
The village revived with the boom in the late 1880’s, and on the heels of the boom came a change in the attitude of the Southern Pacific, now headed by Collis P. Huntington, which built a large wharf here in 1891-92 and was soon engaged in a bitter five-year fight with those who favored San Pedro as a harbor (see Pueblo To Meropolis). Millions of dollars were spent in the struggle, which finally reached the floor of the Congress, where the Southern Pacific was defeated and Santa Monica’s second hope of becoming a large port was blasted.
Almost immediately a campaign was started to advertise Santa Monica as a residential and resort community. In 1892 the Santa Fe and Santa Monica Railroad completed its line from Los Angeles to Ocean Park, then known as South Santa Monica, and built a station, an amusement pavilion, cement promenades along the beach, and advertised excursions to “the Coney Island of the Pacific.” Golf links and race tracks were laid out to attract more visitors. Thousands came to watch the Santa Monica automobile road races held between 1909 and 1916. By 1910 the city’s population approached 8,000, and during the next decade it grew steadily.
But it was during the booming 1920’s that Santa Monica began to assume its present metropolitan proportions. Many of the easterners and middle westerners who poured into California during that period were attracted by the city’s quiet residential atmosphere; they built small houses and settled down as year round residents. Movie stars, lured by its sea breezes within commuting distance of Hollywood and Beverly Hills, built elaborate summer houses on the beach. The coming of the Douglas Aircraft Company and its rapid growth freed the city from sole dependency upon its tourist and vacationist trade. Nevertheless, Santa Monica keeps its resort fences in good repair, and even builds new ones: its “Coney Island” is still packing in the nickel-and-dime week-end trade; and the completion of the breakwater in 1932 gave it a fine harbor and a firmer grip on the boat-owning class.
POINTS OF INTEREST
LINCOLN PARK, Wilshire and Lincoln Blvds., a five-acre tract, has a shaded picnic ground and a children’s playground.
1. In the park is the MILES MEMORIAL PLAYHOUSE, which stands on the Lincoln Boulevard side of the park among eucalyptus trees and palms. The playhouse is of modernized mission architecture. It was built with funds left to the city in 1925 by James Euclid Miles. It is used for community social, recreational and dramatic events.
2. The SANTA MONICA PUBLIC LIBRARY (open weekdays, 9-5; limited service Sun., holidays), 5th St. and Santa Monica Blvd., is a two-story H-shaped concrete building of Spanish Renaissance design. The buff-colored exterior is embellished with dark terra-cotta ornament around the doors and windows. In the main reading room are murals by S. MacDonald Wright depicting the evolution of literature, art, and science since the dawn of civilization.
PALISADES PARK is a narrow strip of 26 acres along the high bluffs that fringe the ocean between Colorado Ave. and Inspiration Point. Palm and pepper trees line the Ocean Avenue side; trees and shrubbery in the park have been grouped to allow unobstructed views of the sea. A rustic wood and iron fence skirts the face of the precipice, down which narrow stairs with rustic rails wind to the strand.
3. The CAMERA OBSCURA (open 9:30-5:30; free), housed in a two-story, shingled structure at the foot of Broadway, was built more than 50 years ago. In summer some 600 persons a day visit the small dark chamber where scenes caught by the revolving lenses, prisms, and mirrors on top of the building are projected in color on a movable, canvas-covered table top.
The YACHT HARBOR, at the foot of Broadway, a municipally operated haven for small pleasure craft, is protected by a 2,000-foot stone BREAKWATER, completed in 1934 at a cost of $700,000, which parallels the shore 600 feet beyond the end of the pier.
The MUNICIPAL PIER, extending 1,680 feet seaward from the foot of Colorado Ave., is the center of Santa Monica’s Stillwater angling, and boating and yachting activities. It forms the southeastern boundary of the yacht harbor. From the seaward end of the pier water taxis (rates vary) carry passengers to offshore fishing barges.
4. At the end of La Monica Pier, left of the Municipal Pier, is the LA MONICA BUILDING, a concrete and stucco structure housing the Life Guard Service, Municipal Aquarium, and a skating rink. Powerboat agencies, fish stores, restaurants, and miscellaneous amusement concessions wall the north side of the pier.
The MUNICIPAL AQUARIUM (open 9-5; free), in the La Monica Building, exhibits mounted and living specimens of sea life peculiar to the waters of southern California. The collection was started as a hobby in 1935 by members of the Santa Monica Lifeguard Service, who have been put in charge of the enlarged aquarium.
5. The new CITY HALL, Main St., between Olympic and Pica Blvds., was begun in March 1939, as the first municipal unit of a proposed Civic Center midway between the northern and southern sections of the city. The H-shaped two-story building is of reinforced concrete construction. Above the Main St. facade a square central section rises in a low set-back beyond the roof line. The dark exterior trim of a squat, square-shaped unit above the central setback is in sharp-contrast to the whiteness of the structure as a whole. The building; houses all departments of city government.
6. The MEMORIAL OPEN AIR THEATRE, on the grounds of the Santa Monica High School, Pico Blvd. and 4th St., built in 1920, was dedicated the following year to the Santa Monica High School boys who saw service during the World War. The 3,000-seat concrete amphitheatre is used for graduation exercises, fiestas, and various public gatherings.
7. ST. ANNE’S CHAPEL, NW. corner Colorado Ave. and 20th St., a low, gabled cruciform structure with clapboard walls and shingle roof, topped with a small bell tower, is locally famed as the repository of a relic of St. Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary. The chapel was built in 1908 by Father Patrick Hawe. In 1913 the archbishop of Quebec, Canada, sent an authenticated fingerbone of St. Anne from the shrine of St. Anne de Beaupre, near Quebec, and a rustic rockery for it was built on the chapel grounds. During the annual novena, which precedes St. Anne’s Day, July 26, several hundred people daily attend the outdoor services held near the shrine.
DOUGLAS PARK is bounded by Wilshire Blvd. and California Ave., 25th St. and Chelsea Ave. It is a four-acre recreational area of diversified appeal that was named for Donald Wills Douglas, airplane manufacturer, who built the first Douglas planes in an abandoned motion-picture studio that formerly stood on the site. Facilities include one of the few fly-casting pools in southern California, a wading pool, children’s playground, and tennis courts.
The CLOVER FIELD AIRPORT, bounded by Ocean Park and Centinela Blvds., 27th and Dewey Sts., one of the first municipal airports in the United States, was established in 1926; the 75-acre airport adjoins the 100-acre MUNICIPAL GOLF COURSE AND RECREATION CENTER, acquired at the same time.
8. The main DOUGLAS AIRCRAFT COMPANY PLANT, 3400 Ocean Park Blvd., a three-story white concrete building, covers 18 acres, with almost 1,000,000 square feet of floor space. Adjoining it on the east is the new hangar-shaped ASSEMBLY BUILDING. Here are built the giant Douglas transport ships—the DC-3, a 21-passenger day and night plane; the DST, a 14-passenger sky sleeper; the huge DC-4 skyliner, weighing 65,000 pounds gross, with a wingspread of 139 feet; bombers and torpedo carriers for the U.S. Army and Navy, and various foreign governments. The Northrop Division plant at El Segundo (see Tour 5) is a subsidiary.
Airplanes were formerly built on a workbench, but manufacturers have adopted the assembly-line methods of the automobile builders. The Douglas company makes most of the parts for its planes in its Santa Monica factory, using a high-speed hydraulic press which weighs 840,000 pounds and is one of the most powerful of its kind. The intricate processes and countless tests involved in the evolution of a new model are revealed in the creation of the Douglas Sky Sleeper DST. In December 1934, engineering projections, based on the designs of previous models, were started. Four hundred engineers and draftsmen made some 3,500 drawings—of each screw and bolt, the detail of every unit. Once the basic design was completed, a model, one-eleventh the size of the proposed ship, was built. Engineers then made 300 tests of the model in a 200-mile-an-hour wind tunnel at the California Institute of Technology (see Pasadena). The construction of the full-size wooden model for determining the most practical seating and storage arrangements required 15,000 work hours, and included tests of the reactions of air passengers to color. The construction and testing of the wooden model cost $400,000. Shaping of steel and duralumin parts on the high-speed hydraulic presses followed, each unit being subjected to load, bending, and torque tests. On December 17, 1935, a year after the first plans had been drawn, the completed DST rolled off the production line, and was given a series of severe air tests before being pronounced ready for production in quantity.
OCEAN PARK, extending along the ocean for several blocks on either side of Ashland Avenue, is Santa Monica’s amusement district, “the Coney Island of the West,” with roller coasters, shoot-the-chutes, skating rinks, carrousels, hot-dog stands, and carnival booths.
9. The MUNICIPAL AUDITORIUM, foot of Ashland Ave., rests on a pier adjoining Dome Pier. Its arcaded stucco facade overlooks a block-wide, concrete-paved plaza with a bandstand shell in the center. In the plaza, seating 5,000, summer concerts are given by the Santa Monica Municipal Band; the auditorium, seating 1,200, is used for community educational and cultural affairs.
DOME PIER, foot of Pier Ave., the center of Ocean Park’s so-called “Fun Zone,” is lined almost solidly with concession booths and cafes. Northwest of it stretches the sloping strand of the Santa Monica MUNICIPAL BEACH, which attracts summer holiday crowds of more than 100,000 persons.
