Santa Monica Mirror: A Short History of Ballona Creek: Often Occupied, Never Settled

Mirror staff writer

   In the shadowy, black-and-white world on the screen, a steam engine rushes down the track. Mabel Normand struggles against the chains that bind her to the tracks in the path of the oncoming train, her dark hair long and loose; cut to a shot of famous race car driver Barney Oldfield speeding down a road with our hero, Mack Sennett, in an antique roadster, to save Mabel. The road looks surprisingly like Jefferson Boulevard. Jefferson Boulevard? *
   Was there a Jefferson Boulevard in 1912?
   Yes. And no.
   It was called Speedway, then, a seldom-used highway through an isolated stretch of marsh that Oldfield used to practice on. In 1913, racing promoters built a mile-long wooden track at the junction of Speedway and Playa Street (now Culver Boulevard) where Oldfield and other drivers raced until 1914 when the track burned up.
   Pacific Electric ran its red cars through the marshes, where they rattled over bridges on pilings that can still be seen and doubtless disturbed the fish that lived in the stream. And fish there were, smelt and three-spined stickleback and steel-head trout.
   Ballona Wetlands had amassed a colorful and curious history even before the days of black-and-white silent films.
   But not in the beginning. In the beginning, Ballona Creek ran placidly (usually) from the LaBrea tar pits, meandering unimpeded across the broad marshy flood plain to the ocean. Much of the Los Angeles Basin was marsh at that time, and the inversion layer that traps smog so efficiently now, trapped moisture and warmth then. Enough so that the Shoshone Indians whose villages dotted the wetlands and the bluff above them could go without clothes year round.

Remains of pilings, Ballona
   The Shoshones shared the land with (and often fed on) other vanished species; in particular, grizzly bears, which have been hunted to extinction throughout the state. How ironic that we feature it on our state flag.
In the late 1700s, the first white settlers arrived in Los Angeles. Their arrival meant departure for the Ballona Shoshone, most of whom were forcibly removed to Spanish missions by the end of the century.
   In 1839, Antonio and Ygnacio Machado were deeded 13,919 acres by the Spanish government for services rendered in exploring and annexing California. Their “Rancho la Ballona” included the future townsites of Santa Monica and Venice. The name may have been a bastardization of “la ballena”, or whale, for the grey whales that bred in the estuary.
   When the Civil War came, Union soldiers came, too. Camp Latham was established in the Baldwin Hills somewhere above Ballona Creek “close enough to hear the water” and Federal troops were garrisoned there. The exact location was lost when Heinz’ giant concrete “57” was dug out of the side of the hill. It can be still be seen in certain old films and certain old minds’eyes.
   The Los Angeles River which changed course several times in its history, would occasionally jump its banks and join Ballona Creek in its run to the Pacific. The Great Flood of 1862 left the entire valley, and much of the Los Angeles Basin, under water for six months from Washington Boulevard to Baldwin Hills, from the bluffs to the sea.
In the 1880s, Southern California experienced a land boom. Moye Wicks looked at the wetlands and saw a world-class harbor. He organized The Ballona Harbor and Improvement Company with capital stock of $300,000 in 1886 and began to dredge “Port Ballona.” Plans were for a protected inner harbor two miles long, 300 to 600 feet wide and twenty feet deep linked to the sea by a 200-foot channel.

1930's arial shot of Ballona
   The Santa Fe Railroad had been looking for a major port near Los Angeles. When they agreed to extend tracks to the proposed port, Wicks set his crew to work in earnest, ordering them to dig around the clock. In 1887, the first passenger train arrived at Port Ballona with 800 passengers on board.
   But time and tide were against Wicks. When the cash was exhausted three years later, his construction crews were still battling currents that swept silt back into the channel as fast as they dug it out.
   When a storm took out most of the wharf in 1889, Wicks washed his hands of the project and walked away.
   In 1902, Moses Sherman and Eli P. Clark, who built the Los Angeles Pacific Electric Trolley line, purchased 1000 acres of land around the lagoon, formed The Beach Land Company and started work on their “King’s Playground,” a resort which permanently tattooed its name on the surrounding area.
   Landscape architect Alfred Solano planned to take advantage of Wicks’ 1885 channel to build a small harbor and create a Venetian style resort on the marshy land, including Venetian bridges and towers, a bathing pavilion, and a deluxe 250-room hotel on the cliffs overlooking the lagoon.
   They called it Playa del Rey, or “The King’s Beach.” Sidewalks and streetlights were installed, as well as sewers and pipes for the proposed community. According to historian Luther Ingersoll, a reported 700,000 cubic yards of sand was used as fill. A total of $200,000 was invested.
??00 lots were sold at auction for between $500 to $1500. Subsequently, additional lots were sold, but few of the buyers ever built in the isolated area.
   A few years later, red-headed eccentric Abbot Kinney enlarged on the idea far more successfully a few miles north. He added real canals and called his community Venice.
   Sherman and Clark hauled hundreds of visitors on their trolley across the marsh to their budding resort. The Venetian style had been abandoned in favor of “Oriental craftsman.” The centerpiece was a $100,000 three-story pavilion on the banks of the lagoon (on the western edge of today’s “Duck Pond,”) featuring restaurants, bowling alleys, and dance floors. A fishing pier extended 1200 feet into the ocean and a boat racing course was laid out, complete with shore-side grandstand. Nearby, the 50-room Del Rey hotel accommodated overnight guests.
C. M. Pierce included it in his Balloon Line Excursion Route. Named for the shape of the track, sightseers rode the red cars from downtown Los Angeles to the outlying city of Hollywood and on to the seaside outposts of Santa Monica, Venice, and Redondo Beach. After luncheon at the Ballona pavilion, passengers were trundled back on the trolley for a ride through the Ballona’s marshy wilderness and back to L.A. by way of Culver City—all this for a mere dollar.
   A funicular was later installed on the Playa del Rey cliffs so ladies in hobble skirts and gentlemen in celluloid collars could enjoy the ocean view. Its counterbalanced cars were named Alphonse and Gaston.
   Wind, weather and the fickle tide of public opinion worked against the resort. Parts of the fishing pier collapsed in 1911 and then again in 1917.    The tide gates that maintained the lagoon’s high water level were dynamited when heavy rains flooded the wetlands, as well as a good part of nearby Venice. The pavilion burned prior to World War I.
   By 1917, the Del Rey Hotel had become notorious as a house of prostitution. By 1924, it had regained respectability as the Hope Development School for mentally retarded girls, but became the scene of tragedy when it went up in flames that same year. The matron and 22 girls lost their lives in the blaze.
   During the Depression, oil derricks rose out of the wetlands from Ballona to Venice.
   In the late 1930s, the United States Army Corps of Engineers corralled Ballona Creek into a business-like concrete channel that cut straight across the wetlands to the sea.
   Then, in late 1940 or early 1941, a lanky young man with money to burn bought just over 1000 acres for $500,000. Howard Hughes recognized the area as one of the few large tracts of developed land in the Los Angeles. The high water table made it necessary to sink 40- and 50-foot pilings into the wetlands to support Hughes’ buildings and reroute the course of the Centinela which flowed through the site every spring, and flooded it. On July 4, 1941, a 250-employee plant opened for business.
   In 1943, Hughes built the world’s longest, private paved runway on the site. Runway 23 was almost two miles long and 80 feet wide. It was not paved until 1948 because Hughes believed that hardtop was hard on a plane’s landing gear. He reportedly had to add fill regularly to keep the ground solid and regular.
   Once a swamp, always a swamp.
   In 1985, the last aircraft taxied down Runway 23. Playa Capital Corporation cut it down to 4,000 feet to make room for their Playa Vista development. Now reduced to aggregate, the old runway rubble will be used to pave Playa Vista streets.
   Having built the longest private paved runway, Hughes naturally had to build something equally record-breaking to taxi down it.
   As World War II ground on, metal stockpiles dwindled and Hughes became convinced that wood was the logical material to replace it.
Hughes’ flying boat, the HK-1, better known as the Spruce Goose was and is the largest airplane ever built. Its entire airframe and surface structures were made of laminated wood.
   Even the facility in which it was constructed made the record books.
Built in 1943, Building 15 (or the Cargo Building) is probably the plant’s signature structure. It’s a big double gabled hangar with Hughes’ name painted on the roof, and at 720 feet tall, and two-football fields long, it may be the world’s largest all-wood structure.
   Large as the Cargo Building was, it wasn’t quite big enough to house the big plane. The hull and wings were built as separate units and sent off to Long Beach for assembly. It was in Long Beach that the Spruce Goose made its first and only flight in 1947 with Hughes himself at the controls. Unfortunately, the army didn’t agree with Hughes. He was ridiculed for his folly. One U.S. Senator derided the Goose as a “flying lumberyard.
   Goose or lumberyard, after its brief flight, it spent the next 38 years collecting dust in a Long Beach hangar.
   Hughes did very little with the rest of the land, but use it an effective buffer around the hangar.
   Tenant farmers planted soy and lima beans beside the runway and on the bluffs. Legumes never grew very enthusiastically or, owing to the salty, alkaline soil, very successfully. Rumor has it that Hughes farmed the land because agricultural land is taxed at a lower rate.
   In 1960, Marina del Rey yacht harbor was carved out of 800 acres of non-Hughes-owned wetlands.
   In 1978, Hughes died. After the dust of Hughes’ estate had settled, the wetlands were in the hands of Summa Corporation. Summa proposed a mega-development, one of the largest, if not the largest mini-cities ever proposed in Southern California, with a 29,000 people in 13,000 units and an additional 20,000 employed by an on-site world-class motion picture studio.
   The project was called “Playa Vista.”

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