Downhill All the Way

   1510: Paradise
   In 1510, in an otherwise preposterous romance, “The Adventures of Esplandian,” Garcia Ordonez de Montalvo, a provincial Spanish novelist, wrote, “Know that on the right hand of the Indies, there is an island called California, very near to the Terrestial Paradise, which is peopled with black women, without any man among them, because they are accustomed to live after the fashion of Amazons. They are of strong and hardened bodies, of ardent courage and great force. Their island is the strongest in the world, from its steep rocks and great cliffs. Their arms are all of gold, and so are the caparisons of the wild beasts which they ride, after having tamed them, for in all the island there is no other metal.”

   1875: God’s Gift
   In 1875, announcing the auction of the first parcels of land to be sold in the new town of Santa Monica, onetime newspaperman Tom Fitch said, “At one o’clock, 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 filled with white-winged ships; we will sell a southern horizon, rimmed with a choice collection of purple mountains, carved in castles and turrets and domes; we will sell a frostless, bracing, warm, yet languid air, braided in and out with sunshine and 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 land will be guaranteed by the owner. The title to the ocean and sunset, the hills and the clouds, the breath of life-giving ozone and the song of birds is guaranteed by the beneficent God who bestowed them all in their beauty.”

   1949: Factory Town 
   In 1949, in “Fabulous Boulevard,” Ralph Hancock wrote, “ (In the 1870s) Santa Monica and the west beach area became the playground of Southern California. It still clings desperately to that reputation although today it is only an illusion. Santa Monica is as dependent on the business its beaches attract as Kansas City or Denver is dependent on the Cape Cod fishing fleet.
   “The City of Santa Monica was fortunate in the choice of its founding fathers, but apparently most unfortunate in its selection of the leaders that followed them. Of all the world’s ideal settings in which to build beautiful cities, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Santa Monica, California, are, to our way of thinking, the nearest to perfection. That Rio has a few unsightly spots is admitted, but on the whole its citizens have generally improved on the natural beauties of the location. Santa Monica, on the other hand, has the general appearance of a ramshackle Massachusetts beach town of a bygone era with infrequent and much-neglected use of the original natural features of its location...
   “The best thing one can say about (Santa Monica) is that as a factory town it is, compared to eastern factory towns, a very nice community. If its citizens could only turn back the clock and begin all over again, say in about 1875.” 

   1980: Revolutionary 
   CBS-TV’s “60 Minutes” correspondent Ed Bradley said, in 1980, “Santa Monica is probably the last place in the world you’d expect to find ‘the revolution.’ For the most part, it’s just a drowsy beachfront suburb of about 86,000 people nestled between Los Angeles and the Pacific Ocean, the kind of place where Californians would say the rainbow ends.
   “Its politics were pretty much conventional until about a year ago. That’s when the local elections swept into power a group on ‘the far left.’ Suddenly, this community woke up to find itself polarized. The radicals, or the progressives as they call themselves, haven’t renamed Santa Monica “Ho Chi Minh City” but if they did, the people who used to rule here — the conservatives, the landlords, the developers, the business people — wouldn’t be at all surprised.” 

   1999: Real Estate
   In 1999, Joy Horowitz wrote in TOWN & COUNTRY, “...An eight square-mile liberal enclave that borders on the Pacific to the west and Santa Monica Mountains to the north, (Santa Monica) is the kind of town that its residents snobbishly try never to leave. And why should they? It has its own airport, police department, shopping districts, open-air farmers’ market and topnotch public schools...
   “The town is essentially split into two domains: north and south of Montana Avenue, with neighborhoods ranging from raffish Ocean Park to the south to the traditional Gillette Regent Square around Montana to prestigious Santa Monica Canyon to the north...
   “Best Address, either La Mesa...or Adelaide...
“Average house price, About $800,000, which will buy a 2,700 -square-foot house on substantially less than an acre.”

   2001: Resort 
   Tuesday, April 10, a longtime resident explained the proliferation of short-term housing to the City Council by saying that Santa Monica wasn’t a sleepy beach town anymore, but had become a resort. 

   2001: Paradise Lost? 
   Santa Monica is inevitably described now as a hip, cool, even chic oasis in the L.A. commotion, but in spite of its plum setting and fancy new trappings, it’s still no more than a minor accessory to the great sweep of the Pacific to its west and the vast L.A. nation to its east. 
   Though they have topography, borders and palm trees in common, Santa Monica is as passive as Los Angeles is volatile. The ceaseless collision of high and low motives that makes Los Angeles so fascinating and so troubled and so vital has merely made Santa Monica confused and, occasionally, petulant. 
   Like every large American city, Los Angeles has suffered bosses, but it is so vast and unruly that it eventually shakes them loose or wears them out, but Santa Monica has always been in someone’s pocket: a trio of tycoons, a clique of bankers and merchants, an aircraft pioneer, business people and landlords, and, since 1981, Santa Monicans for Renters’ Rights. 
   For all its efforts to dress itself up, Santa Monica remains the hick in the big city of L.A., Babbitt unaccountably in East Egg. an old beach town tricked up with lollipop ponds and promenades, a kind of virtual realityland. 
   And so on the eve of Earth Day 2001 it gives us no pleasure to report that the primary achievement of five generations of busy, ambitious bosses — so various in means, so similar in ends — has been to reduce this paradise we inhabit to a resort.