The Dreams They Had

   Pacific Palisades, Santa Monica and Venice were once inhabited by Native Americans who wanted nothing but to abide on the land.
   They were subdued by Spaniards who moved north out of Mexico and settled on large land grants made by the King of Spain, who never even saw the gorgeous territory he dispensed so royally.
   Perhaps he had read “The Adventures of Esplandian,” in which Garcia Ordonez de Montalvo, a provincial Spanish novelist, had written in 1510, “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.”
   The Spaniards were, in turn, pushed aside by Americans who heeded Horace Greeley’s advice to “Go West, young man” and came all the way to California — a real place that took its name from an utterly preposterous 16th century romance written by a man who had never seen the Pacific Ocean, much less this paradise.
   Naturally, the Americans, having beaten everyone else, turned on each other.
   Collis Huntington, boss of the Southern Pacific Railroad, laid tracks down the coast from San Francisco and built the Long Wharf near the mouth of Santa Monica Canyon — with an eye to making Santa Monica the port of Los Angeles, which would not only have given him a virtual monopoly but won him federal subsidies. To that end, he bullied local officials, bribed Congressmen and swung his considerable weight all over the place, but ultimately lost to San Pedro.
   In the early 1870s, Robert S. Baker, who’d made a fortune in sheep, of all things, set out to found a town called Truxton, on western edge of Los Angeles. When his British backers backed out, he sold most of his land to another would-be railroad titan, John P. Jones, a silver tycoon and former U.S. Senator from Nevada, who had wanted to build a Santa Monica-Los Angeles railroad. And failed. Baker and Jones assembled a real estate development they called Santa Monica, and in 1875, they auctioned off lots.
   In 1904, Abbot Kinney, a man of amazing imagination, founded Venice of America. It was an utterly outrageous dream and the town grew gloriously for a time. But, its canals became clogged with silt, its high aspirations were overtaken by low pleasures, and, in 1925, Los Angeles cut off its water supply, forcing Venice voters to approve its annexation by Los Angeles.
   Long a summer resort for Angelenos, Pacific Palisades didn’t make the maps officially until 1921 when a Methodist group founded a colony, the “Chautauqua of the West, for cultural and moral betterment.”
   The pitch of the Jones-Baker auctioneer, former newspaper reporter Tom Fitch, may be unsurpassed in the annals of hyperbole: “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.”
   From that time to this, residents of this luminous coast have struggled to prevent developers and their own elected officials from selling the ocean, sky, weather and gardens out from under them.
   Venice, having been conjured by an idiosyncrat, was far too eccentric — with its network of canals and colonnades — to attract conventional developers. Initially, it attracted people seeking a cheap and beautiful place to live – the poor, African-Americans, artists and writers, filmmakers, and a relatively benign breed of anarchist. Eventually, the developers came, of course, laden with big, bad plans.
   Most recently, Lincoln Place, a remarkably successful large garden apartment complex, which was built in the late 1940s to house returning GIs and has been home at one point or another to scores of upward bound Westsiders, was bought by a developer who is now busy turning those charming, inexpensive garden apartments into ordinary, high-priced apartments.
   Pacific Palisades’ residents have been more successful in fending off developers, or holding them back. They have taken on major opponents – Big Oil a while ago and the Getty Trust now. They beat down Big Oil’s plans to undertake drilling operations in the ocean off the Palisades and they have thus far stymied Getty’s efforts to plop a 950-seat amphitheater down in the midst of a quiet residential neighborhood. Not surprisingly, the Palisades Community Council is often cited as the model for the Neighborhood Councils mandated in the new L.A. Charter.
   Unlike Venice and the Palisades, Santa Monica was founded for purely commercial reasons and grew erratically. For decades, it reeled from not quite one thing to not another thing. Inadvertance was in the saddle.
   Charlie Chaplin shot his first film on the beach. That same beach was later dubbed the Gold Coast – inhabited by movie stars and moguls, dotted with exclusive beach clubs, while, up on the Palisades, the city’s burghers tried every which way to crank up the economy. And failed.
   But it was a genius, Donald Douglas, working in a small room behind a barbershop on Pico, who finally set off a genuine economic boom.
   Douglas made airplanes that made history. With the advent of World War II, the demand for airplanes soared, and Douglas Aircraft grew fast. Eventually, it outgrew Santa Monica, spilling down the coast and, finally, out of town, leaving only an expanded airport, a residential neighborhood and the RAND Corporation in its wake.
   Once again, the burghers were on their own, and flailing. In the 1960s, in the name of urban renewal, they condemned several blocks of beach cottages in Ocean Park and replaced them with a pair of high-rise apartment buildings, killing Pacific Ocean Park Pier in the process. About the same time, they permitted CalTrans to bulldoze a lovely neighborhood to make way for the new Santa Monica Freeway.
   In 1973, still dreaming of big business, the City Council decided to demolish the Santa Monica Pier and replace it with a man-made island on which they planned to erect a convention center and hotel. But the residents had finally had enough, mounted an initiative, saved the Pier and booted the offending Council members out of office.
   Having saved the Pier, residents, led by ‘60s activists and self-described “old radicals” began to organize. They called themselves Santa Monicans for Renters’ Rights (SMRR). The then governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, was the star attraction at their first fund-raiser. In 1979, they passed a sweeping Rent Control Ordinance. In 1982, they took control of City Hall and in their time they have done what four generations of conventional businesspeople failed to do: they’ve gentrified Santa Monica and made it immensely profitable.
   Just about the time Palisades resident Ronald Reagan moved into the White House and took America into a hard right turn, the SMRRs took Santa Monica into what was generally seen as a hard left turn. SMRR leader Derek Shearer said, “If you think of Reaganism as a right wing grassroots strategy, there is a left wing one and the biggest failure now is people not trying. I think we are evidence that if you work hard enough on this, you can win.”
   Ironically, today, the SMRRs’ version of Santa Monica looks remarkably like the America Ronald Reagan wanted to take us back to – a pretty, prosperous, orderly little city, but it works more and more like an amusement park — designed primarily for tourists.
   The destiny of a place is determined in its first days and is set as solidly as its sidewalks, and so it is that as Abbot Kinney and his acolytes dreamed of art and glory, so do their heirs and successors, and the Chautauquans’ high-minded dreams are re-enacted by current residents, and Santa Monica’s would-be tycoons’ dreams of profit pass intact into their descendents, and inadvertence is still in the saddle.