
For Good or Ill
By Frank Gruber
Change is the big word in national politics today. Barack Obama made
it his mantra, and beyond the general disapproval of the failed Bush
administration, the country appears poised for a seismic shift in its
politics. (Proposal for new slogan: "Let's hope so.")
Here in Santa Monica our largely left-wing electorate wants change
at the national level as fervently as any other Americans, but change
on the local level is not so fashionable. As the City has developed
its plans for the future, in the context of the updates to the land
use and circulation elements (LUCE) of the general plan, the mantra
has been to preserve and protect.
The image of Santa Monica as a small or even sleepy "beach town"
has been invoked often, both by those residents who are wary of any
change (meaning any growth), and by those, including the City's planners,
who want to plan for change that is inevitable by channeling development
into places where it will have less impact on the existing fabric of
the city, particularly existing neighborhoods.
At the July 1 City Council meeting on LUCE, Council Member Kevin McKeown
even invoked Santa Monica's origins as an "open air" beach
town to question whether we could ever develop an urbanism as congenial
as that of the European cities he likes so much, which, he said, were
never such sand and surf paradises themselves.
I have to say that I haven't yet heard an explanation of exactly what
a sleepy beach town is, but the fact is that no matter what one is,
Santa Monica never was one -- except possibly to the extent that in
the '60s and '70s the local economy declined so much that some surfers
and skateboarders took to referring to Ocean Park as where "the
debris hits the sea."
But historical reality is irrelevant to the power of the image of Santa
Monica as a beach town, and it's an image that can be used for good
or ill.
The founders of Santa Monica intended the city to become a great port
and transportation center. Despite large investments in infrastructure
by them and the Southern Pacific Railroad (which succeeded to the founders'
assets) -- including a railroad line and the famous Long Wharf -- the
big plans for a port failed when the federal government chose San Pedro
to be the port of Los Angeles.
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Port Los Angeles, a/k/a, the Long Wharf (all
photos from the Santa Monica Public Library's Image Archives |
Notwithstanding the failure of the SP's Port Los Angeles, Santa Monica
grew for nearly a century with an economy based in part on tourism,
but largely on industry -- brickyards and the like, nothing picturesque
-- or sleepy.
In the '20s Santa Monica was still only lightly populated, with many
vacant lots and most people living in single-family houses, but its
downtown was bustling. Ocean Park then had relatively few year-round
residents, and Sunset Park was largely empty. All that changed with
the build up to World War II and the growth of Douglas Aircraft, which
built one of the world's largest industrial facilities here, employing
tens of thousands of workers.
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Douglas Aircraft plant, 3000 Ocean Park Blvd.,
1940 |
By 1950, Santa Monica's population was 71,595, about 85 percent of
its 2000 population of 84,084. (Santa Monica's population peaked in
1980 at 88,314.)
Santa Monica's industrial era culminated with the closing of the Douglas
plant, which coincided with the nadir of the City's tourism infrastructure
in the early '70s. This was when the power structure of the time wanted
to tear down the Pier -- about fifteen years after they had destroyed
most of Ocean Park's "Coney Island" type amusements, along
with beachfront affordable housing (okay, that was a beach town), to
build Miami Beach-style apartments.
At that time, activists used the beach town image to good effect to
stop the further destruction of Santa Monica's historic edge on the
Pacific.
But the city we love, and the city most of us live in, took its shape
during the industrial era. Apartment-dominated neighborhoods like Mid-Wilshire,
Ocean Park and the Pico Neighborhood, and single-family neighborhoods
like Sunset Park, owe their character and housing stock to the needs
of Douglas and related businesses.
Our downtown, which Santa Monicans frequent in amazing numbers for
"post-urban" America, was shaped by home-grown retail establishments
like the old Henshey's Department Store, local banks and even a local
telephone company, and a bus company that the City developed to serve
commuters coming into Santa Monica for all those jobs.
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Bay Department Store (later Henshey's),
Fourth and Santa Monica, 1920s |
In the post-industrial era, Santa Monica's economy switched to white-collar
jobs and film and television post-production. The Douglas plant's land
near the airport became an office park, and in the '80s the City went
overboard with authorizing office development on formerly industrial
land north of the freeway.
Looking back, perhaps it was to be expected given the reaction to the
extensive development of apartments in the '50,'60s and '70s, not to
mention the suburban type planning models that were then dominant, but
the City did not require the office park developers in the '70s and
'80s to integrate their developments into the existing street grid.
Nor did anyone build housing for the new employees and their families.
Which leaves us where we are today. Santa Monica has a vibrant economy,
a bustling scene with great restaurants and shops to spend your money
at, first run and art house movie theaters, art galleries, and other
cultural facilities, top-ranked schools, high property values, walkable
neighborhoods, more park acreage than ever, beautiful beaches with excellent
tourist facilities and hotels (and a restored Pier and a bay that's
cleaner than it's been in decades, and a public beach club on the way),
and an active grassroots politics.
Maybe not what I would call a sleepy beach town, but a wonderful place
whatever it is.
Yet housing prices are so high that few of the city's children will
be able to raise their families here if they want to. In fact, the number
of children in the city is in such decline that if trends continue,
we won't have much of a school district in 20 years. Amidst the restaurants
and the culture, we still have poverty and gang violence, and an achievement
gap in our schools.
And then there is the issue that motivates so much of our politics:
the commuters leaving town in the afternoon -- when joined with the
commuters from growth all along the 405 corridor -- have blockaded Santa
Monicans in their city.
I've often thought that behind the sleepy beach town cliché
is not any genuine memory of or nostalgia for whatever the culture of
that mythical place might have been, but just the ability to use that
cliché as a substitute for saying, in Council Member McKeown's
immortal words from the 2001 Target debate, "It's the traffic,
stupid."
This is where the "for ill" part comes in when people use
the beach town image. Surveys show that Santa Monicans are in favor
of moderate growth, and the situation calls for not allowing anything
more than moderate growth. But growth will come, and Santa Monica will
need to make decisions about what shape that growth will take.
We and the politicians who represent us will not make the best decisions
for the future if we are stuck on an image of the past that is as false
as it is evocative.
Not that anyone else is counting, but this column is the 400th "What
I Say" column I've written. Thank you readers and Lookout
staff. It's been a lot of fun.
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