For nearly all of its 133 years, Santa Monica has gone its own iconoclastic way.
It was at the epicenter of both the birth of surfing on this continent and the American aviation industry. It is home to such traditional organizations as the Kiwanis Club and the Rotary Club, as well as the absolutely un- traditional Z Boys’ Dogtown.
Its first residents were Japanese fishermen who lived in lean-tos on the beach. In the 1920s and 1930s, the beach became “The Gold Coast,” and four of Hollywood’s five studio heads had houses there, as did Irving Thalberg, J. Paul Getty and William Randolph Hearst, and a gaggle of film stars.
Large numbers of writers, painters, sculptors, actors, directors, photographers, architects and musicians have always been drawn to this outer edge of the continent that is made more of light and air, ocean and sky than of soil, brick and cement. Like the artists, beach town residents are bright, naturally contrary, independent, and idiosyncratic.
All of that, and much much more is in the bones of this beach town, and expressed in its unique character and rogoe spirit, as well as in its buildings and houses and its residents. But, in recent years, City Hall has seemed bent on making all that, and us, merely orderly and pliant. And conventional.
Many of the new buildings – the City’s own and commercial buildings like those graceless fortresses that line Fifth and Sixth Streets – are vagrants, affronts. They are here, but they don’t belong here, and their enlarging presence is diluting the sense of place.
City Hall boasts of its leadership in “:sustainability” and “green” towns, but it is currently engaged in an extended tug of war with residents over some 50 ficus trees that the City wants to remove from two downtown streets.
City Hall tells us to get out of our cars and onto our bikes, but a parade of bike riders appeared at a recent City Council meeting to describe all the ways in which they were being harassed by police.
