How Local Politics Shape Federal Policy: Business, Power, and the Environment in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles

CHAPTER ONE: OIL AND WATER: The Public and the Private on Southern California Beaches, 1920–1950

chapter one oil and water The Public and the Private on Southern California Beaches, 1920–1950 Los Angeles beaches have changed since the 1920s. Old photographs reveal people lounging in the sand, playing in the waves, and fishing from piers. They show lifeguard towers and crowds of umbrellas. But these crowds play in the shadow of oil rigs and ornate beach clubs that have mostly disappeared from Los Angeles’s shoreline. It took nearly thirty years, but miles of Los Angeles area beaches were eventually acquired by state, county, and city governments. The campaign was spearheaded by prominent individuals in the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce and the Los Angeles Realty Board with support from the outspoken superintendent of the Los Angeles City Department of Playgrounds and Recreation. Efforts to secure public rights to the beach were not unique to Los Angeles; on the contrary, groups like the American Shore and Beach Preservation Association supported public access movements nationwide. These movements thrived on the widely held conviction that beaches were a distinctly public and recreational resource. In the 1920s, most of Los Angeles’s beaches and adjacent lands were in private hands; some private holdings dated from eighteenthcentury Spanish land grants. Much of this private land lay undeveloped and open for recreational use by local residents and visitors alike. The real estate and oil booms of the second and third decades of the twentieth century accelerated the development along the shoreline and constrained recreational access with a suddenness that surprised and alarmed Angelenos. Oil companies began drilling near the shore, then on the sand, and finally from piers that stretched out into shallow waters. Real estate developers erected fences and houses that blocked customary public access. These booms, of course, also brought more people to the region who wanted to use the beach.1 Unsurprisingly, the Public beaches and oil fields in greater Los Angeles P A C I F I C O C E A N SAN BERNADINO COUNTY VENTURA COUNTY LOS ANGELES COUNTY ORANGE COUNTY S a n G a b r i e l R . Los Angeles R. Long Beach Santa Monica Los Angeles Huntington Beach Santa Monica Venice Beach El Segundo Manhattan Beach Hermosa Beach Redondo Beach Newport Beverly Hills Los Angeles City Los Angeles Downtown Boyle Heights Whittier Dominguez Santa Fe Springs Venice/Del Rey Hyperion El Segundo Long Beach Signal Hill Huntington Beach N 0 4 6 2 8 mi public beaches oil fields SANTA MONICA MOUNTAINS S A N G A B R I E L M O U N TA I N S PUENTE HILLS San Gabriel R. S a n G a b r i e l R . SANTA MONICA MOUNTAINS S A N G A B R I E L M O U N TA I N S PUENTE HILLS San Gabriel R. S a n G a b r i e l R . oil and water 19 conflict between these incompatible uses of the shoreline resources quickly coalesced into campaigns to ban oil drilling on the beaches and then to move drilling farther and farther from the coast. These campaigns rested on assertions that the beaches were uniquely public, noncommercial , nonindustrial spaces. During the New Deal and World War II, visitors continued to swarm to the beaches in large numbers. Neither the coastal erosion that narrowed beaches nor sewage pollution so severe that the state board of health quarantined most of the Santa Monica Bay shoreline deterred them. New construction along the shore slowed; landowners up and down the coast abandoned property because of bankruptcy or when erosion damaged their homes beyond repair. Meanwhile, a national movement emerged to preserve public access to the recreational shoreline . In Los Angeles, this movement inspired civic leaders in coastal communities to organize the Shoreline Planning Association to promote public ownership first in Los Angeles County and then in the rest of the state. They saw abandoned and depreciated coastal properties as an unprecedented opportunity to acquire beaches for the public. They also feared that Los Angeles’s best chance at preserving its recreational shoreline would vanish as soon as peace reenergized Los Angeles’s real estate market. The Shoreline Planning Association largely succeeded. By 1950, city, county, and state governments coordinated their efforts to buy beach lands, install facilities, and operate the beaches. Widely promoted by Los Angeles boosters and seen by local residents as integral to the return to...