Santa Monica

Santa Monica, created by land speculators in 1875, is the original Los Angeles coastal resort community. It stretches nonchalantly along alarmingly eroding seaside bluffs above quarter-mile wide swaths of beach and the azure Pacific. The city has grown from a scruffy, laid-back coastal village, once notorious for the gambling ships anchored just off shore, into a fanatically manicured, politically liberal community.

The carnival rides and souvenir booths on the pier below are the slightly funky remnants of an amusement park built in the 1920s when the city was the end of the line for the Red Cars (the long-lost public trolley system that was dismantled by a gang of oil producers, tyre manufacturers and car dealers in the 1940s). The town was also home to several amateur aviators in the 1930s and 1940s who pushed their planes from garages down city streets to the local airfield, which remains a popular private airport. Today, Santa Monica is better known locally for its strictly enforced rent control policies and its delicate, politically correct treatment of the poor, which has earned it the ironic title ‘the home of the homeless’.

The beaches and the recently refurbished Santa Monica Pier are still the main attractions. Also recommended is the UCLA Ocean Discovery Center (www.odc.ucla.edu), just below the pier where you can fondle sea anemones and starfish. The grand beach houses along the broad beach to the north of the pier made up Hollywood’s ‘Gold Coast’. Among them is the Sand and Sea Hotel, once the servants’ quarters for a long gone 120 room Victorian monstrosity built by William Randolph Hearst. In the 1960s the Kennedy brothers were rumoured to have ‘entertained’ Marilyn Monroe in an oversized bungalow next door, originally owned by Louis B Mayer (of MGM).

The city’s most interesting locales are within strolling distance of Palisades Park, an intertwining series of palm and cypress tree-lined pathways that meander precariously along the cliffs overlooking the beach. The Third Street Promenade, a few blocks east, is a growing and lively pedestrian shopping zone menaced by topiary dinosaurs and popular with street vendors, musicians, performance artists and soapbox preachers. Although the predictable chain stores and fastfood franchises have replaced many (but not all) of the independent bookstores and boutiques, it remains one of the best people-watching venues in town.

A few blocks further inland is Bergamot Station, a former Red Car stop and now Southern California’s largest gallery complex and cultural centre, featuring contemporary art galleries, The Santa Monica Museum of Art (310 586 6488; www.smmoa.org) and architecture and design firms. In particular, look for events at the Track 16 Gallery, perhaps the most intriguing privately owned gallery in the city.

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