Water and Power Associates Informing the Public about Critical Water and Energy Issues facing Los Angeles and California

Historical Notes

The Pacific Palisades lighthouse was built as a bathhouse with a working light in 1927. In the early 1930s the structure along with the beach was sold to Will Rogers and later the beach was given to the state of California and renamed the Will Rogers State Beach.

Historical Notes

“The Lighthouse” restaurant and bathhouse opened for business on Memorial Day, 1927. Built by the Pacific Palisades Association and designed by architect Thomas P. Barber, the bathhouse featured a second floor dining room, a wrap-around Venetian colonnade, and was large enough to accommodate 500 patrons.

Historical Notes

Although it was not a true lighthouse, the picturesque building was commonly featured in promotional photographs and materials advertising Southern California. It was also an important visual point of reference for boats navigating into Santa Monica Bay.

Historical Notes

The most distinctive feature was the 50-foot tall lighthouse tower with a functioning beacon powered by eight 500-watt lamps. The Lighthouse was a popular destination and become an iconic landmark as the Roosevelt Highway (later the PCH) opened up through Malibu in 1929, connecting all of California along a single coast highway.

Historical Notes

In 1926, the Pacific Palisades Association purchased the land that was owned by the Huntington family of New York. Both a commemorative gesture and a way to benefit from the prestige associated with the Huntington name, the area was deemed “Huntington Palisades.”

Historical Notes

The Long Wharf was the longest ocean wharf in the world at 4700 feet. It was built in 1893 by the Southern Pacific Railroad, and it was destroyed in 1920 by the Pacific Electric Railroad Co.

The Long Wharf was designated California HIstorical Landmark No. 881. Click HERE to see more California Historical Landmarks in L.A.

Historical Notes

Over the decades, as the popularity of bathhouses faded, the patronage of the Lighthouse diminished. Eventually, the building was taken over by the Will Rogers State Beach lifeguard, serving as a part of the lifeguard headquarters. By 1972, the Lighthouse structure was determined to be unsuitable for habitation and was razed.

Historical Notes

Notes from reverse of photo: Roosevelt Highway Blocked Again. Santa Monica, Calif.,--Southern California's Roosevelt Highway along the Pacific Ocean near here was the scene of another traffic-stopping earth slide from the towering beach front Palisades. The 200-foot, 30-foot deep chunk of earth slid from the backyard of actor Charles Laughton. Photo date: 8/29/44

Historical Notes

Roosevelt Highway was widened and renamed Pacific Coast Highway (PCH) along this stretch in the 1940s.

Rustic Creek, flowing through Rustic Canyon in Pacific Palisades, has a history intertwined with the area's development since the Spanish land grant era. Originally part of Rancho Boca de Santa Monica, the canyon gained prominence in 1887 when Abbot Kinney established a forestry station and planted eucalyptus trees. The early 20th century saw increased development, including the founding of Pacific Palisades in 1922 and the establishment of the Uplifters Club. Will Rogers' purchase of his ranch in Upper Rustic Canyon in 1926 further elevated the area's profile. 

Historical Notes

Will Rogers Beach, located near Chautauqua in the Pacific Palisades area, was officially named and dedicated on July 26, 1942. This occurred about seven years after the death of Will Rogers, who had owned the beachfront property in the 1920s and early 1930s. Following his death in a 1935 plane crash, his widow Betty developed a plan to gift their oceanfront land to the state of California. The beach was initially owned and operated by the State of California from its dedication in 1942 until 1975, when the County of Los Angeles took over its management. The naming of the beach was part of a larger effort to transform the Rogers' private property into a public recreational area, preserving Will Rogers' legacy and providing public access to this stretch of coastline.

Historical Notes

Today, Rustic Creek remains one of the few natural streams in developed Los Angeles, running past Will Rogers State Historic Park and into Topanga State Park. It continues to be a vital part of the local ecosystem, surrounded by a prestigious residential neighborhood known for its natural beauty and seclusion.

Highlighted in purple on the Google Earth view is the Eames Foundation, located at 203 Chautauqua Boulevard in Pacific Palisades, California. Established in 2004, the foundation preserves the Eames House—an iconic mid-20th century modernist structure designed by Charles and Ray Eames in 1949. Part of the Case Study House program, this landmark served as both their home and studio and is now recognized as a National Historic Landmark.

Historical Notes

The bluffs at Pacific Palisades above Will Rogers Beach have transformed from vertical to slanted due to a mix of natural and human influences. Eroding at an average rate of about 4 inches per year, the bluffs—composed of easily erodible materials like sand, silt, gravel, and clay—are particularly vulnerable to erosion and slumping. Significant weather events, such as heavy rains during El Niño periods, have triggered landslides, notably in 1998. Seismic activity, like the Northridge Earthquake, has also contributed to bluff collapses. Human activities may have further impacted their stability. Over time, these combined forces have reshaped the bluffs into a more stable, sloped formation, reflecting the natural evolution of coastal landscapes.

Historical Notes

In 1911, film director Thomas Ince created his Western film factory, "Inceville," which at its peak employed nearly 600 people.

Historical Notes

Ince leased 18,000 acres of land extending from the seashore up Santa Ynez Canyon and into the mountains for 7-1/2 miles. While he was building the frame-structured studio buildings, situated where Gladstone’s Restaurant is today, he also hired Miller’s 101 Ranch Wildwest Show, including many cowboys, animals and a Sioux Indian tribe, who set up their teepees on the property.

Historical Notes

Most of the cowboys, Indians and assorted workmen lived at Inceville, while the actors came from Los Angeles and other communities as needed, taking the red trolley cars to the Long Wharf at Potrero Canyon, where buckboards conveyed them to the set. Ince lived in a house that overlooked Inceville, the location of Marquez Knolls today.

Historical Notes

By 1916, Ince was supervising eight directors and releasing one five-reel picture (about 50-minute films) each week at an average cost of $40,000. His film ‘Civilization,’ which employed over 25,000 extras, was by far his most ambitious endeavor. The set for the mythical city stood alone on the barren hills, where Marquez Elementary School is today. It was built by 60 carpenters over a period of three months at a cost of $80,000 and was used for only 100 feet of film.

Historical Notes

Incville's cost continued to rise as moviegoers enjoyed the more expensive feature films, which used five reels or more.  Ince, through his alliance with Triangle, a production company founded by D. W. Griffith and Mark Sennett, built a new studio in Culver City to use for indoor movies, while retaining Inceville for outdoor locations and Westerns.

Historical Notes

The Santa Monica Bath House was replaced by the North Beach Bath House in 1898.

Two piers are seen in the above view. The lower pier is the remains of the Los Angeles & Independence Railroad Wharf. The pier further north is the North Beach Pier, built in 1898 (same year as the North Beach Bath House).

Historical Notes

The North Beach Pier was built adjacent to the North Beach Bath House in 1898. At 200 feet long, it was a place where guests of the North Beach Bath House could stroll.

Historical Notes

The remains of the 1875-built Los Angeles & Independence Railroad Wharf is further south closer to the Arcadia Hotel.

Historical Notes

The pipeline seen above is some form of discharge pipe that came out of the North Beach Bathhouse.

Historical Notes

Santa Monica Electric and Power Company built a power house on the beach in the late 1890s.

North Beach Bath House

Santa Monica's Grand Victorian Resort on the Sand (1894 to 1911)

When the North Beach Bath House opened on June 9, 1894, it instantly became the social center of Santa Monica's beach life. Senator John P. Jones, one of the city's co-founders, had invested $50,000 to build it, hiring architect Sumner P. Hunt, who would later design the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles, to create what the Los Angeles Times described as the largest and finest structure of its kind on the Pacific Coast.

Stretching 440 feet along the sand, the complex was far more than a place to change clothes. It offered two large heated saltwater plunges, 300 dressing rooms, an ornate parlor, a ballroom, a rooftop garden and observation deck, a bowling pavilion, a vaudeville auditorium added in 1901, and the Pavilion Restaurant with three separate dining rooms. A twenty foot wide boardwalk connected the bath house to the nearby Arcadia Hotel and ran for several miles along the surf, rivaling the famous boardwalk at Atlantic City. Admission was just twenty five cents.

The bath house was the fifth facility to open along Santa Monica's North Beach, the first having been built by Michael Duffy back in 1876. It served the community for sixteen years before being torn down in 1911. The photographs below document the bath house and its surrounding beach from its earliest years through the height of its popularity.

Historical Notes

This view from around 1900 shows the full extent of the North Beach Bath House complex from the beach side. The long building at far left housed the heated saltwater plunge, while the taller structure with two towers to the right was the main bath house containing the dressing rooms, parlor, ballroom, and restaurant. The pipe running along the sand at left is particularly interesting. In 1896, a contract was awarded to lay pipe from the bath house to two large 30,000 gallon tanks constructed on the bluffs above, supplying saltwater not only to the indoor plunge but also to water the streets and keep the dust down in the growing town above.

The 99 Steps bridge descending from the Palisades in the distance connects this scene directly to the Linda Vista Park section of your site, reminding visitors that the bluffs and the beach were linked from the earliest days of the resort. The mix of fully clothed visitors and bathers in the water captures the dual nature of North Beach as both a social promenade and a working resort, where the simple act of entering the ocean required a trip through the bath house and a change of clothes.

Historical Notes

Eckert and Hopf's Restaurant operated as a popular dining establishment adjacent to the North Beach Bath House, catering to the steady flow of visitors who arrived by Pacific Electric trolley and early automobile from Los Angeles. The flags flying from every tower of both buildings suggest a holiday or special event, likely one of the many summer festivals and beach days that regularly drew thousands of visitors to North Beach in the 1890s. The remains of the Los Angeles and Independence Railroad Wharf visible in the distance marked what had been Santa Monica's first bid for major port status, before San Pedro was selected as the region's official harbor.

The grand structure visible in the background is the Arcadia Hotel, built in 1887 by Santa Monica co-founder Arcadia Bandini de Baker. One of the finest resort hotels in Southern California, it hosted presidents and dignitaries along its ocean facing verandas and was considered the social crown jewel of early Santa Monica. Like the bath house beside it, the Arcadia Hotel had a relatively short life. It was demolished in 1909, just two years before the bath house itself came down, closing the chapter on North Beach as the city's premier resort district.

Historical Notes

The umbrellas carried by nearly every visitor in this 1898 view are a telling detail. In the late Victorian era, a suntan was considered undesirable, associated with outdoor labor rather than leisure, and fashionable visitors to the beach took great care to protect their skin from the sun. The broad twenty foot boardwalk running in front of the bath house was the social heart of North Beach, a place to promenade, be seen, and enjoy the sea air without necessarily setting foot on the sand or in the water.

The Bowling Pavilion was one of the bath house's most popular secondary attractions, offering an indoor recreation option for visitors who preferred not to swim. The North Beach Bath House Pier, partially visible at lower right, extended into the ocean and gave bathers direct access to the surf, while the boardwalk above served as Santa Monica's answer to the famous promenades of Atlantic City and Long Beach.

Historical Notes

This 1901 interior view captures the plunge in full use on a busy day. The pool measured 50 by 150 feet and ranged from three to nine feet in depth, making the "Deep Water" sign overhead a genuine safety warning rather than a decorative touch. The heated saltwater was piped directly from the ocean and warmed to a comfortable temperature, making the plunge usable year round regardless of the weather outside. Children playing in the shallower sections and adults swimming in the deeper end reflect how deliberately the bath house was designed to serve the entire family.

The year 1901 also marked the addition of the new vaudeville auditorium to the complex, built at a cost of $7,000 and opened first by the newly organized YMCA before being taken over by a traveling vaudeville company. With the plunge, the restaurant, the bowling pavilion, and now a performance venue all under one roof, the North Beach Bath House had grown into one of the most complete resort facilities anywhere on the California coast.

Historical Notes

This elevated view from the end of the pier puts the bath house complex in its full coastal context. The main bath house building sits at center with the Camera Obscura and Bowling Pavilion clearly visible to the right, illustrating how tightly packed the resort's attractions were along this short stretch of sand. From this vantage point the scale of the operation is clear. The complex occupied nearly the entire width of the beach between the bluffs and the ocean, leaving just enough room for the boardwalk and open sand that visitors needed to reach the surf.

The Camera Obscura, installed around 1899 by Robert F. Jones, nephew of Senator John P. Jones, quickly became one of the bath house's most talked about features. For ten cents, visitors entered the darkened chamber where a rotating lens and mirror projected a live 360 degree view of the surrounding beach, ocean, and passing ships onto a circular table below, giving them a moving panorama of the entire Santa Monica shoreline without stepping outside.

Historical Notes

The signs visible on the bath house facade in this photograph serve as a directory of everything the complex had to offer. "Bathing Suits" indicates that rental costumes were available for visitors who arrived without their own, a common service at bath houses of this era when wool bathing costumes were expensive and most visitors did not own one. The sign for the Camera Obscura and the Bowling Pavilion confirm that by 1900 the bath house had grown well beyond its original purpose as a changing facility into a full resort attraction in its own right.

The term "casino" in the caption refers not to a gambling establishment but to the broader Victorian usage of the word, meaning a public gathering place for entertainment and socializing. By this definition, the North Beach Bath House was very much a casino in the truest sense, a place where the community came together for music, dining, sport, and the simple pleasure of a day by the sea.

Historical Notes

This view from around 1898 captures North Beach at what may have been the height of its popularity. The crowds filling the sand in front of the bath house reflect the enormous appetite for seaside recreation that had developed in Los Angeles during the 1880s and 1890s, driven largely by the arrival of transcontinental railroad service and the dramatic drop in fares that followed the rate wars of 1886. Visitors who had once faced a long overland journey to reach the California coast could now travel from downtown Los Angeles to Santa Monica for a few cents on the Pacific Electric.

The Camera Obscura, visible in the background, had been installed just the year before and was already drawing curious visitors to its darkened chamber. Within a decade, however, the opening of Venice of America just to the south in 1905 would begin drawing crowds away from North Beach, and the bath house itself would close by 1910 and be demolished the following year, ending a sixteen year run as the finest resort facility on the Southern California coast.

Camera Obscura

Santa Monica's Most Beloved Optical Novelty (1898 to Present)

In 1898, Santa Monica mayor Robert F. Jones, nephew of city co founder Senator John P. Jones, built a Camera Obscura on the beach near the North Beach Bath House. Jones had experimented with the devices since boyhood, and as mayor he saw it as both a personal fascination and a clever attraction that could draw visitors to the young seaside city. Admission was ten cents, and the Los Angeles Herald advertised it for months under the headline “There Is Fun at Santa Monica.”

The principle behind the Camera Obscura is ancient. Aristotle first described how a small opening in a darkened space could project an inverted image of the outside world onto an interior surface. In 1600 the German astronomer Johannes Kepler gave the phenomenon its Latin name, meaning “dark chamber.” What Robert Jones constructed in Santa Monica was a revolving version of this device, housed in a small wooden turret that projected a full 360 degree live view of the surrounding beach, ocean, and passing ships onto a circular table inside a darkened room. Jones proudly described it as one of the most perfect instruments of its kind.

The Camera Obscura has had a remarkable life spanning more than 125 years. From its original location on the beach, it moved briefly to Westlake Park in Los Angeles in 1898, returned to Santa Monica in 1899, was purchased by the city in 1910 and relocated to Linda Vista Park, and in 1955 was installed in a purpose built mid century modern structure at 1450 Ocean Avenue designed by architect Weldon J. Fulton. It still operates today as part of the Camera Obscura Art Lab and remains one of only a handful of revolving Camera Obscuras still functioning anywhere in the world.

Historical Notes

This early photograph shows the Camera Obscura in its original form, a small wooden turret standing on the sand near the North Beach Bath House. Robert F. Jones constructed the device in 1898 during his tenure as mayor, combining his lifelong fascination with optical instruments with the city’s growing effort to attract visitors to Santa Monica’s expanding seaside resort.

Visitors climbed a wooden stairway, paid ten cents, and entered a completely dark chamber where a rotating mirror and lens projected a live panoramic image of the surrounding beach and ocean onto a circular viewing disc below. The effect was surprisingly vivid. Waves rolled, people moved along the shore, and ships passed slowly across the horizon, all appearing silently on the white table inside the dark room.

Because the operator spent hours scanning the shoreline through the lens, the Camera Obscura occasionally served an unexpected secondary purpose. From this elevated vantage point attendants could observe swimmers and activity along the beach, functioning at times as informal lookouts for lifeguards and police.

Historical Notes

By around 1900 the Camera Obscura had been given a new wooden structure after its brief relocation to Westlake Park in Los Angeles and its return to Santa Monica in 1899. The attendant collecting the admission fee in this photograph was an employee of the North Beach Bath House, which had incorporated the Camera Obscura as one of its featured attractions. According to the Los Angeles Times, it was a rule of the establishment that every employee be a good swimmer, and the Camera Obscura operator, perched above the beach with a commanding view of the water, was among the best positioned to spot trouble in the surf below.

Ten cents was a modest sum even by the standards of 1900, and the Camera Obscura drew several hundred visitors on busy days, making it one of the most consistently popular attractions at North Beach. The image it projected onto the viewing disc inside was not a still photograph but a live, moving, silent picture of everything happening outside, an experience that must have felt genuinely astonishing to visitors who had never seen anything like it.

Historical Notes

In 1907, Robert F. Jones donated the Camera Obscura to the city of Santa Monica, and it was moved from the beach up to Linda Vista Park on the bluffs above, near the foot of Broadway. The city hoped the device would attract visitors to the park the same way it had drawn crowds to North Beach, and the elevated location proved to be an even better vantage point. From the top of the Palisades, the Camera Obscura's rotating lens could capture sweeping views stretching from the mountains to the north all the way south to the developing beach communities of Ocean Park and Venice.

The move to the bluffs also coincided with the gradual decline of the North Beach Bath House, which would close in 1910 and be demolished the following year. As the old resort district faded, the Camera Obscura carried on above it, outlasting the boardwalk, the bath house, and the Long Wharf, all of which had defined the Santa Monica shoreline at the turn of the century.

Historical Notes

By the mid-1920s the Camera Obscura had become a fixed landmark of Palisades Park, appearing regularly on postcards that promoted Santa Monica as a scenic destination. The La Monica Ballroom, visible to the left in this view, had just opened in 1924 as one of the largest dance halls built over the ocean anywhere in the country, bringing a new generation of visitors to the bluff top park. The Camera Obscura's small wooden structure, modest by comparison, sat quietly nearby, offering a very different kind of spectacle, one that required patience, darkness, and a willingness to simply watch the world go by in silence.

The postcard format of this image reflects how thoroughly the Camera Obscura had entered the public imagination as a symbol of Santa Monica. It appeared in promotional materials alongside the pier, the ballroom, and Palisades Park itself, recognized as one of the distinctive experiences the city offered that visitors could not find anywhere else.

Historical Notes

By around 1920 the park had been known as Palisades Park for five years, having shed its earlier name of Linda Vista Park in 1915 to reflect the dramatic coastal cliffs that define the bluff top landscape. The Camera Obscura's modest wooden structure fits naturally into the informal, rustic character of the park during these years, when twisted branch fencing, winding paths, and simple wooden shelters gave the bluff top promenade its distinctive character.

The device continued drawing visitors steadily through the 1920s and into the mid-century, when a growing need for a permanent home led the city to commission architect Weldon J. Fulton to design a purpose built structure. In November 1955, the Camera Obscura was installed in Fulton's new building at 1450 Ocean Avenue, where it has remained ever since, one of only a handful of revolving Camera Obscuras still operating anywhere in the world, and one of the oldest continuously operating public attraction in Santa Monica's history.

Historical Notes

In 1895, Abbot Kinney acquired the deed to the coastal strip previously purchased by W.D. Vawter and named the area Ocean Park. It became his first amusement park and residential project. A race track and golf course were built on the Ocean Park Casino. After a falling out with his partners he focused on the south end of the property, which he made into Venice of America.

Click HERE to see more in Early Southern California Amusement Parks.

Historical Notes

Formerly known as Decoration Day, Memorial Day originated after the American Civil War to commemorate the Union and Confederate soldiers who died in the Civil War. By the 20th century, Memorial Day had been extended to honor all Americans who have died while in the military service.*^

Historical Notes

The Los Angeles Pacific Railway was built by Eli Clark and Moses H. Sherman, for whom Clark Drive, Shermanton (now West Hollywood), and Sherman Avenue (now Santa Monica Boulevard) were first named. They were early pioneers of interurban electric railways that laid track from downtown to the sea. Their Los Angeles to Santa Monica line opened on April 1, 1896 to an excited beach crowd in Santa Monica.*#

Historical Notes

Santa Monica Airport was originally called "Clover Field" after World War I aviator Lieutenant Greayer "Grubby" Clover, and was home of the Douglas Aircraft company. The first circumnavigation of the world by air took off from Clover Field on St. Patrick's Day, March 17, 1942. At one point, it was the site of the Army's 40th Division Aviation, and became a Distribution Center after World War II.*

Historical Notes

Edwin J. Vawter, was from a pioneering Santa Monica family. His father established Santa Monica's first general store and First National Bank. A 1901 guidebook (Wilson's Illustrated and Descriptive Souvenir and Guide to Los Angeles and Near-by Towns) described the carnation fields thus: "One of the most beautiful attractions [in Ocean Park] is the carnation field of Mr. E.J. Vawter. It is situated on a ridge overlooking the grand old Pacific. Here carnations are in full bloom summer and winter."

It was probably helpful that Mr. Vawter was also in charge of the city water company.

Historical Notes

In 1891, Abott Kinney and (silent partner) Francis G. Ryan purchased a 1-1/2 mile long, narrow strip of sand dunes along the shore line south of Santa Monica extending from Strand Street to Brooks Avenue from a Captain Hutchinson.  To encourage building, water was brought in, the tract was sewered, board walks laid, and lots leased to persons desiring to put up small cottages.

That same year, Kinney & Ryan (Ocean Park Development Company) built a pier, golf course, horse-racing track, boardwalk and other resort amenities on the northernmost edge of their holdings. They would also give 12 acres to the Santa Fe Railroad so they would extend their Inglewood line north to Kinney and Ryan’s resort.

In 1893, Kinney and Ryan began selling small 25 x 100 foot beach lots priced at $100 and featured piped water.  Tents were erected on the unsold lots and were available to campers for summer rental. Frederick Rindge, who was president of the Los Angeles YMCA, founds a YMCA summer camp on 5 acres of land located on 250ft beach front near Hill St., donated by Kinney who hopes that the YMCA camp will attract people to his beach resort.*

Historical Notes

Kinney and Ryan’s original resort consisted of 150 beach cottages, and a small commercial district along Pier Avenue. A building boom added 40 new beach cottages, several stores, and Kinney’s new 40 acre Ocean Park race course and golf links. The resort would be subdivided and sold to more developers and by 1902, there were over 700 cottages in Ocean Park.*

Historical Notes

In 1898, Ryan died and his widow married Thomas Dudley of Santa Monica who becomes Kinney's new partner.

After 1904, Kinney moved his attention to his Venice of America development (also called Ocean Park at the time) , south of the Santa Monica city boundary.

The history of Venice and Ocean Park are intertwinned. From 1905 to 1925, Ocean Park was developed by people such as Fraser, Merritt Jones, Hart, Hollister and Wadsworth.

Historical Notes

Originally known as “Linda Vista Park,” Palisades Park was the first officially-designated public open space in Santa Monica. The land was donated to the City by Santa Monica's founder, Senator John P. Jones, in 1892.

The Los Angeles and Independence Railroad Wharf was in use between 1875 and 1879, at which time it was purchased by the Southern Pacific Railroad company and partially dismantled. It stood just south of the present location of the Santa Monica Pier at the foot of Colorado Avenue.

Historical Notes

Most of the beach shacks would be removed with the laying of railroad tracks along the beach by Southern Pacific in 1892.

The “99 Steps”

Early Beach Access Beneath the Santa Monica Palisades

The Staircase That Watched a City Grow

In 1875, the same year Santa Monica was founded, a wooden staircase was built at the foot of Arizona Avenue. Its purpose was simple: to solve the problem of the coastal bluffs. Those cliffs rose sixty-five feet above the beach and made reaching the shoreline a real challenge for residents and visitors alike. The staircase, soon called the 99 Steps, became the town's first direct pedestrian route from the mesa above down to the sand below. For more than fifty years it served as the main connection between the growing city and the ocean it was built around.

The 99 Steps are worth studying because of how much changed around them while they kept standing. In the early 1890s, railroad tracks were laid directly beneath the staircase. Freight trains carrying cargo to a massive ocean wharf then passed under the same wooden landings where bathers had been pausing to enjoy the view. A celebrated resort hotel rose a short walk to the south. The dirt road at the base of the bluffs slowly became one of the most recognized coastal highways in the country. Through all of it, the steps stayed open and kept carrying visitors to the beach, until the highway finally grew too wide and too busy for a wooden staircase to safely cross.

The photographs in this section follow the 99 Steps through each of those changes. They begin with the original wooden staircase in the 1880s and end with the pedestrian bridge that stands at the same location today. Each image shows the steps at a different point in time. The world around them shifts in nearly every photograph, but the route from the bluff to the beach never moves.

1886 | The Original 99 Steps

Historical Notes

This is one of the earliest surviving photographs of the steps, taken eleven years after they opened. Look at what it actually shows: a man in a bathing suit at the base, women and children ranged along the upper railings, nobody in a particular hurry. The 99 Steps were not just a way to get to the beach. They were a place to be. People paused on the landings to watch the surf, talk, and take in the view that spread out below them across the full sweep of Santa Monica Bay.

The McKinnie sign is worth a second look. Fred McKinnie was a local pharmacist who understood something simple: this staircase was the most-traveled ground in town. Every person heading to the beach passed this spot. In an era before roadside billboards, the top of the 99 Steps was the best advertising location in Santa Monica. Santa Monica itself was only eleven years old when this photograph was taken, founded by Senator John P. Jones and Colonel Robert S. Baker with a land auction in July 1875. The bluffs that required the staircase were the same bluffs that gave their new city its dramatic silhouette against the Pacific sky.

Whether the staircase ever had exactly 99 steps is a question the historical record does not fully answer. The name stuck as a popular nickname through every modification and rebuilding. The current Arizona Avenue crossing has approximately 115 steps — suggesting the count grew over time as the structure was expanded to bridge an ever-wider corridor of road and rail below. The name, however, never changed.

Historical Notes

The quiet in this image is about to end. Those two small wooden buildings near the base of the steps are the first hint of the commercial shoreline beginning to form below the bluffs. But the bigger change is invisible here: the Southern Pacific Railroad was already surveying the narrow strip of land at the bottom of these steps, preparing to lay tracks straight through it. Within a year or two, freight trains would be passing directly beneath the wooden landings visible in this photograph. The 99 Steps, built for a sleepy beach town, were about to become a pedestrian bridge over one of the busiest rail corridors on the Southern California coast.

The Railroad Era, 1891–1913

ca. 1898 | Railroad Tracks Below the Steps

Historical Notes

Few photographs in this collection are as striking as this one. The 99 Steps now span an active freight railroad. The staircase was modified in the early 1890s to let trains pass beneath while pedestrians continued above, and the two systems coexisted for several decades without incident. The Long Wharf in the distance opened in 1894 as the longest wooden pier in the world at approximately 4,700 feet. Ships from Pacific ports unloaded onto waiting Southern Pacific cars, which then rolled south beneath these steps to Los Angeles. A visitor stepping off the last riser in 1898 would have landed directly beside moving freight cars before crossing to the beach.

Historical Notes

In this single frame you can see almost every form of transportation available in Southern California in 1898: a wooden staircase, a working railroad, a dirt road, and in the distance a pier long enough to dock oceangoing ships. The railroad was here because of the Free Harbor Fight, a national political battle over whether Santa Monica Bay or San Pedro Bay would become the official port of Los Angeles. Senator Jones backed Santa Monica. When Congress chose San Pedro in 1897, it was essentially over. Shipping traffic at the Long Wharf began to fall. The wharf closed in 1913. But Beach Road, visible running beside the tracks, outlasted the railroad entirely, eventually widening into Pacific Coast Highway. The 99 Steps crossed all of it without pause.

Historical Notes

This photograph was taken from a point near the 99 Steps, looking south down the coastline, which means the staircase itself is behind the camera and out of frame. What the image gives us instead is the world the steps connected to. The railroad tracks pressed against the palisade base carried the trains that passed directly beneath the 99 Steps before continuing south along this very stretch of shoreline. The Arcadia Hotel visible in the middle distance opened on January 24, 1887. Named for city co-founder Arcadia Bandini de Baker, who donated the blufftop land above the steps to the city as a public park in 1892, the hotel sat just far enough south that guests who wanted to climb the palisades would have walked north along this beach to reach the staircase.

What remains of the original Los Angeles and Independence Railroad Wharf is visible at right, reduced by 1893 to little more than pilings in the water. Senator Jones had built it in 1875, the same founding year as the 99 Steps, to bring commerce to his new city by sea. It did not last. By the time this photograph was taken, the Southern Pacific Long Wharf — approximately 4,700 feet of new timber stretching into the bay just north of here — had already replaced it as the working pier of Santa Monica. What this image captures, then, is a city mid-transformation: the old wharf fading, the new one risen, and the 99 Steps still standing above it all.

Historical Notes

The steps are just out of frame to the right. Anyone on this train looking up would have seen visitors descending toward the beach, exactly as they had been doing since 1875.

The park above is Linda Vista Park, established this same year when Senator Jones and Arcadia Bandini de Baker donated the blufftop land to the city. Jones was known to walk his dogs here each evening to watch the sunset. The view from the top of the steps, looking out over the full arc of Santa Monica Bay, was among the finest on the California coast. The park was renamed Palisades Park in 1915 and remains one of the great public promenades in Southern California. A bronze bust of Arcadia Bandini de Baker stands in its rose garden today, placed there in 1987.

From here, everything lines up. The steps. The railroad. The dirt road. The hotel. The ocean. This one view contains the entire argument for why the 99 Steps matter: they connected the top of this bluff to the bottom of it, and at the bottom was the whole world of early Santa Monica.

The political battle over the harbor was still unsettled when this photograph was taken. Had Congress chosen Santa Monica Bay, the narrow strip of land visible below these bluffs would have become one of the most industrial stretches of coastline in the American West. The 1897 decision to build the port at San Pedro instead preserved Santa Monica as a beach town. Everything in the modern photographs of this same location follows from that choice, and the 99 Steps carried visitors to that shoreline through every chapter of what came next.

Forty years old, and still the original structure. The railroad beneath the steps stopped carrying freight two years before this photograph was taken. Electric streetcars still ran the beach road below, and would until 1933. Santa Monica's population was growing fast, and the crowds on these steps were far larger than anything Jones and Baker had imagined when they built this simple wooden staircase in their brand-new city. Nothing about the structure itself had changed. Everything around it had.

The beach economy visible at the base of the steps reflects how thoroughly the shoreline had been commercialized by the 1920s. Refreshment stands, changing rooms, and shops lined the strip between road and water. But look at the road itself, running beneath the staircase. Automobile traffic was growing fast along the coast, and a wooden staircase crossing an active roadway at ground level was becoming a genuine danger. The end was coming. The 99 Steps that had stood since Santa Monica's founding year would soon be replaced by concrete and steel.

Historical Notes

The wooden staircase is gone, but the route has not moved. The new concrete bridge sits at the same point on the bluff where the original 99 Steps were built in 1875, and it still carries pedestrians from Palisades Park down to the beach along the same path. Roosevelt Highway, dedicated on June 26, 1929, was part of an ambitious plan for a continuous paved road down the entire western coast of the Americas. The increasing width and traffic of the road had made the old wooden structure unsafe, and the concrete bridge crossing visible here was the answer. The highway eventually became Pacific Coast Highway. The crossing built on the bones of the 99 Steps continues to serve that role today.

Historical Notes

The earlier concrete bridge was already overwhelmed. Santa Monica's population had passed thirty thousand, and summer weekends brought tens of thousands more from across the Los Angeles region. The 1935 structure was built to handle that scale, and it established the design that functions at this location today. Worth saying plainly: every version of this crossing, from the wooden staircase of 1875 to the bridge under construction in this photograph, has stood at the same point on the bluff at the foot of Arizona Avenue. The route to the beach has outlasted the railroad, the resort hotel, the wharf, and two separate staircase structures. It is, in that sense, the most durable thing Santa Monica ever built.

From directly above, the logic of the site becomes undeniable. The bluffs that made a staircase necessary in 1875 are still there, unchanged. The bridge crosses Pacific Coast Highway at the exact point where the wooden steps once descended to railroad tracks and a dirt road. The beach itself is a different story: sand replenishment projects over the past century have added roughly thirty million cubic yards of material to the shores of Santa Monica and Venice, transforming the narrow historic shoreline into the broad recreational beach visible here. The steps, in every form they have taken, have always pointed to this edge of the continent.

The railroad is gone. The highway is four lanes. The beach is twice as wide. And yet anyone standing at the top of the Arizona Avenue crossing today is standing exactly where every visitor to the 99 Steps has stood since 1875: at the edge of the bluff, looking down toward the same Pacific Ocean, about to take the same route to the water.

Historical Notes

The Los Angeles and Independence Railroad Wharf in the distance of the 1890 image was built by Senator Jones in 1875, the same year as the 99 Steps. They were founding-year projects built side by side: a staircase to bring people down to the beach, a wharf to bring commerce in from the sea. The wharf is buried under a hundred years of sand and history. The staircase, in everything but its original wood, is still there. Every day, people who have never heard of the 99 Steps cross the Arizona Avenue bridge and walk down to the beach without a second thought. They are following a path that has been in continuous use for one hundred and fifty years.

The 99 Steps were never a landmark in the way the Arcadia Hotel or the Long Wharf were. Nobody came to Santa Monica to see a staircase. They came to see the ocean, and the steps were simply the way down. That plainness is exactly what makes them worth remembering. While hotels were built and torn down, while railroads arrived and fell silent, while highways were cut through ranchland and renamed, this single route from the bluff to the beach kept going. It still does.

Arriving in Santa Monica

By the end of the nineteenth century, Santa Monica had become one of Southern California's most popular seaside destinations. Much of that success depended on the railroad. Excursion trains from Los Angeles regularly brought visitors to the coast, turning what had once been a quiet shoreline into a busy resort town. A trip that once required hours by wagon could now be made in less than an hour by rail.

Most visitors arrived by train at the depot near the beach, then continued their journey on foot, by carriage, or by local streetcar. From the observation tower of the Arcadia Hotel, visitors could watch trains pull into the station while crowds moved toward the beach below the bluffs. The hotel itself, opened in 1887 and named in honor of Arcadia Bandini de Stearns Baker, a prominent California landowner, quickly became the social center of the young resort city. Rising 136 feet above beach level, its tower offered guests one of the finest panoramic views on the Southern California coast.

The photographs shown here were taken from the Arcadia Hotel observation tower and capture a lively moment around the turn of the twentieth century. Southern Pacific excursion trains stand beside the depot while horse-drawn carriages and a trolley wait to carry passengers through town. Within a few years Santa Monica would grow rapidly, but the railroad remained the primary route through which most visitors first experienced the city and its beaches.

Historical Notes

From the tower of the Arcadia Hotel, guests could look out over the Santa Monica depot and watch excursion trains arrive throughout the day from Los Angeles. The railroad below was the former Los Angeles and Independence line, which had opened in 1875 to connect Santa Monica with downtown Los Angeles. After the Southern Pacific acquired the line a few years later, it became the primary route used by excursion trains carrying visitors to the beach.

Scenes like this were common on weekends and holidays when large numbers of passengers arrived from the city. Once the trains stopped at the depot, travelers continued toward the beach on foot, by carriage, or by local trolley. The mixture of steam locomotives, horse drawn vehicles, and early electric transit seen here reflects a moment when several forms of transportation shared the same streets in the growing seaside resort.

Historical Notes

This later view from the Arcadia Hotel tower shows how quickly the area around the Santa Monica depot was changing at the start of the twentieth century. Buildings near the station had expanded and trees had been planted around the depot grounds, giving the district a more developed appearance than in the earlier photograph.

At the time Southern Pacific was also considering Santa Monica as a potential commercial harbor. In 1893 the railroad built a large wharf at the north end of the city that briefly served as the Port of Los Angeles. When Congress selected San Pedro Bay in 1897 as the region's principal harbor, Santa Monica remained primarily a seaside resort. Excursion trains like those seen here continued bringing visitors to the coast, helping sustain the town's growing tourism economy.

Beach Views

Historical Notes

The Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary had arrived in Santa Monica in July 1899. They opened the Academy of the Holy Names on September 4 of that year in a small frame building on Fourth Street and Arizona. An intense fund-raising drive was launched immediately and a more substantial Academy building was erected in 1900 at Third and Arizona.

Historical Notes

By 1899 there were two banks in the City of Santa Monica: Bank of Santa Monica located at Third Street and Oregon Avenue (now Santa Monica Blvd.) and Commercial Co's Bank at 219 Third Street. By the late 1920s there were thirteen financial institutions, including multiple branches.

Historical Notes

The 1st Santa Monica Public Library was located at Third Street and Santa Monica Blvd. on the second floor of the Bank of Santa Monica.

Historical Notes

The Los Angeles Pacific Railroad, founded by Moses Sherman and his brother-in-law Eli Clark, operated a peak network of 180 miles of track in the western parts of Los Angeles County. Its routes connected Pasadena to Santa Monica and extended along the coast to Redondo Beach.

The Pacific Electric Railway served Santa Monica from 1911 to 1953. It acquired the Santa Monica Air Line during the 1911 "Great Merger," when Southern Pacific took over Henry Huntington's railway holdings.

Pacific Electric also continued the popular Balloon Route excursion, originally launched in 1901 by the Los Angeles Pacific Railroad. After taking over LAP's operations in 1911, Pacific Electric maintained the Balloon Route as one of its signature attractions.

Historical Notes

Pacific Electric trolleys played a crucial role in Santa Monica's history, connecting the coastal city to downtown Los Angeles and other parts of Southern California. The Santa Monica Air Line, established in 1908, was a key component of this transportation network, providing electric passenger service along a 16.88-mile route with 15 stations. As part of the world's largest trolley system by the 1920s, the line contributed significantly to Southern California tourism, urban development, and economic growth. It allowed residents to live in coastal areas while working in the city center and influenced the gridded street layout of many communities. Despite its initial popularity, the Santa Monica Air Line faced challenges, with service reduced to rush hours by 1924 and passenger service ending in 1953.

Historical Notes

Moses Sherman and Eli Clark introduced several innovations to trolley operations in the Los Angeles area. Among the most popular was the scenic Balloon Route Trolley Trip, celebrated as the most famous streetcar excursion in the West. Few tourists visiting Los Angeles skipped a ride on the Balloon Route, named for the loop-shaped course the trolleys followed.

The excursion featured up to 18 cars daily, departing from downtown Los Angeles and traveling through Hollywood, Sawtelle, Santa Monica, and beach cities like Venice, Playa del Rey, and Redondo Beach. The route then returned downtown via the Palms area.

Historical Notes

The Balloon Route Trolley trip was the featured route of the Los Angeles Pacific, opened in September 1901. The line ran from downtown LA through Hollywood, Santa Monica, Venice Beach, Redondo Beach and back to L.A. via Culver City. The lines stopped at beach resorts and included free entrance to some en-route stops attractions along the way, including: Sunset Boulevard, studio of painter Paul de Longpré, bean fields of Morocco in Beverly Hills, Sawtelle Veterans Home and Old oldiers’ Home in Sawtelle, Long Wharf, Camera Obscura at Santa Monica, Playa del Rey Pavilion for a fish dinner, Redondo's Moonstone Beach, Venice, and Palms - Culver City.

Historical Notes

Passengers enjoyed picturesque views of the city and coastline from the comfort of parlor cars. The trip featured stops at notable attractions such as Paul de Longpre's house, the Soldiers’ Home in Sawtelle, and Santa Monica's Long Wharf, offering a delightful experience for both locals and visitors.

Historical Notes

Initially developed by land promoters Moses Sherman and Eli Clark in 1901, the Balloon Route flourished under the management of Charles M. Pierce, who effectively marketed it as "the only ocean voyage on wheels." At its peak, the route attracted an average of 10,000 riders per month during the tourist season. However, its popularity waned after 1911 when a major railway merger transferred ownership to Southern Pacific, leading to neglect and ultimately the decline of this once-thriving trolley service.

Historical Notes

One of Santa Monica’s natural wonders was the Arch Rock.  It was so wide that during low tide, horse-drawn wagons could pass through its opening.  It was located on what is now Pacific Coast Highway just south of Topanga Cyn Blvd.

In the early 1890s, a primitive wagon road between Santa Monica and Malibu passed directly through the stony structure.*#*

Historical Notes

With improved access, the Arch Rock became a popular destination among excursion parties and day-trippers.*#*

Historical Notes

The old stage road to San Francisco (later Pacific Coast Highway) passed under the Arch Rock on Santa Monica Beach.* 

Historical Notes

For many nineteenth-century tourists, the Santa Monica Arch Rock was the place to see. It became the defining image of the Southern California coast.*#

Historical Notes

On the morning of March 24, 1906, the bridge that once spanned the arch's two columns was found crumbled on the ground. Initial reports blamed a rainstorm, but rumors later circulated that work crews constructing a railroad to Ventura had blasted the rock, performing their nefarious deed under the cover of darkness because of public affection for the landmark. In turns out that the railroad was never completed, but some of the grading work was later incorporated into the coast highway.*#*

Historical Notes

Today, Mastro's Ocean Club Restaurant (18412 E. Pacific Coast Hwy) is located where the picturesque Arch Rock once stood.*

Historical Notes

This early view shows the narrow coast road before it was formally improved and named Roosevelt Highway in the late 1920s. At this time Castle Rock stood less than a mile northwest of the former Arch Rock site, rising roughly fifty feet from the sand and serving as a natural gateway between Santa Monica and the sparsely settled Malibu coast. Motorists, picnickers, and day-trippers used the looming sandstone outcrop as a wayfinding landmark long before traffic demanded a modern four-lane highway.

Historical Notes

Seen from Palisades Park on the bluffs, Castle Rock anchors the shoreline just north of town. The dirt and early paved road hugging the base of the cliffs would soon evolve into Roosevelt Highway and later Pacific Coast Highway, but here it still reads as a narrow scenic drive with only a simple wooden rail between motorists and the drop to the beach. The image underlines how abruptly the coastal cliffs, the beach, and the new automobile road met at this point on the bay.

Historical Notes

This hilltop view makes clear why Castle Rock fascinated early photographers. The main promontory projects from the base of the bluff, with a second boulder off-shore that is probably the rock later known as Haystack. Tiny figures on the wet sand emphasize the scale of the formation and show how close the sea, the cliffs, and the future highway all crowded together at this tight bend in the coastline.

Historical Notes

The man standing on the summit gives a sense of Castle Rock’s height and its sheer drop to the beach below. The formation stood between the mouth of Sunset Boulevard and what is now Coastline Drive, near the present-day Getty Villa and below the future site of Villa de Leon. Locals often scrambled up the rock for the view up and down Santa Monica Bay, long before strict safety railings and modern traffic made such climbs impossible.

Historical Notes

Here the focus shifts from Castle Rock itself to the cluster of boulders at its base. The stout, flat-topped rock in the surf was known as Haystack Rock, and the smaller stones beside it were nicknamed the Family Group. Postcards of the era celebrated this spot as the place “where the mountains meet the sea,” capturing the dramatic way the Santa Monica Mountains plunge directly into the Pacific at this narrow strip of sand. Today the same boulder is still there and is known to climbers as the J. Paul Pebble, even though Castle Rock above it is gone.

Historical Notes

This postcard uses Haystack Rock as a scenic backdrop to show off what were then “modern” bathing suits. In the late 1910s, shorter hemlines, sleeveless tops, and form-fitting knitwear pushed the boundaries of acceptable public dress, especially for women. The rugged rocks and open Pacific behind the model helped sell Southern California as both a fashionable resort and a place of natural drama, tying the emerging beach culture to this very specific stretch of shoreline.

Historical Notes

By 1924 the coast road had been widened and formally incorporated into Roosevelt Highway, which carried motorists from Santa Monica toward Malibu and points north. Here the highway bends so close to Castle Rock that the stone nearly overhangs the pavement, dwarfing the small touring cars that squeeze past. Countless postcard views like this made the rock a symbol of motoring along the bayside cliffs, even as increasing traffic would soon mark it as an obstacle to be blasted away.

Historical Notes

This westward view emphasizes how the highway threads between the cliffs and the sea, with Castle Rock pinched between asphalt and surf. As automobile use soared in the 1920s and 1930s, this scenic pinch point also became a bottleneck. Engineers eventually concluded that the only way to create a modern four-lane route was to remove most of the rock, a decision they would carry out in 1945 when wartime concerns diverted public attention from the loss of the landmark.

Historical Notes

In this late-1920s scene, Castle Rock still dominates the curve of the bay, but the surrounding landscape is beginning to change. Families relax on the sand while motorists park along the shoulder for a closer look, treating the rock as a built-in roadside turnout. Beyond, the highway points toward Topanga Canyon and the sparsely developed Malibu coast. Within a decade, large hillside estates like Villa de Leon would rise above this same stretch of road, and traffic would be far heavier than the few cars seen here.

Historical Notes

By around 1930 Roosevelt Highway had been upgraded and soon after was officially renamed Coast Highway; the familiar Highway 1 designation would follow in 1939. This closer view shows a steady stream of cars hugging the base of Castle Rock, illustrating why highway engineers worried about limited sightlines and room for expansion. What had once been a picturesque roadside monument was increasingly treated as a traffic hazard on one of California’s most important coastal routes.

Historical Notes

From the developing hillside tract of Castellammare, we see Castle Rock framed against the ocean with the highway squeezed between rock and surf. By the mid-1930s this area was attracting affluent homebuilders, including Leon Kauffman, whose Villa de Leon rose directly above the formations. Castle Rock and nearby Haystack Rock became familiar backdrops in Hollywood films and promotional photography, and in August 1945 the young Norma Jeane (later Marilyn Monroe) posed here for one of her earliest paid modeling assignments, a color shoot promoting the Mercury II camera and ANSCO color film.

Historical Notes

This view looks back toward Santa Monica with Castle Rock on the left, the highway curving around its base, and Haystack Rock in the surf. People fish and wander among the boulders that locals called the Family Group, treating the spot as both a roadside stop and a neighborhood beach. The scene captures the mix of everyday uses that made the rocks so beloved: a place to fish, stroll, picnic, and watch cars roll by within sight of the growing city. Today only Haystack Rock survives, but the outline of the old turnout and the line of the highway still mark where Castle Rock once stood.

Historical Notes

Publishers often turned Castle Rock into a romantic symbol, showing it against a moonlit sea or sunset sky in postcards aimed at tourists. The rock stood beside the old coast road near the present-day Getty Villa and below what would later become Villa de Leon. In June 1945, highway crews used explosives and heavy equipment to remove most of the formation so the road could be widened.

Castle Rock once stood on the ocean side of what is now Pacific Coast Highway at the curve near Coastline Drive, directly below Villa de Leon and across from the Getty Villa entrance. Only a low remnant of the original rock remains at road level, while Haystack Rock still stands offshore in its original position.

Historical Notes

Castle Rock used to stand beside the Roosevelt Highway at the water's edge near the present-day location of the Getty Center Villa and Villa de Leone. Castle Rock was demolished in 1945 in order to expand the highway, renamed the Pacific Coast Highway (see next photo).

Historical Notes

Named after its original builder, Austrian native Leon Kauffman, the Villa Leon was the result of a longstanding promise Kauffman had made to his wife Clemence that, if he ever had the money, he would build for her a dream castle by the sea. A fortune made in the wool processing business in California during the First World War allowed Kauffman to make good on his promise and, after purchasing an impressive six-lot parcel above the famous Castle and Haystack Rock formations, Kauffman began construction of his $1,000,000 dream house in 1926.^

Historical Notes

Leon Kauffman selected architect Kenneth MacDonald in 1926 to design this 12,000-square-foot palazzo in the Beaux- Arts European tradition. This imposing structure features 35 rooms, including nine bedrooms, 11 bathrooms, a huge grand salon (32’ x 64’), a library, a circular dining room, a butler’s pantry, an elevator and a seven-car garage. The construction price of $1 million (that was a lot of money in the late ‘20s!) included a first-ever central vacuum, several hand-made crystal chandeliers, Italian tiles, imported marbles, hand-carved wooden beams, mahogany paneling from Thailand, magnificent wrought-iron gates, even gold grouting for the Italian tiles. The Villa de Leon took five years to complete.*

Historical Notes

Leon Kauffman purchased six elevated lots in the 1920s in the new Castellammare (Castle by the sea) area on the Malibu coast, North of Sunset Boulevard and high above what would soon become Roosevelt Highway, predecessor of the Pacific Coast Highway.*

Historical Notes

When first built, the Villa de Leon boasted topiary gardens, a pipe organ and beach access via a private funicular railway, very expensive amenities that have not survived the passage of time.

Historical Notes

The Kauffmans lived in the house for five years before Leon’s wife (Clemence) died, and Leon lived only another two years. Their grown son chose not to live in the house, which was overseen by caretakers until 1952, when the estate was settled.*

Historical Notes

Villa de Leon has been featured in countless productions over the years, most notably photo shoots.

Historical Notes

The mansion overlooks Pacific Coast Highway and the Pacific Ocean and is situated in close proximity to the Getty Villa. It was designed by prominent Los Angeles architect Kenneth A. MacDonald, Jr. in 1926 for Austrian builder and investor in wool Leon Kauffman.

Historical Notes

The Villa de Leon has been used in many high-profile music videos, commercials, and printed ads such as Beyonce's "Haunted," Lady Gaga's "Paparazzi," Britney Spears's My Prerogative body fragrance commercial, Camila Cabello "Liar", Ariana Grande, Miley Cyrus and Lana Del Rey "Don't Call Me Angel", Rod Stewart's Christmas special Rod Stewart: Merry Christmas, Baby, and shoots featuring Heidi Klum, Victoria Beckham, Robert Pattinson, and Reese Witherspoon. Its highly recognizable grand staircase has been a major focal point in several of these videos and photographs, as has its balconies and their balustrades, including their appearance on the cover of English rock band Procol Harum's 1973 album, Grand Hotel.*^

Historical Notes

Today, many first-time visitors to the adjacent J. Paul Getty Villa mistake the Italianate Revival palazzo, the Villa de Leon, for the Getty Villa museum, not visible from the Pacific Coast Highway. Even the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have mis-identified Villa de Leon thinking it was the Getty Villa.

Historical Notes

The new Castellammare neighborhood became popular with the Hollywood crowd. John Barrymore, Thelma Todd and Joseph Cotton had homes in the area.

Historical Notes

For the 1932 Summer Olympics, the segment of the PCH between Oxnard and Santa Monica (then known as the Theodore Roosevelt Highway) hosted part of the road cycling events.

Historical Notes

Thelma Todd's Sidewalk Café was a notable Hollywood hotspot in the 1930s, located at 17575 Pacific Coast Highway in the Castellammare neighborhood of Pacific Palisades, California. The building and café have a rich history intertwined with Hollywood's Golden Age and a tragic mystery.

Historical Notes

The Spanish-style building that housed Thelma Todd's Sidewalk Café was originally constructed in 1928. It was designed by architect Mark Daniels in the California Mediterranean and Spanish Colonial Revival styles with Moorish influences. Initially, the structure served as a shopping center for the nearby Castellammare housing development.

Historical Notes

In the summer of 1934, Hollywood actress Thelma Todd and her lover/business partner, director Roland West, opened Thelma Todd's Sidewalk Café on the ground floor of the building. The café quickly became a popular destination for Hollywood's elite, known for its high-end seafood menu and glamorous atmosphere.

Historical Notes

Thelma Todd's Sidewalk Café was a stylish establishment featuring a ground-floor bar, a private upstairs dining area called Joya's Room, and a menu with specialty seafood dishes, including New England-style offerings. Known for its unique cocktails named after celebrities, like the Todd Gin Sour and Thelma Todd Rickey, the café attracted patrons in part due to Todd's frequent presence behind the counter, where she engaged with customers and promoted the business through interviews and photo opportunities. The building itself had a multi-level layout: the café occupied the ground floor, while the second floor housed Joya's Room, Todd’s apartment, and an adjoining apartment for her business partner, connected by a sliding door. A ballroom with a hexagonal shape and a bandstand occupied the third floor, providing an elegant space for events.

Historical Notes

On the morning of December 16, 1935, Thelma Todd was found dead in her car inside the garage of Jewel Carmen, a former actress and former wife of Todd's lover and business partner, Roland West. Carmen's house was approximately a block from the topmost side of Todd's restaurant. Her death was determined to have been caused by carbon monoxide poisoning. Todd had a wide circle of friends and associates as well as a busy social life; police investigations revealed that she had spent the previous Saturday night (December 14) at the Trocadero, a popular Hollywood restaurant, at a party hosted by entertainer Stanley Lupino and his actress daughter, Ida. At the restaurant, she had had a brief but unpleasant exchange with her ex-husband, Pat DiCicco. However, her friends stated that she was in good spirits, and were aware of nothing unusual in her life that could suggest a reason for committing suicide. She was driven home from the party in the early hours of December 15 by her chauffeur.

Historical Notes

The detectives of the LAPD concluded that Todd's death was accidental, the result of her either warming up the car to drive it or using the heater to keep herself warm; however, other evidence, such as a bloodied lip, seemed to point to foul play.

Historical Notes

Tractor trailer trucks first became widely used on American highways in the 1930s. This period marked a crucial turning point for the trucking industry, as these vehicles revolutionized long-distance haulage and transportation of goods.

Historical Notes

Over the decades, the building experienced periods of vacancy and various uses, including serving as a private residence and housing different businesses. Today, the Spanish Colonial Revival building has been renovated and is marketed as a creative office space called "Surfside" by Vibe Office Properties. Photo comparison by Trey Callaway.

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