1970 to 1980 (1960-1970) (1980-1990) Table of Contents
Myrna Oliver Alphonzo Bell Jr., 89: GOP Congressman Often Won Bipartisan Support, Los Angeles Times, 27 April 2004, B11, 1977, 1970s, 1950 See Text
Barbara Berner A Place I Call Home, 12 2003 Free Venice Beachhead, issue 270, 1970s See Text
Terry Castle My Heroin Christmas, London Review of Books, 18 December 2003, 11 - 18. 2003, 1994, 1982, 1979, 1970s, See Text
Arthur Danto Encounters & Reflections: Art in the Historical Present, University of California Press, 1997(1990), 1967 See Text
Allen David Heskin* After the Battle is Won, Political Contradictions in Santa Monica, UCLA Lecture and unpublished ms. Fall, 1983. 1983, 1982, 1981, 1980, 1979, 1977. 1970s See Text
Pico Iyer, "A Californian who heeded a distant drumbeat," Tony Cohan Native State, Broadway Books, 320 pp., September 2003 LA Times Sunday Book Review, page R2, 2003, 1970s See Text
Mark E. Kann Middle Class Radicalism in Santa Monica, Temple University Press: Philadelphia, 1986. 322pp., 1981, 1980, 1980s, 1979, 1977, 1976, 1970s, 1960s, See Text
James W. Lunsford The Ocean and the Sunset, The Hills and the Clouds: Looking at Santa Monica, illustrated by Alice N. Lunsford, 1983, 1979, 1919 See Text
Eric Mankin Strategies: You Can Win City Hall, Mother Jones, VI, no. X December, 1981. p. 66. 1981, 1970s, 1950s, 1940s See Text
Tom Moran and Tom Sewell Fantasy by the Sea Peace Press: Culver City, CA, 1980 (1979) (Originally published by Beyond Baroque Foundation with a grant from the Visual Arts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts), 1970s See Text
Jim Ohlschmidt Liner Notes The Genius of Joe Pass*, Vestapol 13073 Video, 2001, 1970s See Text
Art and Laurie Pepper Straight Life: The Story of Art Pepper, Da Capo Press: Introduction by Gary Giddens; Discography by Todd Selbert; Afterward by Laurie Pepper (1979), 1994. 1970s, 1969 See Text
Jenny Pirie*, Peter Kastner* and Jeff Mudrick* A Short History of Ocean Park, Ocean Park Community Organization, 1982, (With a 1983 update.) 15pp. 1983, 1982, 1976, 1973, 1970, 1970s, 1967, 1960s See Text
Andrea Schulte-Peevers and David Peevers Los Angeles, Lonely Planet: Oakland, 2nd ed., 1996(1999), 351pp., 1999, 1996, 1970s See Text
Jeffrey Stanton Santa Monica Pier A History from 1875 to 1990, Donahue Publishing: Los Angeles, CA, 1990, 1970s See Text
Jeffrey Stanton Venice of America: 'Coney Island of the Pacific,' Donahue Publishing: Los Angeles, CA, 1987. 176 pp., 1974, 1973, 1968 See Text
Les Storrs Santa Monica Portrait of a City Yesterday and Today, Santa Monica Bank: Santa Monica, CA, 1974, 67 pp., 1974, 1973, 1970s See Text
Sean Wilsey On Skateboarding, Using So Little, London Review of Books, 25, no. 12, 19 June 2003, pp.18&endash;21. 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, See Text
Alternative Sources:
Dogtown and Z-Boys (2001), Narrated by Sean Penn, 1970s end of POP pier, Main St., Bay St. Hill, Ocean Park, 2004a, 200, 1970s
Documents
Myrna Oliver Alphonzo Bell Jr., 89: GOP Congressman Often Won Bipartisan Support, Los Angeles Times, 27 April 2004, B11, 1977, 1970s, 1950
"Alphonzo Bell Jr., who represented Los Angeles' influential Westside in Congress for eight terms and was a scion of the pioneering ranching, oil and development family that give its name to the Southern California communities of Bell, Bell Gardens and Bel-Air, has died. He was 89.
" . . .
"From 1950 to 1977, Bell represented a vast congressional district - the 28th and, after redistricting, the 27th - running along the coast from Malibu to the Palos Verdes Peninsula and encompassing all or part of Santa Monica, Pacific Palisades, Brentwood, Bel-Air, and West L.A. Then considered a Republican stronghold, the district nevertheless had only 40% GOP voter registration, and bipartisan approval was necessary.
" . . ."
Barbara Berner A Place I Call Home, 12 2003 Free Venice Beachhead, issue 270, 1970's
"I moved to Venice in the early 70's, I was 27. Back then the lines between Ocean Park and Venice seemed blurry. Now they are, as we know, clearly defined.
"My friend Tina took me to POP when I was 15. We had cut school. I had never heard of POP till then. A pervert exposed himself to us on the walkway into the park. I thought we deserved it cause we had cut school.
"I vaguely remember the boardwalk. Very different than now. From what I remember, there was a row of blue wooden one-story buildings on the beach side. There were hardly any buildings on the East Side of the walk. It is a good thing I didn't hang out in Venice in the late fifties; I would have been chasing the Dragon for sure.
"I went to Olivia's Restaurant on the SW corner of Ocean Park and Main in my 20's with my first husband for soul food. We were middle class, smokin' dope, doing psychedelics and thought it was a great hole in the wall place. I did not connect to Venice then either, still too asleep to connect with anything much.
"It took me a few more years to find my way back to my home for the past 31 years now. Luckily I woke up, got feminized, political, left my middle class existence, husband, took my 2-yr. old daughter and moved into a commune on 3rd St. between Ashland and Rose. This was a radical/political commune filled with college students, another single mother and child.
"I loved that commune, the people, the vegetable garden, making bread in a huge metal bread maker, dinners around the long wooden table and the parties. I loved that I was involved in radical change, my own life, group change and philosophy. Life seemed serious business but with good times mixed in.
"I worked at the Midnight Special Bookstore on W. Washington, was involved with collective day care, started one of the first consciousness raising groups held at our commune that grew and grew till we opened a women's center on South Venice Blvd. We ordered food with the co-op then picked it up in the middle of the street on W. Washington Blvd. in the morning. That was how sleepy Venice was back then. We almost have gridlock now.
"There were other political collectives around, all had names. Ours was the 3rd Street house. One was the Fraser house and the Thornton house. There was Mayday in Culver City that included a non-sexist pre-school. All of our tires were slashed one morning at all of the communes. This was a big intrigue; we were getting ready for the revolution.
"It did not come as we had expected. Our house was sold. We felt the owner a traitor, selling out to the establishment. One couple moved to Bellingham, Washington, one couple to Berkeley and I moved in with another single mother in Culver City for a while, then to Santa Monica to go to school.
"While in school, a lover brought me to the Fruit Tramps on the Boardwalk, a small organic market where you could work for your food, I had gotten into herbs and began ordering them for the store and making herbal potions.
"The climate seemed different; everyone was into the 'flow', fasting for days on end, taking high colonics, giving away all their possessions, meditating at the water's edge. I swear it is possible to ask and receive whatever your heart desires at the water's edge, between Dudley and Paloma still to this day!
"There was a woman from Tennessee who had a free store on Main where you could drop off clothes and pick up new ones. She wanted to preach and finally moved back to Tennessee.
"One Life had opened a small restaurant, organic, with no prices on the menu where you would pay what you thought the food was worth and it was fabulous. So were the people who ran the store. There was Blackies on Main for Blues, the Comeback Inn on W. Washington for jazz and the Circle Bar for whatever. Beyond Baroque was right next to the Comeback Inn back then.
"Walking the boardwalk was the main attraction, up and down, several times a day. Not much of a working crowd, much of the nine to five around. Artists, musicians, lots of philosophers, poets, kids and seniors. The world was on the boardwalk.
'Somewhere in the late 70's it changed. I had gone away for six weeks in the summer and when I came back, MONEY had appeared. The Reagan/Bush era had hit Venice. Nice shops on Main, buildings going up on the boardwalk, talk of stopping the artisans from selling without a license and on and on. Overnight Venice was changing once again.
"Money is still here, so are the artisans, in fact even more. That is the wonderful thing about Venice, its ability to change. Always, on the forefront, the current vision is ever present; the freedom to be whoever and create whatever is your desire."
Terry Castle My Heroin Christmas, London Review of Books, 18 December 2003, 11 - 18. 2003, 1994, 1982, 1979, 1970s,
A commentary on Art Pepper's autobiography Straight Life: The Story of Art Pepper, 1979, reissued in paperback in 1994, and relates that in the early seventies Art Pepper spent several years at Synonon.
" . . . Pepper managed to get himself into Synanon, (the celebrated Santa Monica rehabilitation centre and Atlas Shrugged-style beach commune. He lived there for several years in the early 1970s and met Laurie, a fellow resident who became his third wife. He gradually cleaned up - at least partially - and began a heroic if truncated musical comeback. He made some new records, started touring again, and as a quasi-rehabilitated éminence grise, gave jazz workshops at colleges and universities. . . .
"He began dictating Straight Life to Laurie . . . asked some of his old bandmates, producers, drug dealers, prison cronies and girlfriends to add their . . . comments. The resulting feuilleton was hailed as a poetic masterpiece: a riffing, scabrous, West Coast Season in Hell. . . . Though mostly off junk, Pepper continued to consume pills in great quantities and shot up, quite brazenly, with coke and methadone to the last days of his life. He died in Panorama, California, of an exploding brain, in June 1982, at the age of 56." p. 12
"All the more surprising, then, the pathos the writer achieves when he describes courting Laurie, his last and 'greatest love', at Synanon in the 1970s. Synanon itself - the most celebrated rehab programme of its day - sounds like a Southern California cult nightmare: all rules and regulations and not being able to go to the bathroom without permission. At the Santa Monica 'campus' - where Pepper lived for two years - there were the usual cult trappings: a charismatic guru (named Chuck) and army of live-in disciples; elaborate rewards and punishments for performing (or neglecting) communal household chores; and daily Khmer Rouge-style group therapy sessions in which the goal was to drive your fragile fellow addicts into a state of mental meltdown.
"You'd be in a game with ten or fifteen people and if somebody, like pissed on the toilet seat in their dorm or something like that, you'd tell itl You'd accuse him of it in front of the girls. When your covers are pulled in front of women it's really a drag, so there'd be some wild shouting matches. They made up a lot of things, too, just to get you mad, to get you raving. Somebody'd accuse you of farting at night so loud they couldn't sleep, or some chick would accusse some broad of throwing a bloody Kotex in the corner of the bathroom, leaving it laying there. The idea was that rank{l}ing you and exposing you bad habits would make you eventually change. And it worked, you know, it worked."
" . . . After staying sober and drug-free for some time, male and female Synanon residents who wanted to start a sexual relationship could petition the counsellors to let them go on 'dates' together - little walks around the neighborhood, trips to the nearby shopping mall, chaste bike rides. The formal courtship period accomplished, they might then request permission to spend a couple of hours together in the commune's designated trysting place . . . " p. 15
"On their first official date, he and Laurie sit on a bench and watch the carousel.
"In the end one gets the feeling that Pepper is just too much . . . the old guy has to be defended against; not only for playing the sax, doping up and balling chicks to startling excess, but for describing it so unambiguously, with the ludic genius of a trailer-park Villon. He's an out landish daddy-o from some time before les neiges d'antan - if Southern California can indeed be said to have had them." p. 16
Arthur Danto Encounters & Reflections: Art in the Historical Present, University of California Press, 1997(1990), 1967
"In 1967, the American painter Richard Diebenkorn turned away from his widely admired figural style fluid, awkward, loosely evocative of Bonnard but less florid and more athletic-to return, to be sure with some marked differences, to the abstractionist imperatives he had just as abruptly put aside a dozen years before. His career thus falls naturally into three phases-or two phases of abstraction with a prolonged figurationist interlude-but this bland periodization fails to do justice to the unfolding narrative of his artistic discoveries. His figures were after all but regimentations of the same urgent and sweeping gestures that were the mark of his driving first abstractionist manner, and were set into pictorial spaces that did not exist in painting before Abstract Expressionism reinvented space. And the post-1967 abstractions have seemed to many sufficiently referential so that it is a critical commonplace to see them as suffused with a special California light, and as dense with coastal allusions to sky, ocean, seaside and sun, tawny hills, bleached architecture, sharp shadows and angular illuminations, green expanses and glimpsed distant blues, and possibly haunted by the erasure of human presences. Nor does the chronicle "abstraction-figuration-abstraction" adequately acknowledge the extreme determination, the aesthetic courage it had to have required first to shift from abstraction to "the image" at a time when such a change was perceived within the art world as something momentous, like a conversion or a betrayal or a heretical declaration, and then, at a time when one's great reputation was based upon the marvelous posing of figures in landscapes or interiors that looked like abstractions anyway, when pure abstraction was no longer the True Faith but only one of the ways to do things in an art world gone slack and pluralistic, to return to abstraction as one's own truth. Both changes are evidence of a certain dogged integrity, and were perhaps among the benefits of growing a career in California, away from the style wars and the critical fire storms of New York, with its fevered obsessions with where one fits, with who is in and which is out and what is new, fading, dated and dead.
"In a sense, nothing has been new with Diebenkorn since 1967, when he exhibited the first paintings in what was to lengthen into an extraordinary series. These are the Ocean Park paintings-large canvases, each bearing the same title, Ocean Park, but individuated with a number that indicates, presumably, the order of its completion. The series had reached number 140 by late last year, which allows a rough calculation of Diebenkorn's annual output, though he has concurrently produced a number of works-on-paper, titled Untitled but recognizably answering to the same impulses that give rise to the Ocean Park paintings. Ocean Park itself is a community near Santa Monica, where Diebenkorn traces a daily path between home and studio, but whether or not these works make the topical references to local landscape with which they are credited, they clearly are something more than abstractions with recurrent compositional motifs, cadences, pastel tonalities, scumbled fields and tapelike forms, and stunning juxtapositions of color swept on with masterful brushwork. Each of them, for example, displays the submerged record of its own realization, and so distinctive are the pentimenti in Diebenkom's art that each painting carries within itself the visible history of the artist's search. The nearest parallel, perhaps, would be the great drawings of Rembrandt , in which certain crowded lines converge on the sought-after contour so that the drawing and its draw-ing are one, process and fulfillment inseparable. It is possible to imagine a writer, misguided by the recent privileging of l'ecriture who publishes a work that exhibits the labor of writing it, with all the first lines, the crossed-out sentences, whited-out lines with fragments of letters showing through and scribbled insertions between the lines and up the margins. Whatever such a text started out to be about, it would in the end have to be about its own processes, self-exemplificatory. In my view, Diebenkom's paintings are less about the bright skies and long horizons of Ocean Park than about the act of painting, as if the works had become more and more their own subjects and the external references stand at best as indications of what the painting is not about- Ceci nest pas un paysage ! In this sense, and despite his notorious employment of mechanical straightedges, Diebenkorn has not moved greatly beyond the premises of Abstract Expressionism, which always insisted that the painting was the painting, its final subject and only reference. On the other hand, nothing could more vividly illuminate the difference between painting and writing as arts than the extreme power and beauty, the elegance and excitement of the Ocean Park paintings, and the tiresomeness of the piece of writing I just imagined, with which no one, unless perhaps a member of Yale's Department of English, could have the slightest patience.
"It is instructive to compare Diebenkorn as an artist with his somewhat older fellow Californian (and Stanford alumnus) Robert Motherwell, who has also produced an extraordinary series: the most recent Spanish Elegy I have seen is number 132, completed in 1983. "Diebenkorn," Motherwell recently told me, "is what I would have become if I had had his talent but remained in California instead of moving to New York." The Spanish Elegies and the Ocean Park paintings are at the pinnacle of contemporary painting, but the differences in their inspiration and spiritual provenance are profound. Motherwell wrote about the Spanish Elegies that they are "for the most part, public statements. [They] reflect the internationalist in me, interested in the historical forces of the twentieth century, with strong feelings about the conflicting forces in it." By contrast, Motherwell says of his collages that they are "intimate and private." Now, I do not believe, of any of Diebenkorn's works, that the category of privacy or intimacy especially applies. They are as public as scientific experiments, open investigations into the resolution of pictorial tensions or conquests of painterly difficulties. But neither are they "public statements" which could be construed as dealing with any issues other than the issues of painting. It was as if even the somewhat blank figures of Diebenkorn's middle period were ill at ease in their paintings, and distractions from Diebenkorn's deepest preoccupations. . . .
"As a term, "Ocean Park" belongs to the hopeful vocabulary of the real estate developer, and designates an archetypal suburban locus in Southern California-Ocean Park No. 133 could be an address. But in any case Ocean Park is but the site, perhaps distantly the occasion for a work that makes and needs no references. And the miracle is that works so circumscribed in subject, substance, meaning and feeling should be so overwhelming when viewed as altogether to obliterate their circumstances and limits. The miracle is that the country mouse/ city mouse difference between these two masters should finally count for so little in terms of their comparable achievements. There is finally a fierce beauty in Diebenkom's work that marks a limit in our critical competence to explain it.
"Aside from the two decisions that articulate his corpus, Diebenkorn's life is really more a career than a biography, like that of a successful academic. It is an exemplary life, but not an outwardly interesting one: the story of schools attended, positions held, group shows, traveling retrospectives, prizes won and a growing, finally a global recognition. It is an exemplary life because of its absolute commitment, as if the decisions to remain in California and to stay within a single and evidently deeply fulfilling marriage were so many ways of keeping distraction at bay. In this sense, I suppose, the life and the work are of a piece, for the art, too, is a systematic and sustained effort to expunge from itself whatever is other than itself. Even the numerated laconic titles bear out what we might think of, in Sartrian terms, as the original choice that defined the project. The work is tentative and confident at once, as if the doubts which the individual works preserve and display were required in order that they should be overcome in the dazzling works to which they lead. There is a marvelous moment in a recent profile of Diebenkorn by Dan Hofstadter in The New Yorker which brings out both sides. Diebenkorn was expressing to an intimate his doubts about being up to the task of painting. The intimate said, "O.K., Dick. How many people in the world do you think paint as well as you do?" Hofstadter tells us that Diebenkorn thought for a long time, and then he just laughed. Unremitting doubt as to one's adequacy to the task one knows no one is better suited for than oneself: those are the coordinates of his personality and in an odd way the content of his work."
Allen David Heskin* After the Battle is Won, Political Contradictions in Santa Monica, UCLA Lecture and unpublished ms. Fall, 1983. 1983, 1982, 1981, 1980, 1979, 1977.
"What protest there has been has been primarily concentrated in the heavily renter, "alternative lifestyle" beachfront neighborhood of Ocean Park. A redevelopment project in the neighborhood which was intended o create a Miami Beach high rise beachfront has been a source of discontent for years, and efforts to privatize the very popular recreational pier and build an enclosed suburban type shopping mall in the areas that adjoin the neighborhood were major issues. Much of this, however, is more related to coastal politics that led to the formation of the Coastal Commission than to traditional urban politics. Outside of Ocean Park, including the more working class and minority Pico neighborhood, no such history of protest is known.
"As a result, the Santa Monica "shift left" was much more a case of SMRR seizing the moment than winning after building through years of struggle. The moment was created by the passage of Proposition 13. The inflationary spiral in real estate was steeper in very few places than in Santa Monica. Buildings were turning over three times a year, condos were rising, and Santa Monica was on its way to becoming Beverly Hills by the sea. The stakes were high and the elected officials in power unwilling to compromise. Santa Monica was the focus of an immediate fight between those who were benefitting from the inflation and those [who] were not, i.e., between those who owned property and those who did not. Those who did not were in the majority.
". . .
"There was a base of spontaneous tenant organizing in the early period following the passage of Proposition 13 from which to build, but the mobilization was far from spontaneous. The campaigns were run like military operations, incorporating broad scale organizing and the latest electioneering technology. It was this combination of mobilization, i.e. people, and technology that proved so effective. Over a quarter of those who had disputes with landlords organized at the building level to fight the landlord (nearly 50% of the dispute was about rent levels), and over a third of these people were brought into the campaign. The technology consisted of polling and computer assisted targeting and getting out the vote campaigns."
Pico Iyer, "A Californian who heeded a distant drumbeat," Tony Cohan Native State, Broadway Books, 320 pp., September 2003 LA Times Sunday Book Review, page R2, 2003, 1970s
" . . . Every day one summer, . . . he (Tony Cohan) hitched the 12 miles from Coldwater Canyon to Santa Monica Pier to look out across the ocean toward all the places he longed to get to . . . California was where he dreamed of somewhere else.
" . . . 'Santa Ana breeze rustling the oleanders, smell of suntan oil and semen' . . . 'past the pinball arcade with the skee balls in their troughs. Madame Doreena's crystal ball on velvet, the merry-go-round ponies frozen to their poles behind glass doors.'"
Mark E. Kann Middle Class Radicalism in Santa Monica, Temple University Press: Philadelphia, 1986. 322pp., 1981, 1980, 1980s, 1979, 1977, 1976, 1970s, 1960s,
To Santa Monica
" . . .
"In fact, many activists from the 1960s entered into the business world in the 1970s, . . . They became artisans, craftsmen, and entertainers plying the street and tourist trade. They started cottage industries in their homes and garages that sometimes developed, for example, into solar energy or recycling businesses. They sought to live as independent producers and sellers of books, articles, art, and films; and they began new bookstores, magazines, art galleries, and movie theaters. They also founded new social service agencies and nonprofit corporations that catered to pressing human needs for affordable health services, legal services, housing services, and so forth. They sometimes entered into the world of high finance with a women's bank or a socially conscious investment firm or consumer network like Co-op America, which offers comprehensive life insurance to community groups through a plan developed by an employee-owned insurance company that invests premiums in low income cooperative housing. And they often experimented with things like food, housing, or even bicycle cooperatives, editorial collectives, and community development corporations. . . . that is toward the virtues of small businessmen that Santa Monica's Harry C. Henshey appreciated a half-century ago." p. 67
" . . .
" . . . Furthermore, (the business activists) were of the middle class, heirs to the American Dream legacy that pronounced individual daring, intelligence, hard work, long hours, and self-sacrifice the key to success depite adverse odds.
"More so than other leftists, Tom Hayden* exemplified a continuing belief in struggling against the odds. His Port Huron idealism outlasted the 1960s and 1970s, showing up again in the conclusion to his 1980 The American Future: New Visions Beyond Old Frontiers {Boston : South End}: "Ours is a great and young nation, living in a yet richer and older world. It is not too late for a new beginning, no longer based on a hostile assessment of nature and others . . . Hope and love still know no boundaries." In fact, Hayden's political ideas had changed very little over the course of two decades. What had changed, however, was his understanding of the American middle class.
"By the mid-1970s, Hayden not only recognized that transformation of student activists into new professionals and new business people; he also sensed that their ideals had rippled throughout middle America to produce "a great shift in consciousness which began in the sixties and continues in less-noticed ways in the seventies." {Tom Hayden and the Tom Hayden for U.S. Senate Campaign, Make the Future Ours, 1976 campaign document.} . . . Hayden decided to seek the Democratic party nomination for the U.S. Senate in 1976 with the notion that the Port Huron Statement, now updated in a campaign booklet . . . would appeal to affluent voters in places like Santa Monica.
" . . . Hayden's particular notion of economic democracy spoke directly to the concerns of the middle class. It emphasized people's right to control their lives and future, to assume mastery in their communities and workplaces, and to play a larger part in shaping the services that they produce, distribute and consume. As Hayden recognized, it was powerlessness not poverty at the root of middle class frustrations.
"One Hayden campaign goal was "building a lasting political organization that will go on whether I am elected or not." He was not elected. But he garnered an impressive 1.2 million votes in the primary, more than enough to suggest that his platform did have a social base in California and that a lasting political organization was needed to cultivate it. Undaunted by his 1976 setback in the political marketplace, Hayden manufactured in 1977 the Campaign for Economic Democracy (CED), a California "grassroots citizen's campaign to take back power over our lives - and create healthy individuals, families, communities, and workplaces." Appropriately, Hayden located CED state headquarters in middle class Santa Monica. There it spawned a local chapter that defined the core ideology and organizational thrust of the Santa Monica left.
The Core Ideology
" . . . Local activists generally credited Zane with the energy behind organizing CED, the Santa Monica Fair Housing Alliance, and the city's Democratic Club into the Santa Monicans for Renters' Rights (SMRR) coalition and with masterminding SMRR's 1979 electoral victories. Zane himself was elected to a four-year city council term in 1981 . . ."
James W. Lunsford The Ocean and the Sunset, The Hills and the Clouds: Looking at Santa Monica, illustrated by Alice N. Lunsford, 1983, 1979, 1919
Ocean Park
"9. Horatio West Court, 140 Hollister Avenue. Four two-story all-concrete houses built in 1919 by internationally famous architect Irving Gill and restored in the early 1970s. The development was designated a Santa Monica City Landmark in 1979 and is also listed in the National Register of Historic Places."
Eric Mankin Strategies: You Can Win City Hall, Mother Jones, VI, no. X, December, 1981. p. 66. 1981, 1970s, 1950s, 1940s
"When rents began to soar in the late '70s, city government - still in the hands of the suburban squire/chamber of commerce axis - did a classic Marie Antoinette turn. (The people can't afford to rent? Let them buy condos?) Rent control became a matter of elemental self-defense for thousands. In a grueling series of electoral contests, the organization now known as Santa Monica Renters' Rights (SMRR) - for which Shearer is spokesperson - passed one of the stiffest rent control laws in the country and beat back repeated landlord attempts to water it down.
"By the time last spring's municipal elections came, SMRR had become very good at ground-level electioneering, widely thought obsolete in the era of TV and computerized mailing. "We developed," says Goldway, "a system to put our volunteers to work, so their efforts had impact."
'While SMRR rode rent control very hard, it did not shy away from other issues, notably crime. Shearer is very proud that "we weren't defensive. We always said crime has economic roots, but we didn't say the only real solution is full employment and national reform. There are a lot of things you can do if you build decent neighborhoods." Nor did it hurt that one of the SMRR city council candidates was a parole officer.
"The coalition that SMRR represents includes New Left veterans, Demos, feminists and environmentalists, along with union members and - absolutely crucial - old people. Santa Monica is very much a retirement community, and the rise in rents was literally a life-or-death issue for 60- and 70-year-olds trying to survive on Social Security and savings."
Tom Moran and Tom Sewell Fantasy by the Sea Peace Press: Culver City, CA, 1980 (1979) (Originally published by Beyond Baroque Foundation with a grant from the Visual Arts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts), 1970s
Venice Waterways Project
" . . .
" . . . Los Angeles Councilman Paul Lamport, Mayor Sam Yorty, Councilwoman Pat Russell, 1971, Hughes Tool Company, Western Center for Law and Poverty . . . 1973 People's Park and Superior Court Judge Jerry Pacht ruled that the City of Los Angeles had to prepare an environmental impact report on the canal project . . .
"The sharp schism between landowners and tenants was to continue, . . . and the newly created California Coastal Commission was used to slow and control new building . . ."
Jim Ohlschmidt Liner Notes The Genius of Joe Pass*, Vestapol 13073 Video, 2001, 1970s ". . . By 1970, Pass was living comfortably in Southern California, he was married, and had started a family. . . . The Pacific Jazz label was defunct, and although sessions that year with a group of progressive L.A. jazz musicians including electric bassist Carol Kaye, saxophonist Tom Scott and pianist Joe Sample (reissued on a Hot Wire CD ironically titled "Better Days") showed that Pass tried to adapt his well-informed and carefully built technique to the new scene, his heart just wasn't in it. " . . ." ". . . . Norman Granz, founder of Verve records and jazz impresario behind the highly acclaimed "Jazz at the Philharmonic" records and concert tours, had formed a new label called Pablo, with world-wide distribution through RCA. Although Pass was still unknown to most of the jazz world beyond Los Angeles, Granz . . . recorded him in a live set with pianist Oscar Peterson and bassist Niels Henning Orsted Pedersen at Chicago's London House in May of 1973. "The Trio" album was a huge success for Pablo and won a Grammy award the next year. . . . "As a result, Pass' reputation skyrocketed throughout the country and across the Atlantic, and his name began appearing near the top of reader polls in Downbeat, Guitar Player, and Melody Maker. In November and December of 1973, Pass spent several days at MGM recording tracks for the most important Pablo album of his career, Virtuoso. As Lee Underwood wrote in Downbeat: "'Virtuoso' startled everybody: one man, one guitar, complex tunes, and a display of technique that raised the short hairs on the back of the neck." Released in 1974, the aptly titled Virtuoso album. . . . " . . . Richard Cook and Brian Morton wrote in The Penguin Guide to Jazz, "Pass smoothes away the nervousness of bop yet counters the plain talk of swing with a complexity that remains completely accessible." " . . ." "In 1994, Pass told Acoustic Guitar magazine editor Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers that playing guitar with your fingers instead of a pick was "the best and only way to play your guitar, because you're actually in touch with the instrument &endash; you actually feel it, like a horn player feels a horn in his mouth." In addition to developing an impeccable technique, Pass adopted an a Zen-like attitude toward mentally articulating the music while he played. As he told Downbeat: "You have to eliminate your own consciousness, because once you begin thinking about what you're doing, you're not allowing the music to take on its own shape and form and momentum. You're trying to direct the music. The idea is to get away from directing the music, and just allow it to flow out by itself. Sometimes I'm on the stand and I feel pretty good, and the music just starts coming out. When it's like that, I'm not making the music go places; it just goes. I don't play the same tune the same way twice . . . I never know where I'm gonna start, or where I'm gonna end."
Art and Laurie Pepper Straight Life: The Story of Art Peppr, Da Capo Press: Introduction by Gary Giddens; Discography by Todd Selbert; Afterward by Laurie Pepper (1979), 1994. 1970s, 1969
Gary Giddens, Introduction:
". . .
"Art Pepper was born in 1925, in California, to a merchant seaman and his fifteen-year old wife. He was so sickly his family didn't expect him to survive; when his parents divorced, he was placed in the care of his paternal grandmother . . ." p. vi
" . . .
"Pepper had . . . achieved a measure of stardom . . Benny Carter's band, and for five years (1946-1951), following his stint in the Army, he emerged as the most admired soloist in the Stan Kenton orchestra. . . ." p. vii
" . . .
"Then, in 1956, he started making the rounds as a sideman. He appeared on numerous sessions led by Shorty Rogers, Chet Baker, Marty Paich, Hoagy Carmichael, John Grass, Mel Torme, Barney Kessel, June Christy, Henry Mancini, Andre Previn, Helen Humes, and others. During the same years, 1956 to 1960, he hooked up with Les Koenig's Contemporary Records, and produced a series of masterful albums.
"It's astonishing to read in Straight Life that Art had to be propped up to play on sessions that became epiphanies of the West Coast jazz movement. Pepper's intonation was clear and balmy (on clarinet and tenor as well as alto), but the texts of his solos were shaded wtih longings. the tensile and deliberated phrasing was a means to a direct and manly emotional expressiveness that was virtually antithetical to the cool posturings of those improving beach boys who tried to recreate California jazz as fun in the midnight sun. . . ." p. viii
" . . .
"Finally, at the nadir of his life, he retreated to Synanon. The Sixties were in full gear, and he wore an earring and hit the rock joints with his tenor; but his life was empty and even his mother refused him lodging. The description of life at Synanon is as uncompromising as the jail sequences; he is alternately damning and grateful. The best thing to happen to him there was meeting Laurie, who became his wife, lover, mother, babysitter, manager, editor, and co-author.
"Art left Synanon in 1971. Four months later, his father died . . . He started working as a musician again, playing casuals and clinics, touring colleges, sitting in. . . . In 1977 . . . in March, he played a concert series in Tokyo with Cal Tjader . . . in June, he toured the East Coast as a leader, playing two dates at the Village Vanguard . . . in September he was busted after an automobile accident . . . Les Koenig died in November. He went back to Japan in February 1978, Galaxy signed him in September and Straight Life [was published] . . . in 1979." p. x
23: Synanon: Games, Raids, the Trip 1969-1971
" . . .
"The Stew was the only game that allowed spectators. There was a room se aside for it with twenty chairs for the participants and bleachers so people could watch. It ran twenty-four hours a day, every day, . . . You picked up all the information about whatever was happening there, and it was the major entertainment of the place. Jack Hurst, the director and one of the sharpest, funniest game players, would drop into the Stew a lot to play . . . I began to get hooked on the game and I started studying it, but I wanted to be original and have my own style, which I gradually developed . . ." p. 433
" . . .
"I started woodshedding down in the basement of the club. . . . They had "hooplas" after games, sometimes two or three in an evening. . . . There were some excellent professional musicians in Synanon. We had Wendell, a black tenor player, really played well; Marty Meade, "the Troll," a crazy little guy who played good piano and wrote music; Lew Malin, a very exciting drummer, and Lou Loranger, who played bass. We had a Puerto Rican, Jaime Camberlin, who played congas. Later on we got Frank Rehak on trombone; he was on some of Miles's albums. . . .
" . . . Then Tom Reeves, an old-timer in Synanon, began organizing the musicians and even instituted musical games." p. 434
"In Synanon your mind was completely free of the fears people outside use up their energy worrying about. You didn't have to think about food or rent or doctor bills. You didn't have to worry about what you were going to do when you got old, if you got ugly, if you lost a leg. The first tribe leader I had, Bob Holmes, had kidney trouble. He'd had an operation and the only way he could live was through a dialysis machine. Those machines are hard for people to get the use of, but because he was in Synanon and because of the money and power and influence Synanon has, Bob had access to a dialysis machine each week, as he needed it. If he'd been on the streets, living in some beat shack in Cleveland or Watts, he would have died. So all you had to do was accept these changes and periodic humiliations and you had nothing to worry about."
" . . . Every now and then somebody would come in from the oustside to play. Phil Woods dropped by, one of the greatest alto saxophoneplayers living. . . ."p. 450
"Then something happened that turned everything around. There was an old guy in Synanon, Reid Kimball, a close friend of Chuck's, and he was dying of emphysema. He had to stop smoking. . . . the kids in Tomales Bay, the fanatical followers, they got together with Chuck and said, "To help you stop we're going to stop smoking."
"At first it was a voluntary thing . . . they could get everything donated except cigarettes. Cigarettes was our biggest expense.
"It didn't stary voluntary long. Soon another general meeting was called and Chuck appeared in person and told us smoking cigarettes would henceforth be as forbidden as the use of drugs and physical violence. After that meeting I . . . took my cigarettes and stashed them . . ." p. 451
" . . . I'd sneak away from the Clump and smoke at Santa Monica City College. In Santa Monica they have police helicopters that fly around. I got so panicked after sneaking around for a while that I was sure that the police helicopter was watching me at Santa Monica City College or wherever I was.
" . . .
" . . . Blackie Levinson* . . . [ha]d been in Synanon two or three times while I'd been there, but I knew him from before, from jail. . . ." p. 452
"Laurie and I were friends with a couple, life-stylers, who had an apartment in the Clump. They were going back east to visit their families for the holidays and told us we could stay at their place for a whole week while they were gone. Laurie sensed that I was leaving, even though I couldn't tell her. We had a wonderful week together in that apartment and when it was over I gave Blackie a call and told him to come pick me up." p 453
Chapter 24 The Return of Art Pepper, 1971-1978
" . . .
"Bob and Nikki Deal had a proposition to make me. Bob recently opened a health food bakery in Venice, Good Stuff Bread. They lived next door to the bakery; they had an extra room, and they told me if I'd like , I could stay with them, and work with Bob, helping around the bakery, keeping the books. . . .
"Bob made a heavy dark brown bread, . . . and a carrot cake, a banana cake, and an apple cake all out of whole wheat. . . .p. 456
Afterward
Laurie Pepper, nee Miller: " . . .
"During the summer of 1959, when I was in my teens, I worked at an L.A, coffee house called The Ash Grove. I sold records in a shop in the club. Ed Michel was the house rhythm section. He played the bass for the folkies who didn't bring their own bands. Ed was dating one of the waitresses, and he and I became good pals. When he wasn't working we'd spend hours talking and philosophizing. He was wise and old. I think he was 21. I went off to college and Ed went to work for Pacific Jazz and then Verve in L.A. So Ed and I never saw each other again. For eighteen years. Until one Saturday in 1976 or 1977, Les Konig called to say that he would be coming by Donte's, an L.A. jazz club, to hear Art play. That was rare. He was bringing two friends, both record producers. John Snyder and Ed Michel. Ed Michel! Does he play the bass? Same guy. The evening was fine; Art played wonderfully. He played some ballad, and Les, not given much to praise let alone hyperbole, remarked that Art was probably the greatest ballad player living. John agreed. Ed said, " Oh, I don't know . . ." p. 486
Jenny Pirie*, Peter Kastner* and Jeff Mudrick* A Short History of Ocean Park, Ocean Park Community Organization, 1982, (With a 1983 update.) 15pp. 1983, 1982, 1976, 1973, 1970, 1970s, 1967, 1960s
"Real estate development leveled off somewhat in the nineteen sixties, but grew into a speculative boom by the eary nineteen seventies, usually with little consideration for the people who lived in Ocean Park (88% of whom were renters by 1970). The number of new apartment buildings multiplied; rents increased; and the population of the community itself began to change from a blue-collar "tenant community" of people who lived and worked in Ocean Park to a rental suburb, increasingly populated by young professionals who commuted to work outside the area. The completion in 1967 of the Santa Monica Freeway, giving easy access into and out of Ocean Park, was probably the single most important factor influencing this transition. But the net result of real estate development during those years was to create a serious threat to Ocean Park as a source of low-cost housing.
"In the early seventies, Ocean Park residents began organizing to resist the pressures of real estate development and to preserve Ocean Park as a seaside community affordable to low and moderate income people. Beginning in 1973, The Church in Ocean Park, on Hill Street, became a center of this activism and community spirit.
"There were some successes in these early organizing days: in 1973 the battle to save the Santa Monica Pier from demolition was won; but there were also setbacks: in 1976, residents failed to stop the Santa Monica Redevelopment Agency from subsidizing the development of what has become Santa Monica Place without adequate consideration for the impact on the surrounding community. And the "revitalization" of Main Street surged ahead in the late seventies with little or no input from local residents affected by the change. Main Street had fallen into considerable decay, but its transformation into a boulevard of luxury businesses and expensive restaurants had nothing to do with the needs of the people living in the area, and only increased the already serious problems of crime and traffic."
Andrea Schulte-Peevers and David Peevers Los Angeles, Lonely Planet: Oakland, 2nd ed., 1996(1999), 351pp., 1999, 1996, 1970s
"The '70s saw an emergence of art by ethinic artists, notably the Latino group 'Los Four' (Frank Romero, Beto de la Rocha, Gilbert Lujan* and Carlos Almaraz), which focused on public art and gave the city many colorful murals and extravagant sculptures. Women artists were always underrepresented, although muralist Judith Baca has certainly left her mark all over the city." pp. 30 - 31.
Jeffrey Stanton Santa Monica Pier A History from 1875 to 1990, Donahue Publishing: Los Angeles, CA, 1990, 1970s
Santa Monica Pier on the Skids (1941-1974)
" . . . Nov. 1971, plans to build an island . . .
" . . . Opposition to the island was spearheaded by the Los Angeles chapter of the Sierra Club, . . . spokesman Ron Allin . . . the skyscraper hotel would interfere with a clear view of the sea. . . ." p. 135
"Councilman Nat Trives [was for the project] . . . Councilwoman Clo Hoover . . . City Council 6-0 for . . .
" . . . "Save Santa Monica Bay Committee", headed by Pierter van den Steenhoven . . . asked for a referendum . . . City Attorney Richard Knickerbocker [technically refused]. . . ..
"The anti-island group's strategy was to stall for time while waiting for the passage of the California Coastal Protection Initiative (Proposition 20) . . .
"The Save . . . The Bay . . . filed their suit in Santa Monica Superior Court on September 8, 1972 . . ." p. 136
" . . . Even the Santa Monica Evening Outlook newspaper campaigned against the island. They said " Major harbor improvements is a highly desirable goal but linking it to the hoped for financial success of a towering hotel a few hundred yards offshore is a concept the public has made it clear they will not buy." Prop. 20 passed by 55% of the state voters and 61% of Santa Monica voters. . . .
"On Dec. 22, 1972 the Santa Monica City Council announced it would reassess its stand on the island . . . Mayor Anthony Dituri . . .
" . . .
"Two hundred Santa Monica island foes jammed the January 9, 1973 City Council meeting as a result of a misleading radio report that the island was on the agenda. . . .
"The Council . . . agreed to an island hearing plan to be held at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium on Jan. 23rd [1974]. Leonard Clunes, who had been coordinating the petition drive to put the island on the ballot, yelled out at the meeting [where the real agenda item had been the pier lease and plans for tearing down the pier], "We have a legal right to the Pier!" . . . A group of young people let out repeated yells of "Save Santa Monica Pier" as [they] left the meeting." p. 137
"Many members of the anti-island group were young anti-war activists, UCLA students drawn to Santa Monica's Ocean Park neighborhood by low rents and beach front living. The pier provided a focus for these radicals who were strongly consevation oriented and perceived Scott's plan as an outgrowth of a business-dominated municipal government. . . .
"The . . . [EIR] . . . favored the project, . . . there would be a . . . disruption of the southward drift of sand. . . .
"Councilman Arthur Rinck . . . announced his opposition to the proposed plan. "I'd like to see both piers removed and the beach returned to its natural state." He also said that the removal of the piers would make the beaches safer since it attracts many undesirables.
"Over a thousand people packed the Civic Auditorium for the January 23 Santa Monica Island hearing. . . . The council voted 4-2 to scrap . . . the Council's action amounted to termination of the contract.
"The boistrous partisan crowd was jubilant . . . Councilman Arthur Rinck made a motion to demolish both piers . . . Robert Gabriel, James Reidy, Arthur Rinck and Mayor Anthony Dituri [voted for], John McCloskey and Clo Hoover were opposed. . . .
"The following day, City Manager Perry Scott spoke out favoring the removing of the Santa Monica Pier . . . said city taxpayers were subsidizing the business operators on the pier. "There's a very substantial use of the pier by those who don't spend money. I'm talking about kids and the elderly who come out to dangle hooks. The pier might be charming to some folks - but I wonder how much the general public should pay for that charm."
"The pier's merchants . . . formed "Friends of the Santa Monica Pier" and began meeting daily at Al's Kitchen. Larry Barber, the restaurant's cook, became head . . . "We believe the pier is too central to the identity of Santa Monica to be destroyed. It's like family. You don't get rid of your grandmother because she is a little old."
"Jack Sikking, the manager of Al's Kitchen . . . Joan Crowne, owner of Al's Kitchen. . . . produced a Save the Santa Monica Pier booklet . . . would be losing a unique historic landmark . . .
"Diane Cherman was co-chair of "Save Santa Monica Pier Citizen's Committee" . . . produced petitions, brochures, radio and newspaper advertising and . . . bumper stickers . . .
"The four Councilmen refused to be intimidated . . . "The pier is a tired, old and dingy thing and the economics of fixing it up are not worth it," the Mayor asserted. "After it is down maybe the people will support a bond issue to put up something else. I'm not in favor of the taxpayer's subsidizing the businesses that have been drawing the criminal and drug elements to the city."
". . . the Council refused to hear the overflow 350 people who attended the February 13, 1973 City Council Meeting. . . p.138
" . . . on April 10, 1973 . . . Incumbents Robert Gabriel, James Reidy, Jr. and Arthur Rinck were defeated . . . electing Fred M. Judson, Donna Swink, John McCloskey and Pieter van den Steenhoven and an initiative that required voter approval of Santa Monica Bay development.
"The new City Council elected Clo Hoover as Mayor, and . . . decided not to renew Perry Scott's contract. . .
" . . .
" . . . Maynard Ostrow and his partner Harold Kleinman in August 1973 opened a bumper car ride on the site of the defunct La Monica Ballroom. . . . p. 141
" . . . City Manager James D. Williams . . .
" . . . March 4th, 1974 Carousel Fire set by two sixteen year old youths who were never apprehended. . . ." p. 144
" . . .
"The City Council voted 5-0 to approve the pier pact on June 29, 1974, [establishing its ownership, dissolving any liability for Mrs. Winslow and contolling its own liability.] p. 145
Chapter 6: City Owned Pier (1974-1990)
"The city, aware that their newly acquired pier would require money to rehabilitate, hired . . . an outside consultant, Economic Research Associates, to prepare a financial plan . . . . [It was necessary] to bring the Newcomb Pier up to building code requirements.
"The group studied the demographics and spending habits of the 2.4 million yearly visitors and found that 70% were either young people age 12-18 or senior citizens. . . .
" . . . George Gordon* who owned the carousel . . . reopened for business on Oct. 11, 1974. . . .
"On October 18, 1974 Santa Monica unveiled a . . . plan to rehabilitate the pier. . . . In addition, the plan recommended that the city clear the blighted area near the pier by acquiring . . . two run-down apartments and four dilapidated houses in the crime infested area south of the pier.
"Councilman John McCloskey raised doubts . . ." p. 146
"With Nat Trives absent that night . . .
"The $1.5 million program for restoring the pier and clearing out the blight around the pier was approved by a 6-1 margina at the following Council meeting. McCloskey remained opposed. The city decided to issue revenue bonds for the two and one half year project, and spend . . . from a federal grant to buy the Seabright and Purser Apartments, breeding grounds for crime.
"The Council's action guaranteed that the quaint, small town character of the pier would be preserved, and that it would not be developed into a grandiose commercial venture. Clo Hoover said, "the plan shows the City Manager really listens and responds to what the city wants." . . .
"Frank Gehry* & Associates was chosen in January 1975 as the architect for the pier. The Beach Committee's choice was unanimous because Gehry's proposal showed the needed sensitivity to the special character of the pier and its environment. . . .
" . . .
"Meanwhile the group called the "Citizen's Initiative to Preserve the Piers" was campaigning on behalf of Proposition #1, the initiative to preserve both piers for all time. It took them two years to get the initiative placed on the April 8th ballot. . . . " p. 146
"Prop # 1 won on April 8, 1975 by a 2 to 1 margin, assuring that both the Santa Monica Pier and the Newcomb pier would be preserved indefinitely. The measure permitted any resident of Santa Monica or its surrounding communities to file a lawsuit to stop a violation of the ordinance. [It] did not preempt enforcement of existing health and safety regulations . . .
"Los Angeles County decided to dedicate the Santa Monica Pier as an official L.A. County Historical Landmark on Pier Day, Sunday May 18, 1975. It was the opening day event for Santa Monica's centennial year, and James Hayes, chairman of the L.A. Board of Supervisors did the honors. Thousands attended the event that included an art contest and a beachwear fashion show featuring styles from 1875 to 1975. The Jaycees sponsored pie eating, bubble gum bubble blowing, corn eating and whistling contests. Radio station KIIS broadcast the Jerry Mason show live from a 8 x 50 foot hot-air gondola tethered to the pier.
"The pier hosted another large crowd in August for the city's 14th annual Sports and Arts Festival. The eleven day festival in late August featured swimming and paddleboard races, fishing contests, and life guard competition. A Keith Williams big band concert was held on the pier on August 24th.
" . . . Community Development Grant . . . Gehry's* plans . . . for the face lift were approved in September . . . for a wooden boardwalk between the carousel building and Moby's Dock restaurant, new stairs on both the north and south side of the pier for easier beach access, forty new benches, and additional pier lighting. . . . Work began in January 1976, and the project was completed by June. . . ." p.148
"McClosky opposed using the Community Development Grant for pier repairs rather than housing for the elderly. "The pier," he said, "is no historic monument and besides it carries no fire insurance." Mayor Nat Trives said the pier fell in the category of recreation for low and moderate income persons . . .
"After federal funds were officially granted in June, a group of residents challenged their use by mounting a letter wriing campaign to HUD officials . . . City grants coordinator, Martha Brown Hicks, . . .
"The city's Landmark's commission in 1976, after studying the pier's history, declared the pier a historic landmark. The commissioners did so primarily to control changes on the pier. Landmark status meant that the city was required to apply to its Landmark Commission for certificates of appropriateness to make alterations.
"In January 1977 the city decided to buy the merry-go-round to assure it would stay on the pier forever. . . .
" . . " p.151
"The city applied for a third year of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) funds to complete the pier's structural repairs. . . .[U.S. Congressman] Robert K. Dornan came out in favor of the carousel after Arthur Rinck of the Santa Monica Housing Commission tried to divert funds to a loan program to rehabilitate housing for the elderly. . . Newly elected Councilman Perry Scott was always against the pier . . .
" . . .Councilwoman Christine Reed . . .
"Several developments were proposed as well as several rehabilitation projects . . .
"The [City's] Entertainment Facilities Department, [headed by Jack Ferris,] was now in charge of the pier as well as the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium.
" . . . in March 1978 . . .permanently close[d] the pier to all vehicular traffic beyond the pier parking lot. . . . Most of the traffic, a high percentage of cruising teenagers, used to drive to the end of the pier not stop or patronize any of the pier business. . . .
" . . .
"Santa Monica's City Council by a vote of 4-3 quickly approved the [proposed] projects at their July 17, 1978 meeting. . . . Perry Scott was one of the three dissenters . . . He called the waterslide a "reincarnation of the old Pacific Ocean Park." Christine Reed defended the vote by saying, "I don't think the pier is going to turn into a POP. We're trying to get a pier to be a place where families get together.
" . . . .
"Approval for the project was sought from the South Coast Regional Coastal Commission at their September 11th meeting. Approval was denied. Commissioner Ruth Galanter* . . . "It's not necessarily that there's anything wrong with any of these uses, its just the question of the mix of types of uses." . . .
"The pier project was approved unanimously at the Coastal Commission's October meeting.
" . . . Henry Curtis* [Custis] from Ocean Park, John Longenecker from Beverly Hills and Colleen Creedon, who had lived above the carousel before the fire and didn't want to give up her home, appealed the decsion to the State Coastal Commission in Sacramnento. Commissioner Hank Doerfling, the South Coast body's representative [was for the project's approval] . . .
"The appeal was not heard. p. 152
" . . . during the spring of 1979 . . .
" . . . Moby's Dock restaurant [owned by Clarence Harmon*] was remodeled and the Boathouse restaurant expanded. George Gordon* tripled the size of his Beachcomber gift shop. . . .
" . . . Barbara Williams, who would become the head of Friends of the Santa Monica Carousel . . .
"The National Carousel Association became more involved and held their annual conference in Santa Monica on the weekend of September 14-16, 1979 . . .
"In December the city, squeezed for funds by Proposition 13, decided they would no longer subsidize pier parking . . .
" . . . " p. 153
Jeffrey Stanton Venice of America: 'Coney Island of the Pacific,' Donahue Publishing: Los Angeles, CA, 1987. 176 pp., 1974, 1973, 1968
"A.J. Bumb became Trustee of the park, and on April 25, 1968 federal bankruptcy referee Norman Neukom gave permission to dispose of the park. When he was asked if P.O.P. might be saved, he replied, 'No Chance! Santa Monica doesn't want it there.'
"The auction began on June 28, 1968 and ran through the 30th. The proceeds from the sale of 36 rides and sixteen games were used to pay off creditors. The park's dilapidated buildings and pier structure remained until several fires and the final demolition in the winter 1973 - 1974 removed it from all but people's fond memories. The long era of Venice/Ocean Park amusement parks was finally over." p. 170
Les Storrs Santa Monica Portrait of a City Yesterday and Today, Santa Monica Bank: Santa Monica, CA, 1974, 67 pp., 1974, 1973, 1970s
" . . . three new faces on council led to a new city manager, James Williams . . . took over late in 1973. . . .
Pp. 48, 49 [Photo captions: "Third Street as it looked from Broadway in 1888 and below in 1973 . . ."; "Santa Monica Mall, in addition to providing a stimulus for the downtown area, is widely known as a "people place," as this photo, taken at the time of an outdoor art exhibit, plainly shows. Citizens stroll on the mall at all hours, whether stores are open or not, enjoying the absence of vehicular traffic."]
" . . .
"First city engineer and public works director under the present form of government was . . . Maurice M. King . . . succeeded by Bartlett L. Kennedy . . . his deputy was Marcel Gentillon . . . a navy officer in World War II . . . .
"Police chiefs . . . Earl Reinbold . . . assistant Gerald Constable . . . retired in 1974 and was succeeded by George Tielsch.
Two fire chiefs stand out . . . Charles Carrel and John Sturges . . .
Kenneth O. Grubb has been city clerk, responsible for licenses and records . . .
"Santa Monica has one of the few publically owned bus lines which does not operate at a loss . . .
" . . . the result of able management [by] William Farrell and his successor, John Hutchison . . . .
"Parks and recreation, under the direction of Donald Arnett, have helped enhance Santa Monica's reputation as a city having more than the usual number of trees, beautifully maintained parks, and recreational facilities to fit the needs of people of all ages. . . . the actual maintenance of parks was, until fairly recently, a function of the department of public works.
" . . . Ron Severeid lent the necessary expertise to the botanical side of the problem . . . .
"Administrative services . . . have been placed under the supervision of Richard Aronoff. Wayne Higbee was personnel director for a number of years; the late Ashley Shaw was the purchasing agent who set up the program of central warehousing . . .
"Clyde Fitzgerald, airport director, and Jeremy Faris, manager of the Civic Auditorium . . .
"William A. Hard and later Frank Gaudio, directors of finance . . .
Chapter Seven Commercial, Economic and Social Developments
" . . .
"In the beginning, and in the first two decades of the present century, Santa Monica was basically a community of homes, served by what would be described today as "convenience" commercial facilities.
"People lived, in general, on incomes derived from other sources than local, whether the breadwinner of the family worked in downtown Los Angeles, or whether he was, in the language of the day, " a gentleman of leisure," meaning that he had a fixed income . . .
"Virtually all residents lived in single family homes.
"Today four out of five families in Santa Monica are apartment dwellers; today the community has a very substantial economic base derived from numerous industries and from commercial activities which are regional in their clientele.
" . . .
"In the early days, Santa Monica had but one commercial bank, the Bank of Santa Monica, although in 1902 the Ocean Park Bank was organized, and in 1905 the First National Bank of Ocean Park.
"Banks continued to be local institutions for many years, until the branch banking system began to develop and to absorb the smaller institutions, largely during the period of economic expansion which followed World War I and which came to a crashing halt with the bank holiday of 1919 and the subsequent Great Depression.
"In contrast with those early days, Santa Monica now has one major community bank, the Santa Monica Bank, which shortly will celebrate its forty-sixth anniversary, and ranks nationally among the top 600 in the country. It has branches in West Los Angeles, Pacific Palisades, Marina del Rey, and two in Santa Monica in addition to the head office at Fourth Street and Arizona Avenue. Organized originally as the Santa Monica Savings Bank, chartered February 17, 1928, it received a new charter as the Santa Monica Commercial and Savings Bank in 1934 and in 1958 a third charter changed the name to its present designation as the Sasnta Monica Bank.
"Aubrey E. Austin, Sr., was one of the organizers, and became president early in the 1930s. He was succeeded by his son Aubrey E. Austin, Jr.
"Santa Monica's present importance as a financial center is indicated by . . . fourteen branch offices of other banks. They include: Bank of America, City National Bank, Crocker National Bank, First Western Bank, Security Paciific National Bank, Southern Californis First National Bank, Union Bank, United California Bank and Wells Fargo Bank.
"In addition, Santa Moonica has eight savings and loan association offices, two of which, Century Federal and First Federal of Santa Monica have headquarters in Santa Monica and branches in other communities. Others are American, California Federal, Gibraltar, Home, State Mutual and Glendale Federal.
"Pennsylvania Life Insurance Co. has its head office on Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica to serve the entire Southern California area.
" . . .
" . . . the Douglas Aircraft Co., now McDonnell-Douglas, Santa Monica plant is . . . being phased out.
"The Rand Corp., which grew out of a group of scientists and engineers working for Douglas more than three decades ago, a think factory, began by doing in depth research for the armed forces, mainly the Air Force. This continues today, but research also is done for clients of all sorts, form industry to government. Staff is made up very largely of engineers and former college and university faculty members having expertise in many fields.
"Second generation outgrowth of Douglas is System Development Corp., which . . . develops . . . systems for the computerization of . . . operations. It was formed when this phase of the Rand operation grew so large . . .
"Santa Monica is looked upon with favor as a base of operation for many businesses . . . it is the headquarters of General Telephone Company of California, a subsidary of General Telephone and Electronics. . . . .
"In the industrial area, Santa Monica is the home of Papermate . . .
" . . .
" . . . the Southern Californi Rapid Transit District.
" . . . the downtown area lies very close to the Santa Monica Freeway, which places the entire westerly portion of the Los Angeles metropolitan area within 20 minutes driving time from Santa Monica. Completion of the the freeway was perhaps the most significant event of its time.
"This came about largely through the efforts of Robert E. McClure, then a member of the California Highway Commission. The freeway has brought Santa Monica within 20 minutes driving time of downtown Los Angeles, the San Fernando Valley and the South Bay cities . . .
" . . .
" . . . Santa Monica long ago approved bonds which enabled the University of California to establish its Los Angeles campus in Westwood, a decision which has greatly indluenced the community ever since.
" . . .
"So Santa Monica., surrounded on three sides by Los Angeles and on the fourth by the Pacific Ocean, a city of only 8.1 square miles of area, maintains a degree of self sufficiency, and a strong sense of communtiy identity.
" . . . the present trend toward condominium apartments rather than rentals. The family which owns its own apartment is likely to develop a greater degree of political and social responsibility . . .
" . . . continuing unabated in 1974 . . . the old Miramar Hotel, recently acquired by Fujita Corp,, USA, . . . "
Clopp. Ssh . . . RRRaaaaoooowwwwwwrrr
rrrrrrrrrr&endash;reeeee eeeeeeppp&endash;rrraaaaooooo
wwwwwwrrrrrrrrppppppp&endash; tic!&endash;rrraaaa
ooooowwwwwrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr&endash;reeeeeeeeeee
eeeeppp&endash;tic!&endash;schrapp!
BAM! COMBP!&endash;RRrraaaoooowwwwwrr
rrrrrrrrrrrrrrr&endash;
&endash;TNK!&endash;rrraaaaooooowwwwrrrrrrrrrrr
Sean Wilsey On Skateboarding, Using So Little, London Review of Books, 25, no. 12, 19 June 2003, pp.18&endash;21, 1970s, 1980, 1990s
"Skateboarding's inspiration springs from adversity: surfers without waves; pools without water (1970s skating owes much to the California drought); kids without family. It's a particular product of American rootlessness . . . Skateboarding has always been a 'sport' for fuck-ups.
" . . .
"The best skaters of the late 1980s and early 1990s&endash;Natas Kaupas, Tommy Guerrero, Mark Gonzales, Rodney Mullen&endash; would do the Embarcadero just for fun, not for cameras. They were street skaters. They skated and talked to everyone, then flew back into the city in search of spots. Stylistically, Natas Kaupas (Satan Sapuak backwards, Sapuak, according to Thrasher means 'God' in some ancient language) was my favorite.
" . . .
" . . . Skateboarders are not role models.
"Skateboarding is observing things minutely. It is tuning the world out: cutting your hand and not noticing till hours later. Looking at the world like a skater means looking down. It means rarely raising your eyes above kerb level, constantly monitoring the smoothness of concrete and being alert to the presence of pebbles or grit, experiencing an instant elevation in your mood when you roll through a spot where you've successfully pulled a trick, and depression and superstition in a place where you've slammed&endash;no matter the scumminess or beauty of the location in conventional terms. Skateboarding is bringing emotion to emotionless terrain&endash;unloved parking lots, vacant corporate downtowns long after the office workers are home. . . .
"Skateboarding is unresearchable: anecdotal, singular, self-expressive. And that's the problem with The Answer is Never,(Century, 2002, 354pp.) Jocko Weyland's history of skateboarding (which began an an article in Thrasher), as well as the recent skateboarding documentary Dog Town and the Z-Boys. Both try to do it all. . . .
" . . .
"'Using so little.' It's the perfect indictment of everything that's wrong with, and the most succinct encapsulation of everything that's great about skateboarding. The beauty of using so little in a country that uses so much. Living for a plank and four wheels in a profligate culture. And the saddening fact that Thrasher has stopped moving against the wind. . . .
"Skateboarding has joined right in with commercial American culture&endash;and there's something frighteningly involuntary about this numbing and succumbing. . . . And now it doesn't know what to do.
" . . .
"This is a strange time in the history of skateboarding and its homeland. It looks both more alive and more dead than ever before. Every ad and photo in all the skate magazines is eerily the same. In a 'sport' that's all about imagination&endash;like a country all about freedom&endash;nobody has any idea what to do. Skateboarding seeems both ashamed of itself and not nearly ashamed enough. And it doesn't get any more American than that.
" . . . "