Episode 36: The History of the Mesa

Scott Willams: Sweet Home Santa Barbara, where the skies are so blue. Sweet Home Santa Barbara, what’s worked for me can work for you.

Jonathan Robinson: Welcome back friends to Sweet Home Santa Barbara. I am your co-host, Jonathan Robinson. I’m with my friend and real estate broker and co-host

Scott Williams: Scott Williams.

Jonathan Robinson: And today we are going to be talking about The Mesa, which is your area of expertise more than even most other places. So you probably know a fair amount about it. What can you tell us about the history of The Mesa way back when?

Scott Willams: Okay. Well, let me take you back a couple of hundred thousand years. Let’s start back at the beginning. Mesa means a table in Spanish and it’s a raised-up piece of land. And the reason why it’s raised up, The Mesa used to go all the way across from where it is The Mesa, across the front of Santa Barbara, two and a half miles over to Montecito. It was raised up on Montecito, but there was geological changes, earthquakes of various sorts. And the whole center of town that two and a half miles that Santa Barbara is in, fell down or dropped, Mesa stayed up high. And then over thousands of years, the creeks, the Sycamore Canyon Creek, and the Mission Creek filled in Santa Barbara with all the debris that came down from the mountains. That’s how we have this, it’s set up this way. And the geology of The Mesa is important to how the Mesa has developed at the base of The Mesa down at the city college end of things. We have some of the oldest remains of an Indian village is at the site of where the city college is. Just where the city and The Mesa met, that was an important juncture there.

But the Mesa was a bit more isolated because all along the front of The Mesa there’s cliffs that are 40 to 80 feet high. And so you had to scale the side walls of The Mesa either from the beach and that was a fairly daunting climb or between the town and The Mesa was also fairly steep. If you could think about the hill that we call TV Hill, because K-E-Y TV, the television station’s on top of the hill there, it’s much sharper than 45 degrees. It must be 50, 60 degrees. It’s a very, very steep slope. So The Mesa was left out of the way where people lived in Santa Barbara because it was hard to get there.

Jonathan Robinson: Interesting.

Scott Willams: And that has been instrumental in making The Mesa the way it is.

Jonathan Robinson: So instead of getting much of a population, was it used for agriculture? What was it used for?

Scott Willams: Well, in the 1800, middle of the 1800s, the federal government decided that there was enough shipping going in and out of Santa Barbara, that they carved out a 27 acre parcel right in the middle of The Mesa. And they said, we need to put in a lighthouse. And they sent a fellow lighthouse keeper with his wife, his pregnant wife, and they showed up and he decided I’ve got to build a house for her, and I’ve got to build a tower and put a light on the top of it. And so that’s what happened in 1856. And so within a year, less than a year, he built himself a house where Julia, his wife, had the baby and he took a look around at the land and said, okay, we’re taking care of the lighthouse here. But he said, this land looks good for farming. And he was right. So he promptly carved himself out 90 acres of land and started to farm it. And other people came in and it was a bit isolated from the city for sure, but it was relatively flat on top. So we had a couple of dozen acres from 80 to 200 acres. The Mesa’s a total of about 1900 acres of space. And farming began to… that’s what took over right then and there. That made it not so easy for people to want to live there because the farmers weren’t that interested in putting up houses.

Jonathan Robinson: I heard that at some point they even had like an airport in The Mesa?

Scott Willams: Yeah. Let’s get to that. I want to go back to Julia though for just a second because when her husband said, “I don’t really want to take care of this lighthouse,” she said, “Okay, I’ll do it.” She planted all these flowers around the lighthouse and the mission, which has always been the number one tourist attraction in Santa Barbara. Number two was to take your bicycle and drive out there and go see Julia and her flowers and take a look at her lighthouse. And for 40 years, she lit that lighthouse every single day and was the popular tourist attraction to go out and talk to Julia.

But when we got past that period of time in the 1920s, we had a couple of competing things going on here. They drilled for oil and they hit oil. It turned out to be a fairly low quality crude, but it was a boom. And people took a look at this and thought, oh my gosh, I could get rich. It’s like, I’m going to buy a Bitcoin of the 1920s. And they would say, why don’t I put down an oil well and become an oil baron all myself and you could buy 100 by 100 plot of land. And the purpose of this was to put your own oil well down. So a lot of people did. And they didn’t know how to manage an oil field and so they promptly ruined the oil field, but they put up these 50 to 80 foot tall derricks and they even had gushers. The oil would come in and then this oil would spurt up out of the derrick and fly across the neighborhood and people’s clothes out on their clotheslines would get all covered with tar. Gushers were not entirely popular things to happen, but the competition with the oil wells was that Earl Ovington started flying his airplane into Santa Barbara. And airplanes were new in the 1820s, relatively new, and very popular.

Jonathan Robinson: 1920s,

Scott Willams: 1920S, right. And he decided he wanted to have The Mesa be the airport because it was a nice big flat spot. But when they started to throw these 50 and 80-foot derricks up into the air, this was a real problem for these airplanes that those were so tall and it’s fortunate that we had the oil happen, but it kept us from being the airport.

Jonathan Robinson: Now around that same time, Santa Barbara had major earthquake. I’m wondering how that impacted The Mesa.

Scott Willams: Well, it did. In 1925 was the big earthquake and there was a fellow Dibble’s castle, let me see if I can remember his name. Thomas Dibble had built a big house there, what’s now City College. And the house was all built out of stone. It was a very castly type place and it fell down in the earthquake and fell a name of Ledbetter bought it. And Ledbetter at the beach out in front of it is still known today as Ledbetter’s Beach. And he took that over the castle and he built that whole wall that’s a long cliff drive, that’s all out of stone. That’s all formally from Dibble’s Castle. And it’s now the wall that is the edge of the City College and where Cliff Drive goes past it there. He stayed there for a few years and then moved over to Montecito and he sold and donated the land, is Polo Field is what today. City College is the football field. He donated that to the City College and Santa Barbara City College has on numerous occasions won the number one position for best community college in the United States.

Jonathan Robinson: Well, it is gorgeous. And how did it start? How’d they decide to put City College there?

Scott Willams: Well, that’s because Ledbetter both gave and then donated and then sold land for the City College and the city fathers, if we want to call them that, the city mothers, I’m sure were involved, wanted there to be a college there. And as that was taking off, that became a fabulous spot for college.

Jonathan Robinson: Yeah. So, we’re up to around the 1920s, what happened ’30s, ’40s, ’50s?

Scott Willams: Well, it was an interesting group right there at 1919. A fellow name of George Littlefield bought about 90 acres running up the Fellowship Valley. And he had a religious group that wanted to live communally there. And he set up the Red Rose Press and he actually published religious attracts all the way until his death in the 1940s. And quite a group of people gathered around him, and they divided up, which Skyline Circle and Fellowship Circle. These lots are all in circles and every lot is shaped like a piece of pie. And people live there until there was enough religious dissension in the group and with the coming of the oil, eventually, it broke up. But there’s still many houses that are built on the lots that they built up at that time.

I just saw in my notes here that the City College actually was firmly established in 1954. So that was the date the City College came along there. Post World War II, there was a huge housing boom. Remember because this was farming land, it had been left out of the growth of Santa Barbara until after World War II. And with the coming of the GIs the GI Bill and you could buy a house, they took these large farms and broke them up and they built the largest subdivision. The first subdivision that was ever built in Santa Barbara was 1951. This is the Marine Terrace, which is fronting on Shoreline Park. And then the addition was done in 1954, 502 houses all toll together the largest and the first. There’s never been anything like it before. It’s interesting, back in those days, you could spend $9,900 for a two-bedroom, one-bathhouse, and the most expensive ones, the three-bedroom, one-bath with a two-car garage was $11,400. Back in those days, you could go to the developer and a normal home came with a one-car garage, and if you wanted to have a second garage, it was $300. And only one out of eight people in 1951, decided that they would ever have any possibility of having two cars.

Jonathan Robinson: I miss those days.

Scott Willams: Those were the days. What the heck? Well, the developer kept all the prime oceanfront property there in front of Shoreline Park, and he had visions of hotels and restaurants. Like developers do, he had this beautiful vision, but he got tagged by the neighborhood and said, you’re going to build a red light district with all those bars, the concentration on the alcohol, the bars at the end of the block of our homes. And so they fought him for it. He eventually said, Uncle and the city of Santa Barbara said, we’ll buy the land from you. This is 15 acres of Oceanfront. And they put it up for a bond issue in 1968 in the City of Santa Barbara. And their wisdom spent $1 million to buy his 15 acres of Oceanfront, and that’s what Shoreline Park is.

Jonathan Robinson: Oh, wow.

Scott Willams: So today those $10,000, $11,000 homes are now selling for $2 million. So from being the area that nobody wanted to live and it was just farms, it’s become the most expensive neighborhood in Santa Barbara for what you get for your money for that 1100 square foot house for $2 million. It’s even more expensive than Hope Ranch or Montecito for what you get for your $2 million.

Jonathan Robinson: Wow. So, you’ve been working this area as a specialty for a long time. What changes have you seen in your career?

Scott Willams: Most importantly, it went from an area where people didn’t want to live to an area where people do want to live. The subdivisions are being erased because people want to remodel the homes and it becomes more and more a custom enclave right next to the ocean, which of course it deserves to be because it’s a beautiful beach community right next to the ocean with views. And slowly but surely the world has come around to say that’s a really nice place to live. And it’s really an expensive place to live.

Jonathan Robinson: Yeah, and with cars, these fact that it’s a little bit separate from the city is actually probably a bonus rather than a drawback.

Scott Willams: That’s true. Because of its location next to the ocean. In the summertime, it’s 10 to 12 degrees cooler than the downtown on any given day. And in the wintertime, it’s 10 to 12 degrees warmer than the downtown of Santa Barbara. It’s only two miles away than any given day. So it’s a microclimate that’s very desirable, both in summer and in winter.

Jonathan Robinson: Well, I’ll take a dozen houses. Thank you.

Scott Willams Yes. Remember there’s 1900 acres there, so it’s actually slightly less dense. There’s about 3,900 parcels, about 12,000 people are there then downtown or San Rocky or the other parts of town. So it feels just a little bit more generous with what you get for your money as far as your land where you put your house than most of Santa Barbara. All of this adds up to a nice place where about 12,000 people live.

Jonathan Robinson: Yeah. Well, if people want to know about The Mesa, about what you do, best way to get ahold of you?

Scott Willams: Well, they should contact me through email, scott@scottwilliams.com.

Jonathan Robinson: Great. And thank you all our listeners for tuning into another episode of The History of Santa Barbara on Sweet Home Santa Barbara.

Scott Willams: Thank you for listening. Please subscribe to our podcast on your favorite app. If you know someone preparing to sell their home, please tell them about the podcast. Visit scottwilliams.com to contact me and download the two free e-booklets “Is My House Saleable Now” and “How Not to Buy a Money Pit“. Thank you for listening.