Episode 30: History of the Waterfront

Jonathan Robinson: “Welcome, friend,” says Sweet Home Santa Barbara. I’m your co-host, Jonathan Robinson. I’m with my friend realtor and co-host.

Scott Williams: Scott Williams.

Jonathan: Good to see you again, Scott.

Scott: Everything’s good.

Jonathan: I’m really interested in this topic that we have today, which is really all about the Waterfront of Santa Barbara. There’s so many interesting things to know about. The first settlers here were the Spaniards, were they arriving by boat or over land?

Scott: Mostly, the original histories of Santa Barbara all came in from the ocean, the Spanish explorers. We’re not going to talk too much about the Spanish days. We’re going to move to the late 1700s, that’s where we’re going to start. The place is basically discovered from the water and settled from the water. Some of the other histories we talked about, sort of the other ways that you could get to Santa Barbara. Let’s start with the water.

Jonathan: How did it begin? We didn’t even have a harbor way back then.

Scott: Yes, it took quite a long time to get a harbor. Because back in the time and we had the Royal Presidio, which was the fortress from Spain. Just in passing when we talked about it in the east side, this is the final fortress that the Spanish built in the new world, and this was back in 1872.

Jonathan: You mean, 1782? I think it was earlier.

Scott: 1782, thank you. Exactly. The soldiers, they arrived. Actually, back in those days, the very first soldiers came up through California on horses. But they’re running quickly, knew that they needed to create a seaport here. At that, the front of the town is about 3.7 miles is exposed to the ocean across the front of town, didn’t really make for a good harbor. There’s no harbor there. When they were getting in off of the boats, the boats had anchor out offshore. 

They had to come in on little boats, they had to jump out of the boats, they had to go through the waves, they had to bring their belongings with them through the way. This was a hassle. The big ships, they did not like it at all for the weather. If the weather came up at all, they had to retreat from the beach because they knew that if they were too close to the beach, the waves would wash them right into the sand.

Jonathan: I heard that the Waterfront is really very different than it was, and it has changed a lot in the last 200 years. What’s a little bit of the history of that?

Scott: Well, it is true. All the neighborhoods of Santa Barbara, I would say, that fundamentally, the Waterfront has changed the most. When we go back in history, many people end up in quite a famous book. It was called Two Years Before the Mast. It was a memoir written by Richard Dana. This is covering the 1830s and 1840s and looks at Santa Barbara what it was like back then. This was the towel trade that like part of the parts of cows and the hides of cows, and they were picked up at the beach and he talks with great description about what Santa Barbara looked like in the 1830s. From what we can tell, this was a very accurate description of what the town looked like back in those days. If you really want to go back there, you’ll find it. Richard Dana’s book, Two Years Before the Mast.

Jonathan: I know that. I’ve heard rumors that water covered like where Santa Barbara City College now is.

Scott: That’s right. If you know the college, there’s a big flat football field right there at city college between the college and the beach. The water used to come all the way up to the base of the seats there for the football field, and all of the football field was underwater. That was the way it was back in those days. We’ll talk a little bit about how that field got filled in because there’s some interesting things that happened there, and it was also true that across the whole front was kind of marshes and much swampier than it is today. It’s all pretty much been filled in the saltwater marsh extended way, way up into the east side of Santa Barbara.

Jonathan: Now, we have a lighthouse. What’s the history of that?

Scott: California had become a state in 1850, and the town established itself as a town. The military said, “If we’re going to have boats coming by here, we need to have a lighthouse.” In 1856, a lighthouse was constructed on the Mesa and it was tended until 1925, where the 1925 earthquake knocked it down. But that area there on the Mesa is still occupied by the National Guard, there are still houses there for National Guard people and they still have, of course, it’s quite automated. A very modern white house, but it’s still right there.

Jonathan: Now, you mentioned the 1925 earthquake. There’s also a bigger one even earlier, if I remember, that created quite a tsunami.

Scott: Yeah, tsunami is also known as a tidal wave. There was a 50-foot tidal wave from an 1812 earthquake out in the channel, that threw all this water up in the Santa Barbara and it came up into the middle of town as far as a Canon Perdido Street and Salsa Puentes, which is practically where the high school is right now, it came all the way up. Fortunately, there was not much damage. But that’s pretty just amazing that that much water could come that far inland from an earthquake.

Jonathan: Let’s hope that never happens again.

Scott: We couldn’t handle that anymore. Of course, we’re not going to really address climate change but it’s possible that option may come in further than it is now.

Jonathan: Now, without a harbor for a long period of time, how did people get to shore?

Scott: Remember that park the beach, park the boat off the beach and then come in through the waves and such a mess. As the town grew, they just saw that that was a shortcoming that needed. In the back of their mind, they thought, “We’d like to have a harbor.” But the first thing they did was they built up here. This was in night 1868 and this pier was actually fairly short. It was at the base of Chapala Street and accept the bigger ships really couldn’t come into it. It was helpful in some ways. But in the back of the town’s mind, it was like, “We need a bigger pier.”

Jonathan: When did that bigger pier, what’s the history of that?

Scott: We call it Stearns Wharf, that’s a good reason for that because John Stearns had a lumber yard at the base of State Street and he would bring in lumber from the ships. They floated in on the waves and then he supplied the lumber that we’ve built the town with. He decided, “Let’s build a bigger pier.” That was controversial politically, because we had a short pier and he wanted to build one 1,500 feet out in the water, so that the bigger ships could come in and he made an application in the city. 

The city could tell, everybody in town knew, if he builds this pier, the little pier will be put out of business. But we wanted the bigger pier, we wanted to like join the world. The city eventually did approve it, and the other pier sort of made a living for a few more years as a pleasure pier. It was more fine, but eventually, that was knocked down in a storm. But in 1872, he put the 1,500 feet out into the water and big ships, passengers commerce, the town sort of got on the map with us having that pier there.

Jonathan: It sounds like boom times at that point. Is that kind of what happened?

Scott: Yes, a lot of people flocking in the 1870s to the town. Bathhouses, open hotels, suddenly we had streetcar service all across the beach from East Beach, to West Beach, and back up into the town. This was long before the railroad came, that was about 20 years later. For a long time, this was the way the world came to know Santa Barbara. 

However, there was a bit of bad luck with that pier. We had a big storm in 1878, only 6 years old, and 900 feet got ripped off the pier. They rebuilt it, and then the next year there was a water spout, which is basically a tornado on the water. That ripped another big hole in the pier. All of this led to the city and the city fathers, the city mothers – let’s just be clear here – that we were going to need a protective peer, actually, a protective harbor because the pier was not adequate because weather.

Jonathan: That’s how the harbor first got born, so to speak?

Scott: The push for a harbor was born with a pier going out of commission because people got used to the fact that you could come in and go out to the pier. If that didn’t work, that was a big mess. We did have the Yacht Club was formed and they wanted to have it be part of how the city was going to go, but what sort of slowed it down a little bit was that it was in 1887 that we had the first trains arrived. Suddenly, we had passengers coming in from train and that was a lot more people who came in from train. The town really boomed from the train. 

We need a harbor sort of on back burner, but it didn’t really go away. What’s his name? Stearns – of course – The Warfare, he built actually a little railroad spur out onto the pier because it is lumber business to transport lumber back and forth. They put it all on rail cards. There was actually a second entrance to the pier for many years until it was destroyed by a storm, that allowed him to take all the lumber that came in and take it all the way onto the shore on rail cars.

Jonathan: Any interesting stories about the famous pier?

Scott: He went to his wife when he died in 1902. During the prohibition era, the management was known for discreetly ignoring the unloaded of liquor on the pier from Gangland boats. But they were scared of the liquor gangs, and so they just let them operate. They didn’t want to stop them.

Jonathan: That makes sense. I heard that there was something about aviation at the Waterfront.

Scott: Aviation, it’s a strange thing. People are attracted from all over to Santa Barbara and the Loughead Brothers created an aircraft manufacturing company and they built hydroplanes. These are planes that could take off and land on the water. They had a factory on Lower State Street and they launch their planes from a wooden ramp out on West Beach. They changed their name to Loughead and you’ve probably heard of Loughead Aviation, as far as I know, it’s still the largest advanced manufacturer in the world or at least in the United States. There used to be an airstrip right along the beach in the 1919-1920 range right behind the Marmont Hotel, there was a landing strip there. A lot of things have come and gone on our beach.

Jonathan: It’s fascinating. After the 1800s, obviously, Santa Barbara is growing a little bit. What happened next?

Scott: The beach area was a big attraction for the tourists to come from out of town, just as it is today. However, in the early 1900s, there was a bit more of a honky talk atmosphere. We had these hotels at the beach with a sand floor and a little cage, where they put palm trees, bronze over the roof – a [inaudible] roof. I call it ‘grass shack hotels.’ There were skating rinks, tearooms, a pleasure pier, all of this is not very high end if you have people sleep on the sand at the beach. The city fathers and mothers went, seeing these cottages on the sand, and they did want a slum to take place. A group of concerned citizens began to buy all the lots along the front. Frederick Peabody, he was an arrow shirt tycoon. He bought a bunch of parcels, and then David Gray, who had made his fortune by owning 10% of the Ford Motor Company.

I think when they bought it, he got like $28 million in the 1920s there. They bought a bunch of parcels and David Gray, actually, then built the Cabrillo Arts Center. He gave it as a gift to the city. He spent a $100,000 to buy that building. I think they just spent $14 million to remodel that with how the dollars have changed. But that was a fabulous gift to the city. Fundamentally, they saved over 3 or 3 and a half miles of the whole entire front of the city along the ocean. Basically, philanthropist gave the beaches to the city which makes Santa Barbara what it is today because we just don’t have hotels one next to the other, take it up the whole front of the town like many towns. Dude, it’s really amazing experience as people come to Santa Barbara to find a town where the beaches were everybody.

Jonathan: We owe a great debt to those people. It’s good to put their name out there.

Scott: It was really pretty wonderful. By this time though, by the 1920s, the push for a harbor was still coming along. One of the men who had come to live in Santa Barbara was Max Fleischmann. You still may recognize the Fleischmann name as Fleischmann Yeast, and he made an enormous fortune in yeast back in the 1910s-1920s. He had bought himself a 250-foot yacht, which is still a pretty big yacht by today’s standards. Although, they have much better today but he wanted to park his yacht in the harbor. The trouble is we had no place to put a harbor. The Yacht Club did a study and they said, “The best harbor is really the little area that we call the Andree Clark Bird Refuge,” and they wanted to put an opening to the ocean into the bird refuge because it’s sheltered and they wanted a dredge that out and turn it in the harbor. 

It’s actually an excellent choice for harbor, but the trouble was, it was not going to be big enough for a 250-foot yacht from Max Fleischmann. Max kind of deal with the city and said, “Look, I’ll give you $200,000 in order to help build a harbor for me. We’re going to build this big rock revetment out in the ocean and we’re going to shelter a whole big area here.” That wasn’t enough. He still couldn’t get his yacht in there, so he built another. It was 900-feet – 1,000-feet of rock. He said, “Well, I’ll build another. I’ll pay for another 600-feet.” Then, he hooked the whole thing all together and paid for it, so he could bring his yacht in.

Alas, as the Yacht Club had predicted, this was not a very good idea. The other location was much better and the harbor begin to shoal, that is fill up with sand from all the sand. The sand likes to travel south [inaudible] around here. It all curled back into the harbor. In the harbor, there are photographs in naval textbooks of the worst harbor in the world and that’s our harbor. It has fallen to the city of Santa Barbara and the federal government, they paid more than $1 million every year to pull the sand out of the harbor. Then, they push it down the beach. We had a little tiny skinny beaches, until all this sand filled up the harbor, and we have to pump it out. 

The beach has became really buff. We have these big fat beaches. Although, we got these enormous complaints from the hotels [inaudible] and Carpinteria, it ripped all the sand off the beach in Carpinteria and put it in ours. They slowly build up all the rock revetments and all the ways to help get the sand to push it, keep going back south its natural way and what it wants to do. But it’s a story, I’m like, “Oh, my gosh. How things, actually, sometimes happen with the government?” They don’t always make wise decisions and this was one of it.

Jonathan: Lots of unforeseen consequences. I heard that there’s a lot going on in World War II in Santa Barbara, and I don’t know the history. But I know they had something to do with fearing the Japanese or something like that.

Scott: That’s right. We finally got our harbor built with all of its problems and issues, and we have our big old pier out there. The World War II came along and there was a genuine worry amongst Californians – in Santa Barbara, in particular – that the Japanese might invade the United States. The military had shut down the harbor. They had shut down the pier for the course of the war. It was just not used. After the World War II, the pier was put up for sale out of the Stearns Wharf family. It was bought by an actor that some people may remember the name, James Cagney, and then it was sold to Leo Saunders and finally, George Castagnola, who’s well known. The Castagnola family is still here in town and they were big fishermen. They had a big fleet, and he finally fixed the pier up. It had really fallen into disuse for many years.

Built a beautiful restaurant out on the pier called The Harbor Restaurant, which was quite famous far and wide as a gourmet restaurant until it burned in 1973. It was a spectacular view that the entire town could see as the restaurant burned down that night. The city at that point took over the pier and said, “From now on, we’re going to dictate how things go around here,” and then they leased it back out. The Harbor Restaurant was rebuilt there today, it’s still a fabulous restaurant and they’ve turned it into the single biggest tourist attraction in Santa Barbara. If you come to Santa Barbara, the chances of taking a walk on the pier with ice cream cone in your hand going, “Honey, isn’t this beautiful? Look at this town. Look at those sailboats.” It’s very likely that you will have that experience. It’s a wonderful experience.

 Everyone should have it.

Jonathan: I’ve been there many times. What about the recent history and changes?

Scott: Those were sort of the big chunks that happened. However, there’s a few things that have happened since the ’70s that are worth noting. The freeway runs by in Santa Barbara and that freeway used to have five stoplights. It was like a 5-minute stop. They took the stoplights out in the ’80s to go flowing along, didn’t seem to hurt the tourist business in Santa Barbara, and the city approved what is today – the Hilton Hotel is the doubletree back in the day – as a convention center along the beach, set it back from the road, and that allows conventions to come into town. 

Those are fairly big thing and they added onto the Chase Palm Park, which is the whole park that runs all along the front across the street. From there, they added in another 8 acres which is used for various things. It’s part of the community that’s been added here. There was a big art project. Herbert Bayer lived in this town, he was a well-known sculptor from Europe and they built the chromatic gate, which is quite an interesting and wonderful piece of sculpture.

They put that down on the beach. Another sculpture came from Bud Bottoms, the Bottoms family. He’s a sculptor. He gave the city its, obviously, it was called the Friendship Fountain. That’s three dolphins and that’s in a big circle right there at the base of the Stearns Wharf. That’s a postcard spot there, a lot of pictures get taken there. Finally in 2000, they built a skateboard park for the young people here in town. That’s 2/3 of an acre, they spent about $800,000 and it’s a challenging skateboard park. The young people like to come and play there. Entrada de Santa Barbara is finally getting built, that’s the lower three blocks of State Street from the pier up to the freeway. That is nearing completion with some big condos, big shopping mall, and there’s a few more parcels that are still being completed. That’s sort of the things that are really kind of finished off the whole Waterfront area.

Jonathan: We’re lucky to have it. Most cities don’t have something quite like that.

Scott: We are incredibly lucky to have this. It’s really a number of citizen groups in the last century have given some of the greatest gifts that the city will ever receive, and they’ve just created a beauty and an everlasting interest to the Waterfront area that just remains an attraction for everybody who comes to visit our town.

Jonathan: Part of the allure of Sweet Home Santa Barbara, we appreciate you listening and finding out about the history of the town that you live in and look forward to more of this history for you. Scott, thanks for all your information. Really, really fascinating.

Scott: Thank you too, Jonathan. It’s great to share the podcast with you.

Jonathan: People I get in touch with you, what’s the best way of doing that?

Scott: scott@williams.com

Jonathan: Until next time, friends, at Sweet Home Santa Barbara. Thanks for listening.

Scott Williams: 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.