Episode 47: The History Of The Westside

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

Jonathan Robinson: Welcome back, friends, to Sweet Home Santa Barbara. I’m your co-host, Jonathan Robinson, and I’m with my friend, realtor, and co-host. Scott Williams. And Scott, I love these historical views of Santa Barbara because I learn so much. It’s also very interesting. Today we’re going to talk about the West Side, which I’ve been to your home by Islands Park in the hills above the West Side. Today, what can you tell us about this neighborhood that you’re kind of part of?

Scott: Yeah, I love the West Side. There are so many nice parts of Santa Barbara. I’ve lived all over this town. It has wonderful neighborhoods, no doubt about it. The history of the West Side of Santa Barbara starts out pretty much in the mid-1800s. And coming through to the present day, it was grazing land and it’s turned into a very vibrant community. And prior to statehood back in 1850, it was an area of plantings for farmers and it sort of had the marshy shores all the way down there at the beach. And after we became a town, an American town in 1850, the council of Santa Barbara laid out a grid of streets and did a survey. And they started naming the city, the streets, including the West Side after things like famous battles and heroes, historic figures. And pretty soon after the 1850s, it turned into plots of land from five to 40 acres being used for growing crops.

Jonathan: So it started out as farmland. What kind of crops?

Scott: Well, a couple of the famous fellows, we’re talking about Albert Packard and Joseph Sexton, they put their imprints on the area there. Packard established himself a grand mansion on the West Side. It’s no longer there. And he built the largest adobe for a California winery at the time, and that’s no longer here either. And Sexton planted about a thousand walnuts, those little, tiny plants, and he spread them out on a 40-acre parcel of land on the West Side and started growing walnuts. He brought quite a bit of fame to Santa Barbara as a source of walnuts as he marketed them all over the United States.

Jonathan: Are those trees or walnuts still there?

Scott: Well, not from the 1860s, too far back. [chuckle] We have walnut trees on the West Side, but they would be the children or grandchildren of those trees.

Jonathan: Uh-huh. So how did it evolve after that?

Scott: Well, it sort of became the first Anglo neighborhood attracting white settlers to Santa Barbara. And the architecture shifted from the adobes that they’d been building back in the mid-1800s towards wood and even brick construction. And they put up a number of churches around town because we started to have a non-Catholic population. And this all culminated in 1887 when the railroad arrived in Santa Barbara. And it kind of ended the isolation of Santa Barbara back in those days. And it started to establish itself as a resort, a health resort because we had back in Montecito, we had those hot springs we talked about on the Montecito history.

Back in the day, when the railroad first hit town, there were three thousand five hundred people living in Santa Barbara. But there was no hospital, no medical facilities of any sort. And so that was seen as a missing in the town. They established Cottage Hospital, which was more of like a house that was more like a cottage in 1891. And over the years, they’ve built that as part of the West Side. They built that up to be an entire block. And they’ve rebuilt it in just the last decade or so. I think about 700 million dollars is the most recent remodeling of Cottage Hospital.

Jonathan: Wow, that’s an expensive cottage. Seven hundred million dollars. [crosstalk] Do you know how it got its name? Was that because it was a cottage at one time?

Scott: Yes. Yes, it was a cottage. There are some pictures of it. It was sort of more a house-like but much more on the scale of a house. A cottage would have been a descriptive of it.

Jonathan: Yeah. So what happened after the hospital got made?

Scott: Well, we became actually a center for health and not just from the hot springs, but Dr. William Sansum. We have the Sansum Clinic here in town and he established the Sansum Clinic in 1920. Something he did that was really pioneering in the health field is he isolated insulin and began to attract diabetes patients from all over the globe. And for several years, the only place you could get diabetes on the planet was right here in Santa Barbara until it became more widely available after 1923. And the Sansum Clinic established at that time just sold last week to Sutter Health, which is in Northern California, a big outfit. And I don’t know if they’re going to change the name of it or not, but it’s right across the street from Sansum. Sansum Clinic is right across the street from Cottage Hospital. Health, the hospital, and the clinic definitely significantly contributed to the West Side’s economy.

Jonathan: Yeah. So when did West Side stop being farm country, more house country?

Scott: Well, that pretty much came with 1900. The turn of the century brought electric streetcars, horse-drawn carts, fields of walnuts, lemons, and oranges, dairies, the palm nurseries. There was even a ranch specializing in pampas grass. All of these began to convert into neighborhoods, although as part of that conversion, there was a time when there were pony cart racings and even a polo field there on the West Side.

Jonathan: Horse racing and polo sounds like my kind of place.

Scott: Yeah, absolutely, Jonathan. You would have loved horseback riding back in the day when, well, the cars hadn’t arrived yet, so we were all driving around on horses. Landmarks like Oak Park were preserved through community contributions. And these were places where people would go with their horses and their carts and have picnics right alongside the creek there, going back more than 100 years. Right in that same neighborhood, sort of between Oak Park and Cottage Hospital area, back in the 1920s or 1910 to 1921, actually. We had the most famous movie studio in the world. This is called the Flying A Studio, and I believe they made more than 500 movies there over the course of that time. And it was the greatest source of movies in the world that came out of Santa Barbara in those days.

Jonathan: Wow. It’s nice to know that the West Side was once almost Hollywood. They could have put the big Hollywood sign on the hills above the West Side.

Scott: That’s true. I could have said West Side or Hollywood, absolutely, Flying A Studios. We didn’t get ever subjected to the mountains being filled up with that big picture. But I guess we could have been.

Jonathan: Why didn’t it become more of a Hollywood area or Hollywood moved to Hollywood?

Scott: Well, westerns were by far the most popular type of films that they did, although this is the early days. This is in the silent era. And talkies came in in 1928. And so just south of here, they had more open space because they had to go up to the San Ynez Valley, they had to go over the hill to shoot the movies out there in the open space of the San Ynez Valley. And there was just more space heading down to L.A. And it just gravitated, just kept moving south.

Although it was part of the structure of the West Side. In 1928, we built the Arlington Theatre just on the edge because they had a big old organ in there from the silent era just as talkies took off. So we still have one of the greatest popcorn palaces ever built in the Arlington Theatre right there on the West Side.

Jonathan: Yeah. So it’s one of the oldest residential neighborhoods. What else can you say about the West Side?

Scott: Well, more than half of the houses were built prior to 1940. So, there’s a historical sense to the neighborhood. And it’s always been one of the more affordable neighborhoods in Santa Barbara. And it attracts a diverse population looking to make Santa Barbara their home. So West Side is an enjoyable part of our community.

Jonathan: Scott, I know there’s a really beautiful park on the West Side. Do you know anything about that history?

Scott: Yes, absolutely. Today we call it Ealing’s Park. Virgil Ealing had the park named after him because he donated a lot of money at the end to help pull it together. But let’s go back a few years here. Before World War II in Santa Barbara, the dump for the city was right there in Las Positas Valley. And I’m not sure exactly how far back it goes, but I think it may go back to the 20s. It was there for a long time. And the city, they closed it as a dump about 1965. And so, they had like a lot of dumps, you dump all your trash there and then they pile dirt over the top of it. It’s in a valley and it just fills up and eventually, the whole thing gets full. So, we had that happen. So that’s part of the reason why the, especially the Mesa and the West Side weren’t such a great part of town because they were where the dump was. It doesn’t make a great neighborhood to have the dump in the [chuckle] middle of it back in the day.

So, in 1977, the city proposed converting, this is 97 acres, from a dump into a park. And an organization got together and decided that they would take this on. And so, it is privately funded, by the Las Positas Park Foundation. It is the largest privately funded park in the United States. The Santa Barbara City rents it to the Park Foundation for a dollar a year. I don’t know. It’s a long lease, 50, 100 years. I don’t know how long it goes. But this private organization totally takes care of the park, it’s 97 acres. So, in 1994, the Park Foundation got an opportunity to buy the 133 acres next to that that was owned by the Society of Jesus, commonly known as the Jesuits. It’s part of the Catholic Church, kind of an educational wing part of the… They have a lot of schools.

They’d always thought they were going to put a school there. But they wisely decided that it was in the middle of a housing track and next to the old dump. [chuckle] They wouldn’t do that. And so, they put it up for sale. The Park Foundation agreed to buy it and incorporate that into the park. So now you have 230 acres. We’re starting to get to have a pretty sizable park here.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Scott: Of great benefit to the West Side and to the Mesa both. There’s more than a three-mile-long track that goes around the outside of this. There’s a nice trail system in there. There are three baseball fields. There are two soccer fields, and a BMX track, which is for little bicycles for the young people to ride around in. Six tennis courts and an outlook over the city, which has one of the finest views of the city up at the Goddard Grove. And the outlook from up there is just an amazing view of Santa Barbara. And this is about a block from my home.

And going back to Virgil at Virgil Ealing, it’s named after him. He went to UCSB, our Go Gauchos, our alma mater, you and I. He started Digital Instruments, which back in the day was quite an important company in the very early tech days and made a lot of money from that. And he gave a million and a half dollars back in 1999 that finished off the purchase of all this land. Everybody paid off and contributed to the upkeep of this. It has about two hundred and fifty thousand visitors a year. And I’m one of them, that’s for sure. It’s a great spot. It’s right across the street, too, from the Douglas Preserve, which is another 80 acres or 70 acres. I lost track of that. So, we have about 300 acres of parkland all together between the two parks running them together. An amazing place, an amazing gift to Santa Barbara.

Jonathan: Thank God for people like him who are willing to think ahead. How can I do that? What’s the best way to contact you?

Scott: It’s scott@scottwilliams.com.

Jonathan: And thanks to our listeners for another episode of Sweet Home Santa Barbara.

Scott: [Background music] Thank you for listening. 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 Sailable Now? And How Not to Buy a Money Pit. Thank you for listening.