Why Colorado Avenue matters.
Colorado Avenue is a storied corridor where Downtown Santa Monica's coastal character meets a nineteenth-century railroad approach, postwar commercial expansion and the return of passenger rail to the Pacific after more than six decades.
Running through Downtown Santa Monica between Ocean Park and Mid-City, the west-east corridor follows a direct line from Ocean Avenue across 4th Street, Lincoln Boulevard, 14th Street and 17th Street before extending toward the former industrial territory approaching Bergamot. At its western end, the avenue descends toward the bluff above Santa Monica Bay, terminating directly opposite the pier entrance and Pacific horizon. East of Lincoln Boulevard, larger commercial parcels and mid-rise buildings replace the tighter blocks surrounding the downtown core as the street approaches the Interstate 10 trench. Twin light-rail tracks occupy the center of the roadway between 17th Street and Downtown Santa Monica, giving the avenue a transportation geometry found on few contemporary Westside streets. The result is a corridor whose alignment still connects the Pacific waterfront with an inland rail landscape first established during Santa Monica's founding era.
What defines Colorado Avenue.
Colorado Avenue is best known for occupying the transportation corridor that helped establish Santa Monica during the original townsite's creation in 1875. Senator John P. Jones and Robert Symington Baker founded the community that year in conjunction with the Los Angeles and Independence Railroad, which connected Los Angeles with a coastal terminus at Santa Monica. The railway reached the ocean beside a wharf completed in 1875, establishing an east-west transportation axis immediately south of the emerging town center. Santa Monica's original street plan gave western state and territory names to its principal east-west avenues, yet the roadway adjoining the tracks carried the functional name Railroad Avenue. Southern Pacific acquired the Los Angeles and Independence Railroad in 1877 and retained the coastal connection as Santa Monica developed from speculative townsite into a seaside resort and shipping point. An immense lumber mill and yard opened on the north side of Railroad Avenue in 1889 with spur access to the Southern Pacific tracks, supplying construction lumber during regional growth. By the 1890s, the settled core remained concentrated largely between Washington Avenue, 7th Street, Railroad Avenue and Ocean Avenue, placing the rail corridor along the southern edge of early urban Santa Monica. Railroad Avenue became Colorado Avenue in 1902, adding the previously omitted western state to the town's street-naming sequence. Pacific Electric subsequently incorporated the route into its regional electric system, and the Santa Monica Air Line carried passengers between the coast and Los Angeles until September 1953. Freight operations survived another 35 years, with the final train leaving Fisher Lumber at Colorado Avenue and 14th Street in March 1988. The avenue preserves an extraordinary continuity between Santa Monica's 1875 railroad foundation, its industrial expansion and the final generation of freight traffic through the coastal city.
A second rail era began when transportation planners selected Colorado for the final street-running section of the Exposition light-rail extension from Culver City to Santa Monica. The 6.6-mile Phase 2 project followed the former rail right-of-way across the Westside before diverging east of 17th Street and entering the median of Colorado Avenue. Twin tracks then continued west through the street to a terminal between Fourth and Fifth streets, placing passenger rail immediately beside Downtown Santa Monica for the first time since the Pacific Electric era. Construction required extensive reworking of the roadway and its crossings as a disused single-track freight corridor became a modern two-track light-rail route. A test train moved under its own power along Colorado toward 5th Street in July 2015, marking the first commuter train arrival in Downtown Santa Monica in more than 60 years. The extension opened on May 20, 2016 with seven new stations between Culver City and Santa Monica. Service reached the coast on infrastructure whose western approach runs close to the nineteenth-century alignment that had originally connected the town with Los Angeles. The project also returned rail to a street where the last freight movement had occurred in 1988, compressing the abandonment and revival of urban railway transportation into less than three decades. Colorado entered the twenty-first century performing a role closely related to the one that shaped its nineteenth-century predecessor: carrying rail traffic directly into the commercial center of Santa Monica.
How Colorado Avenue fits.
Colorado Avenue works as the anchor for an outing connecting a postwar department store, a major work of late twentieth-century retail architecture and a public landscape carved from former institutional property beside the Pacific.
Begin at Sears Santa Monica, the former department store at 302 Colorado Avenue designed by Rowland H. Crawford and opened in 1947 amid the postwar consumer boom. Crawford gave the reinforced-concrete building a Late Moderne composition defined by strong horizontal lines, curved cantilevered entrance canopies, window bands and sculpted reliefs on the Colorado facade. Its planning captured a precise moment in American retail architecture: the primary entrance addressed the sidewalk, yet a 200-car parking area and secondary entrances accommodated rapidly expanding automobile use. More than 2,000 customers entered during the first ten minutes of business, requiring 40 police officers to control the opening crowd. Civil-rights activists and the NAACP later picketed the store over discriminatory hiring practices, placing the property inside Santa Monica's postwar civil-rights history. Sears closed in 2017, and a subsequent rehabilitation restored original architectural details as the building entered a new office and retail chapter. Continue to Santa Monica Place, constructed in 1980 as an enclosed three-level shopping center designed by Frank Gehry during an early phase of his career. The Rouse Company and Hahn Company developed the complex as part of an effort to revive a downtown retail district weakened after the Santa Monica Freeway redirected shoppers toward regional centers. Its inward-facing configuration occupied two city blocks and absorbed 3rd Street between Broadway and Colorado, placing a suburban shopping model directly beside Santa Monica's existing pedestrian district. Macerich closed most of the complex in 2008 and undertook a $265 million reconstruction that retained portions of the structure while removing the roof and opening circulation toward surrounding streets. The Jerde Partnership directed the redesign, and the rebuilt three-level center reopened in August 2010 with its upper level oriented toward ocean views and stronger physical connections to the adjoining downtown blocks. Conclude at Tongva Park, opened in 2013 after James Corner Field Operations converted former asphalt-covered land beside Santa Monica City Hall into a major public landscape. The project formed part of a larger civic-center initiative and transformed more than six acres through rolling topography, gardens, overlooks and paths modeled on the washes and ravines of Southern California's arroyo geography. Frederick Fisher & Partners contributed architectural work, and the design created a spatial connection between the Civic Center and Ocean Avenue. Three mature rusty fig trees weighing more than 100 tons apiece were relocated 550 feet and incorporated into the completed landscape. The park's name honors the Tongva people whose history in the Los Angeles Basin predates Santa Monica's nineteenth-century townsite, giving the civic landscape a historical frame extending far beyond the surrounding street grid. The progression moves from Crawford's postwar department store through Gehry and Jerde's successive generations of downtown retail architecture and culminates in Field Operations' conversion of paved institutional land into a coastal civic landscape, tracing three major reinventions of the blocks surrounding Colorado Avenue.
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