Why you should experience Downtown Santa Monica in Los Angeles, California.
Downtown Santa Monica is a coastal enclave where Santa Monica Bay's resort character meets an 1875 town center, surviving nineteenth-century commercial architecture and a pedestrian retail district descended directly from the streets that organized the city's earliest growth.
Positioned between Wilshire Montana, Mid-City, and Ocean Park, the neighborhood occupies the bluff above Santa Monica Bay, where an orthogonal grid approaches the Pacific before terminating against Palisades Park and the abrupt coastal escarpment overlooking the shoreline. Three-story brick buildings, early twentieth-century commercial blocks, midcentury storefronts and contemporary construction produce sharp changes in architectural age across unusually walkable blocks whose western ends open toward ocean light and the bluff edge. 3rd Street supplies the primary encounter through a pedestrian corridor extending across three central blocks, concentrating movement through the historic commercial axis one street inland from the city's earliest business corridor. Second and Fourth streets create a secondary passage on either side, carrying vehicular movement through parallel blocks that expose the commercial center's depth and its close relationship with the residential districts extending north and south. The result is a neighborhood whose compact grid, pedestrianized center and immediate confrontation with the Pacific preserve the physical logic of a nineteenth-century seaside town inside one of Southern California's most intensively developed coastal cities.
What you should know about Downtown Santa Monica.
Downtown Santa Monica is best known for growing from the coastal town founded by Nevada Senator John P. Jones and businessman Robert S. Baker, whose partnership converted former rancho acreage into a new settlement during the 1870s. Jones and Baker envisioned an industrial port, built a wharf and railroad, and offered the first town lots at auction on July 15, 1875, beginning formal development beside Santa Monica Bay. Commercial buildings initially concentrated along 2nd Street, where William Rapp constructed a brick saloon during the founding year that became the city's first masonry building. The structure later housed Santa Monica's Town Hall between May 1888 and February 1889, giving one surviving building roles in both the commercial and municipal life of the young settlement. Santa Monica incorporated in 1886, one year before a fare war between the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe railroads brought a surge of migration and real-estate investment across Southern California. Commercial gravity shifted eastward during the following decade as 3rd Street accumulated increasingly substantial buildings. Carroll H. Brown designed the three-story Romanesque Revival Keller Block there in 1893, when its hotel, shops and corner drugstore made the building the largest structure in Downtown. An opera house had already opened across 3rd Street in 1886, placing entertainment beside commerce as the corridor overtook 2nd Street. Downtown's early development consequently moved through a tightly connected sequence of land subdivision, railroad access, municipal formation and eastward commercial expansion, leaving a street pattern whose first two business corridors remain central to Santa Monica.
3rd Street entered a radically different chapter after postwar retail decentralization weakened the traditional business center during the mid-twentieth century. Municipal leaders closed three blocks to automobile traffic and completed the Third Street Mall in 1965, pairing the pedestrian corridor with large parking structures along Second and Fourth streets. Santa Monica Place opened at the southern end in 1980, creating another retail anchor without reversing the older mall's deterioration. A new strategy emerged through the Third Street Mall Specific Plan in 1986, followed by a comprehensive reconstruction of the pedestrian corridor. The renovated Third Street Promenade opened in 1989 with redesigned public space and a commercial program that repositioned the former mall within the regional retail market. Henshey's, a longtime department store whose earlier presence had helped define Central Santa Monica commerce, closed in 1992 as the district continued moving beyond its department-store era. The Bayside District Specific Plan followed in 1996, and streetscape work in 1997 extended physical changes beyond the pedestrian blocks. Santa Monica Place reopened as an open-air complex in 2010, further altering the southern gateway to the district. The Promenade's successive reinventions turned a nineteenth-century commercial street into an influential pedestrian center through more than four decades of experimentation with the relationship between retail, public space and the automobile.
How to fold Downtown Santa Monica into your trip.
Downtown Santa Monica works as the anchor for an outing connecting an early seaside optical attraction, California's surviving amusement-pier tradition and a Hollywood-era oceanfront estate shaped by Julia Morgan.
Begin at Camera Obscura, whose optical apparatus dates to 1898, when Mayor Robert F. Jones acquired the device and operated it on the beach for ten cents a view. After a brief relocation to Westlake Park, the camera returned to Santa Monica in 1899 and joined the North Beach Bathhouse before the city purchased it in 1910 and transferred it to present-day Palisades Park. Its revolving turret uses a mirror and view to project moving exterior images onto a circular surface inside a darkened room. Architect Weldon J. Fulton incorporated a dedicated chamber for the apparatus into the Senior Recreation Center in 1955, pairing the nineteenth-century optical technology with a midcentury building distinguished by diagonal exterior lettering and period stonework. Continue to Santa Monica Pier, where the Municipal Pier opened in 1909 as a 1,600-foot structure carrying a sewage outfall beyond the shoreline. Amusement entrepreneur Charles I.D. Looff constructed an adjoining pleasure pier in 1916, adding rides and the Looff Hippodrome, an elaborate carousel building with Moorish, Byzantine and Spanish architectural influences. The Philadelphia Toboggan Company built the present carousel in 1922; it arrived at the Hippodrome in 1947 and carries forty-four hand-carved horses alongside other carved figures. The La Monica Ballroom expanded the entertainment complex in 1924, and a 1973 demolition proposal provoked the Save the Pier campaign before preservation prevailed. Conclude at Annenberg Community Beach House, occupying five oceanfront acres developed by William Randolph Hearst for actress Marion Davies during the 1920s. Their estate contained a mansion exceeding 100 rooms, and Julia Morgan supplied architectural direction for the complex, including the surviving 1928 guest house and marble pool. Joseph Drown acquired the property in 1947 and converted it into Oceanhouse and the Sand & Sea Club; the mansion disappeared in 1956, three years before California acquired the property. The 1994 Northridge earthquake severely damaged the remaining complex, and a $27.5 million Annenberg Foundation grant later financed a new public facility designed with Frederick Fisher Partners around the surviving Morgan structures. The site reopened in 2009, completing an extraordinary conversion from private Hollywood estate through hotel and membership club to public coastal institution. The progression moves from a nineteenth-century optical attraction through the engineering and amusements of a historic pleasure pier and culminates at Morgan's surviving work for Davies and Hearst, connecting three successive forms of Santa Monica's relationship with its coastline.
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