Why Ocean Avenue matters.
Ocean Avenue is a storied corridor where Downtown Santa Monica's coastal character meets bluff-top geography, Victorian resort development and a Pacific-facing civic edge central to the city since its founding.
Running through Downtown Santa Monica between the northern residential districts and Ocean Park, the coastal corridor follows the crest of the shoreline bluff from Adelaide Drive south toward Pico Boulevard, with the Pacific stretching below its western edge and the downtown street grid extending inland to the east. Northern stretches occupy a comparatively quiet bluff-top landscape where mature trees, apartment buildings and residential towers face long coastal views before commercial frontage becomes increasingly prominent around Wilshire Boulevard. Traveling south carries the street past hotels, restaurants and larger buildings as Broadway, Colorado Avenue and the freeway terminus concentrate metropolitan activity near the center of the shoreline. South of Colorado Avenue, the alignment continues above the beach before descending toward lower terrain around Pico Boulevard and the northern edge of Ocean Park. The result is a corridor whose bluff-top alignment, uninterrupted Pacific orientation, changing building scale and transition from residential frontage into the downtown core give Santa Monica a remarkably legible coastal spine.
What defines Ocean Avenue.
Ocean Avenue is best known for occupying the western edge of Santa Monica's original 1875 town plan, where the geometry of the new settlement encountered a bluff that immediately complicated the ambitions of founders John Percival Jones and Robert Symington Baker. The original avenue was platted at 200 feet wide along the bluff, but Jones and Baker later negotiated with Southern Pacific over a proposed harbor and railroad improvements that would have cut into the bluff and consumed part of the street. A revised town map eliminated the park strip and half of Ocean Avenue's original width, prompting Santa Monica to pursue the land through the courts. An 1892 judgment returned the contested bluff-top strip to public control on the condition that it remain a park, creating Linda Vista Park along the western side of the avenue. The Santa Monica Land and Water Company added land north of Montana Avenue in 1908, extending the public strip toward the city boundary, and Linda Vista received the Palisades Park name in 1915 during promotion of the adjoining Palisades Tract. Ocean Avenue carries a physical outcome of Santa Monica's earliest conflict between private transportation ambitions and preservation of its bluff-top public edge.
Residential prestige and automobile culture created a separate chapter along the avenue between the late nineteenth century and World War I. Senator Jones built Miramar at Ocean and Nevada avenues in 1889, occupying most of the block bounded by the present Wilshire Boulevard, California Avenue, 2nd Street and Ocean Avenue; his family lived in the 17-bedroom Victorian residence until selling the property in 1912. Another surviving house at 1323 Ocean Avenue dates to 1891, with Queen Anne massing, fish-scale shingles, a corner tower and an L-shaped porch preserving the last residential remnant of the avenue's pre-1900 appearance. Tennis player Gussie Moran, ranked among the world's leading women during the late 1940s, later occupied the house. Automobile racing brought an entirely different use to the street beginning in 1909, when a consortium of Southern California automobile dealers created a road race to stimulate public interest in cars. 50,000 spectators watched two dozen entrants in the inaugural event on July 10, with the start and finish on Ocean Avenue and a course continuing through the city's streets. Racing continued through 1919, and the difficult turn from Ocean onto Nevada Avenue became known as Dead Man's Curve. The avenue had moved within a generation from elite Victorian residential address to a stage for an emerging automobile culture.
How Ocean Avenue fits.
Ocean Avenue works as the anchor for an outing connecting a twenty-first-century landscape built from a former parking lot, a local-history institution born from Santa Monica's centennial and a surviving nineteenth-century cottage carried across the city to escape demolition.
Begin at Tongva Park, a seven-acre public landscape created between 2010 and 2013 by James Corner Field Operations on land previously occupied by a surface parking lot. The $42.3 million project used the Southern California arroyo as its central landscape precedent, arranging rolling landforms, braided paths, gardens and overlooks reaching 18 feet above surrounding terrain. Its construction formed part of a larger civic-center project linking the area around City Hall with the waterfront, turning a flat municipal parcel into a topographically complex landscape. The Urban Land Institute selected the park as one of six finalists for its 2015 Global Award of Excellence for Urban Open Space, placing the Santa Monica project among finalists from the United States, Singapore and China. Continue to Santa Monica History Museum, whose origins reach to the city's 1975 centennial celebration. Ann Funk chaired the Historical Activities Committee and coordinated a local-history exhibition at the Civic Auditorium, and the response led to an October 8 founding meeting for the Santa Monica Historical Society inside the public library. Former mayor Clo Hoover became its first president. The collection expanded through objects, photographs and memorabilia contributed by descendants of early local families, and Louise and Bob Gabriel later drove the campaign for a physical museum. Bob Gabriel led fundraising, Louise Gabriel secured donated furnishings and a rent-free Colorado Avenue location became the museum's first home in 1988. A permanent location on the Santa Monica Main Library campus followed in 2009, giving an organization created during a centennial exhibition a lasting institutional base. Conclude at Shotgun House, built in 1897 at 2712 2nd Street during Ocean Park's early growth as a seaside resort. Its board-and-batten construction places three small rooms in a linear arrangement beneath a gabled roof, preserving a house type with Caribbean roots that spread through the American South and West before appearing as economical vacation cottages near the Santa Monica shoreline. The building remained residential until 1996 and faced demolition in 2002, beginning a preservation campaign involving local residents, the City of Santa Monica and Santa Monica Conservancy. It moved several times before reaching 2520 2nd Street in 2014. Rehabilitation converted the structure into the Conservancy's Preservation Resource Center, which opened in January 2016, leaving it as Santa Monica's last intact shotgun house. The progression moves from James Corner Field Operations' conversion of asphalt into a topographic civic landscape through a centennial project that became Santa Monica's principal local-history institution and culminates in the rescue of a nineteenth-century cottage whose multiple relocations preserved a rare remnant of Ocean Park's earliest resort settlement.
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