Why Paseo Del Mar matters.
Paseo Del Mar is a dramatic corridor where Malaga Cove's coastal character meets Olmsted-era landscape planning, bluff-top residential architecture and a curving Pacific edge shaped during the founding of Palos Verdes Estates.
Running through Malaga Cove between the northern entrance to Palos Verdes Estates and Lunada Bay, the coastal corridor follows the western rim of the Palos Verdes Peninsula through a succession of coves, headlands and residential slopes overlooking Santa Monica Bay and the open Pacific. Long curves respond closely to the bluff contours, placing ocean horizons beside steep coastal terrain as detached houses occupy irregular parcels above and below the roadway. Traveling south carries the street past the protected slopes of Malaga Cove into broader cliff-top stretches where development remains low and the shoreline repeatedly reenters view between stands of mature trees and descending side streets. Elevation changes remain gradual along much of the roadway even where the adjoining land falls sharply toward rocky coves, creating sustained visual separation between the residential plateau and shoreline below. The result is a corridor whose curving alignment, cliff-edge geography, ocean exposure and close adaptation to the peninsula's topography preserve the landscape-planning principles that shaped Palos Verdes Estates from its earliest development.
What defines Paseo Del Mar.
Paseo Del Mar is best known for forming part of the coastal street system created during the Palos Verdes Project, among Southern California's most ambitious early experiments in comprehensive residential planning. New York financier Frank A. Vanderlip and his investment group acquired more than 16,000 acres of the Palos Verdes Peninsula in 1913, envisioning a planned residential colony across former ranchland. World War I delayed development, and the project accelerated after Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. assumed leadership of the Olmsted Brothers work in 1921. The firm opened its first West Coast office in Redondo Beach in October 1922, and Vanderlip required Olmsted and James Frederick Dawson to live locally as design and construction advanced. Charles Cheney joined the undertaking as city planner, and the team coordinated roads, parkland, planting and residential districts around the peninsula's steep coastal topography. The first subdivision encompassed 3,200 acres by 1923, with 800 acres reserved as parkland, and the project launched lot sales that year as construction proceeded around Malaga Cove. Olmsted Brothers treated road design as part of the landscape composition, using gently curving alignments and extensive planting to retain the relationship between hills and ocean; 28 percent of the later city remained permanent open space. Paseo Del Mar emerged within that planned coastal geography, carrying the project's residential fabric along a bluff line where roadway, parkland and ocean remained visually inseparable.
Financial crisis placed that carefully constructed landscape at risk less than a decade after the initial development campaign. The Palos Verdes Homes Association governed the unincorporated community and held responsibility for taxes on its extensive parklands, a burden that became increasingly difficult after the 1929 economic collapse. Residents feared Los Angeles County would sell park property to recover unpaid taxes, turning protection of the original open-space system into the central issue behind a campaign for municipal incorporation. Palos Verdes Estates then contained close to 1,000 residents and 3,200 acres with an assessed valuation near $2 million. The December 9, 1939 incorporation vote passed by only seven ballots, 213 to 206, and H.B.F. Roessler received the largest council vote before beginning a mayoral tenure that lasted a quarter century. Incorporation became effective on December 20, making Palos Verdes Estates the oldest of the peninsula's four cities. The Homes Association transferred the parklands to the new municipality in 1940, securing public ownership of open spaces that had been integral to the original plan. Paseo Del Mar retained the unusually open coastal margins and landscaped slopes envisioned during the project's formative decade through a municipal transition driven substantially by preservation of that inherited landscape.
How Paseo Del Mar fits.
Paseo Del Mar works as the anchor for an outing connecting the peninsula's first permanent development building, a 1920s coastal residence later converted into a church and a Golden Age golf course shaped by two major figures in Southern California course design.
Begin at La Venta Inn, constructed in 1923 as Clubhouse 764 and the first permanent building erected by the Palos Verdes Project. Architects Walter Swindell Davis and Pierpont Davis designed the Spanish Colonial building, and the Olmsted firm laid out its grounds on a three-acre hillside selected for a view extending across land and Santa Monica Bay. The building functioned as a sales office and architectural prototype, allowing the project to entertain real-estate professionals and prospective buyers as the surrounding subdivision took form. Its name soon became La Venta, Spanish for “The Sale,” before the property developed into an inn whose 1930s guests included Charles Lindbergh, Gloria Swanson, Cary Grant, Bob Hope and Tyrone Power. The building briefly became a coastal-artillery observation post in 1942, entered private residential use in 1944 and returned to event use during the 1950s. Continue to Neighborhood Church, occupying the bluff-top Haggarty residence designed by Armand Monaco for department-store proprietor John Joseph Haggarty in 1928. The Italianate villa stretched 290 feet along Paseo Del Mar and incorporated 20 rooms with interior frescoes by A.E. Disi. Haggarty had purchased five bluff lots the previous year, and the house was completed as his retail business approached the financial pressures of the Depression. A growing local congregation purchased the property in 1950 after raising $60,000, then spent eighteen months adapting the former residence for religious use. The living room became the sanctuary, and former garages, bedrooms and kitchen spaces received new institutional functions before services began there during the early 1950s. Conclude at Palos Verdes Golf Club, where William P. Bell and George C. Thomas created an 18-hole course during the first great construction phase of the Palos Verdes Project. The club opened on November 15, 1924, placing their work within the same period that produced several of Southern California's most consequential early golf courses. Thomas and Bell used barrancas, creeks, bunkers and small defended greens across 800 acres of parkland overlooking Santa Monica Bay, building strategic variation into terrain already reserved within the planned community. The front nine carries the unusual distinction of having no consecutive holes with the same par, and the course extends 6,433 yards from its back tees. Their collaboration at Palos Verdes preceded work associated with Riviera Country Club and joined the peninsula's residential plan to the flourishing Southern California golf architecture of the 1920s. The progression moves from the project's first permanent sales building through a merchant's elaborate coastal residence repurposed by a postwar congregation and culminates in Thomas and Bell's golf architecture, connecting three surviving products of the concentrated design campaign that converted open peninsula ranchland into Palos Verdes Estates.
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