Santa Monica Bay

Why you should experience Santa Monica Bay in Los Angeles, California.

Santa Monica Bay is a sweeping enclave where Southern California's coastal character meets broad sandy shorelines, marine terraces and a crescent of communities extending between rocky headlands at the western edge of metropolitan Los Angeles.

Positioned between Malibu, the Westside, and the South Bay, the area occupies a broad Pacific embayment extending through Pacific Coast Highway, Ocean Avenue and the coastal strand from Point Dume toward the Palos Verdes Peninsula. Mountain slopes descend sharply toward the water along the northern shore before widening into marine terraces, beaches and dense coastal neighborhoods around Santa Monica, Venice and the communities farther south. Movement around Santa Monica Bay follows the shoreline's immense arc, shifting between bluff-top roads, beachfront paths, canyon mouths and long uninterrupted sections of sand backed by one of Southern California's largest urban concentrations. The bay itself remains the dominant geographic element, opening westward toward the Channel Islands as successive headlands and coastal ridges frame views across nearly the entire basin. The result is a greater area whose continuous shoreline, mountain edge, expansive beaches and densely settled coastal plain form the principal geographic stage of metropolitan Los Angeles's relationship with the Pacific.

What you should know about Santa Monica Bay.

Santa Monica Bay is best known for the nineteenth-century contest to turn its shoreline into the maritime gateway for Los Angeles, an ambition that placed railroads, wharves and competing fortunes directly along the Pacific. Robert S. Baker purchased more than 38,000 acres of Rancho San Vicente y Santa Monica for $54,000 in 1872, and Nevada senator John P. Jones acquired a three-quarter interest two years later for $162,500. The partners laid out Santa Monica in 1875 and conceived the settlement as both a seaside community and an industrial port connected with Los Angeles and inland mining districts. Their Los Angeles and Independence Railroad opened a sixteen-mile route between Downtown and the coast on October 17, 1875, carrying trains directly toward a 1,700-foot wharf completed that same year. Southern Pacific later revived the maritime ambition under Collis P. Huntington, constructing a new rail extension north of Santa Monica Canyon and completing the 4,720-foot Long Wharf in 1893. The structure was the world's longest wooden pier at the time, permitting trains to move freight directly between deep-water vessels and the railroad under the deliberately ambitious name Port Los Angeles. Huntington's project became central to the bitter contest over whether the region's principal harbor would occupy Santa Monica Bay or San Pedro. Federal support shifted decisively toward San Pedro in 1897, and commercial traffic at the Long Wharf subsequently declined before the immense structure disappeared entirely from the shoreline.

Aviation supplied the bay with a separate industrial force after Donald Douglas established an aircraft operation in Santa Monica during the early 1920s. Douglas moved into a former motion-picture property in 1922 and converted the site into a factory and airfield, placing aircraft production within blocks of the Pacific. Four Douglas World Cruisers departed nearby Clover Field on March 17, 1924 on the expedition that completed the first aerial circumnavigation of the globe, giving the young company an international reputation. Expanding aircraft dimensions soon pushed flight operations to the larger Clover Field site, and by 1929 Douglas was using the airfield exclusively for testing and delivering production aircraft. The company subsequently produced the DC-3, whose combination of speed, range and passenger economics became central to commercial aviation during the 1930s. Wartime expansion transformed the surrounding coastal city as Douglas employment climbed to as many as 44,000 people working three shifts and the industrial property expanded to 227 acres. Thousands of houses followed the workforce into surrounding districts, binding aircraft manufacturing to the physical expansion of the eastern bay communities. Santa Monica Bay consequently entered the middle twentieth century with an industrial importance extending far beyond recreation, its coastline adjoining one of the enterprises that helped make Southern California a global center of aircraft design and production.

How to fold Santa Monica Bay into your trip.

Santa Monica Bay works as the anchor for a daytime outing connecting a Pacific promontory named during an eighteenth-century British expedition, a museum modeled on an ancient Roman seaside villa and a marine science center occupying the end of a historic South Bay pier.

Begin at Point Dume, the rocky promontory defining the western terminus of Santa Monica Bay. Chumash communities occupied this coastline for thousands of years and regarded the headland as sacred ground long before European ships appeared offshore. British captain George Vancouver reached the coast during his Pacific expedition and named the promontory on November 24, 1793 for Father Francisco Dumetz of Mission San Buenaventura. The elevated point subsequently became an enduring navigational reference along a coast otherwise dominated by long beaches and steep mountain slopes. Grasslands, coastal bluff scrub and southern foredune vegetation now occupy the surrounding preserve, with two miles of trails crossing a headland whose physical prominence has governed its human significance for centuries. Continue to Getty Villa Museum, whose origins reach to the 64-acre Pacific Palisades property J. Paul Getty acquired after World War II. Getty opened galleries within his ranch house to the public in 1954, but the continuing growth of his antiquities collection led him to pursue a substantially larger museum beginning in 1968. He rejected Spanish, Renaissance and modern proposals in favor of a reconstruction inspired principally by the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum, the Roman residence buried during the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE. Langdon and Wilson executed the building with architectural historian Norman Neuerburg advising closely on Roman details, and the museum opened in January 1974. Getty supervised its creation from England and died in 1976. The institution now holds 44,000 Greek, Roman and Etruscan works, giving the Pacific hillside one of the country's major collections of Mediterranean antiquities. Conclude at Roundhouse Aquarium, where marine education occupies the end of the Manhattan Beach Pier. Six citizens formed Oceanographic Teaching Stations in 1979 to promote the study of Southern California oceans, beaches and tidelands, securing an aging pier building for a dedicated teaching center. Support from TRW, Arco and local volunteers brought the operation into service for Los Angeles County students by 1982. By the end of that decade, the aquarium was receiving 110 classes annually. Reconstruction beginning in 1991 temporarily displaced its animals to Chevron property in El Segundo before a renewed facility opened about a year later with expanded marine exhibits. The progression moves from a headland carrying thousands of years of coastal history through Getty's reconstruction of a Roman villa and culminates inside a pier-end institution devoted to the marine environment that physically unifies Santa Monica Bay.

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