California (Los Angeles Area)
Santa Monica
Immediately north of Venice, Santa Monica is the oldest and biggest of LA’s resort areas, perched on palm-tree-shaded bluffs above the blue Pacific. Once a wild beachfront playground, it’s now a self-consciously healthy and liberal community, with a large expatriate British contingent of writers and rock stars, ranging from Rod Stewart to John Lydon.

The Santa Monica beachfront grew into a giant funfair city when it was linked to downtown LA by the suburban streetcar system. It was the location for many of the underworld stories of Raymond Chandler, most memorably as “Bay City” in Farewell My Lovely, but today Chandler wouldn’t recognize the place. The gambling ships and bathing clubs have gone, and Santa Monica is now well known for its effective rent control policy and its stringent planning and development regulations. For these perceived infractions, local right-wingers refer sneeringly to the city as the “People’s Republic.”

Santa Monica reaches nearly three miles inland, but most things of interest are within a few blocks of the beach. The visitor center (daily 10am–5pm; tel 310/393-7593), in a kiosk just south of Santa Monica Boulevard, along Ocean Boulevard in Palisades Park (the cypress tree-lined strip along the top of the bluffs), makes a good first stop. Two blocks east of Ocean Boulevard, the Santa Monica Promenade, a pedestrianized stretch popular with buskers and itinerant evangelists, is the closest LA comes to having an urban energy, though it has been losing some of its steam lately with the arrival of colorless chain stores, which are crowding out the quirky boutiques and oddball shops. On weekend nights this three-block strip hosts a pleasant passeggiata bringing together Angelenos of all ages and accents, and it’s by far the best place to come for alfresco dining, beer-drinking or simply people-watching.

The real focal point of Santa Monica life is down below, on the beach and around the once-decaying and recently refurbished Santa Monica pier, which boasts a giant helter-skelter and a well-restored 1922 wooden carousel – featured, along with Paul Newman, in the 1973 movie The Sting. The grand beach houses just to the north of the pier were known as Hollywood’s “Gold Coast”; the largest, now the Sand and Sea beach club, was built as the servants’ quarters of a massive 120-room house, now demolished, that belonged to William Randolph Hearst. In the adjacent villa of MGM boss Louis B Mayer, the Kennedy brothers were later rumored to have had liaisons with Marilyn Monroe.

Five miles along the curving Pacific Coast Highway (PCH) from Santa Monica, a huge mock French chateau inadvertently marks the easily missed entrance to the Getty Villa, once the site of the Getty museum, at 17985 PCH. A fake Roman villa poised high above the ocean, the complex is currently closed until 200l, when it will re-emerge as a showcase for Getty antiquities.

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