By VINCE FLAHERTY Special to the Palisadian-Post Back in the early 1990s, I was president of the Pacific Palisades Historical Society and a member representing Castellammare on the Community Council. I tried hard to get through to Mayor Riordan (and later Mayor Hahn and Mayor Villaraigosa), or someone on staff, about the state of affairs along Pacific Coast Highway in our town, but I received nothing but lip service from interns or deputies. I will admit, what’s going on in the Palisades along the coast isn’t as intense as what’s happening along the Pakistan/Afghanistan border or other hotspots around the world. But still, you can go to so many third-world countries that are really poor, relative to the U.S., and you will nevertheless find pristine coastlines where someone has cared enough to preserve scenic and historical features. Take the Castellammare area of Pacific Palisades, for example. It was styled after the town of the same name on the Gold Coast of Italy where the original developer Frank Meline (and his wife) vacationed with Alphonzo Bell in 1925. Bell was the oilman and rancher who developed several key areas in Southern California such as Bell Gardens and Bel-Air. In Pacific Palisades he backed Meline and his company in their creation of the Riviera, Paseo Miramar, Bel-Air Bay Club and Castellammare tracts. They even had plans for a long pier and a Mediterranean-style shopping village with tile roofs at PCH and Sunset where Vons is now. Those plans went bust in 1929, and for many years the serpentine streets on the Castellammare mesa existed as hardly more than a gothic backdrop for Raymond Chandler novels, of a time-forgotten place where you could drive past countless overgrown vacant lots before the gates of the next lonely Spanish Colonial mansion loomed out of the ocean fog. The place sat, haunted by a builder’s dream that turned into a nightmare, through the ’30s and ’40s, and then was suddenly built out entirely with smaller ranch-style homes within only four years during the boom after World War II. One of the things that remained, however, was the wonderful promenade along Castellammare’s coast highway. Built of concrete and stone in 1928, when builders could afford men with the time and patience to make something worthwhile, it had been intended to serve as an elevated walkway, so that gentlemen and ladies with parasols could take leisurely strolls in the salty air by the sea. Most of the Castellammare promenade is still there and could be restored, and probably would have been restored, if instead of certain city officials and their counterparts in the state of California, the local populace was fortunate enough to have had an evil third-world dictator along the way, who at least realized the value of tourism and the meaning of pride in one’s coastline. You can travel anywhere along the world’s coastlines from Acapulco Bay to Bali and appreciate the beauty of the natural coastal environment. But come here to legendary California, in the proudest nation on earth, and experience a coastline where for liability reasons bureaucrats have been afraid to remove parts of fallen houses and plastic tarps from slipping hillsides. Then, to fix the sliding dirt, they implement engineering solutions that pay little consideration to aesthetics. It wouldn’t be that hard to build things that enhance the surroundings instead of insult them. But hey, why change? Over the past two years, I have to admit, taxpayer bucks have been spent repaving PCH from Santa Monica to Malibu, following expensive improvements to parking and facilities along Will Rogers State Beach. Thank you, Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, Caltrans and other government entities that cooperated in making this happen. Yet I still mourn the fact that years earlier, instead of restoring the Castellammare promenade when PCH was moved slightly, somebody at Caltrans thought it would be a great idea to use the space they created in front of the promenade to erect a long chain-link fence behind which to store their construction vehicles and debris–stuff that could have been easily stored out of sight on the state land off the mouth of nearby Topanga Canyon. And it has been an eyesore like that ever since.
This page is available to subscribers. Click here to sign in or get access.
