Stories about Santa Monica history.
To hear people talk about Santa Monica in the “good old days” — of course, when those days specifically were always depends on who you are asking — you might get the sense that it was truly a bucolic paradise. It…
We’ve talked a lot about Santa Monica’s upcoming zoning ordinance update, the document which will enact the City’s award-winning Land Use and Circulation Element (LUCE). While much of the talk has been about housing, height and density limits, and the…
Editor’s note: Below is the first in a series of blog posts by former City Council Candidate and long-time political observer, Frank Gruber, taking a closer look at the November 2014 election. The original post, titled “Back to What I…
The Santa Monica City Council took a historic step Tuesday and greenlit what could be Los Angeles County’s very first public bike share system. With the Council’s approval, CycleHop, LLC is on track to launch the bike share system by…
Mark your calendars! Santa Monica’s world-famous 3rd Street Promenade is turning 25 (and you can bet there will be some fanfare), Santa Monica gets ready to celebrate Park(ing) Day, and our City Council Candidate forum is only a week away.…
Putting an end to months of speculation, City Councilmember Bob Holbrook announced yesterday that he would not seek a seventh term on the Santa Monica City Council. Many close observers of local politics expected that Holbrook would step down this…
Santa Monica in the early 1930s was many things, but a sleepy beach town it wasn’t. The bayside city was a major industrial center where Douglas Aircraft Company (later known as McDonnell Douglas) manufactured the famous DC-3 transport planes. It was…
One by one they walked to the front of the gathering in Santa Monica to ring a bell and say a name. The names they called out were family and friends who have been killed by gun violence. The bell-ringing…
For 76 years, locals have gathered at Woodlawn Cemetery in Santa Monica’s Pico Neighborhood for the bay city’s annual Memorial Day celebration. This year, along with the usual food, music and military flyover, City officials unveiled a new monument to Santa…
So, you’re moving to Santa Monica, the eight-square miles of eco-friendly paradise on the western edge of Los Angeles County. Your new home – we’re guessing it’s an apartment since about 70 percent of the people who live in…
In the middle of Santa Monica’s Bergamot Station – a collection of about three dozen art galleries housed in repurposed industrial buildings – there is a patch of green space. It is small, about 900 square feet of grass and…
Often overlooked, Santa Monica’s Camera Obscura is a noteworthy relic of photographic history. Stepping into the attraction’s small, darkened space transports today’s media-saturated visitors to a time when the public viewed the projection of images on a screen as a…
Visiting the Third Street Promenade on any given day – let alone on a holiday weekend – it’s hard to imagine the three block stretch between Wilshire Boulevard and Broadway in Downtown Santa Monica was ever anything but a bustling…
With Santa Monica buzzing these days with questions about where the city is headed, a dozen people set out last Saturday and turned their attention not to the future, but to the city’s past. The group was led by a…
If you haven’t been to see the A+D (Architecture and Design) Museum exhibit Never Built: Los Angeles, it’s definitely worth a trip and the price of admission for anyone interested in the history of planning in the Los Angeles region.…
