Santa Barbara, CA Waterfront History: By Walker A. Hopkins

The Marina and Breakwater in Santa Barbara

The Spaniards who founded Santa Barbara in 1782 were soldiers and priests, not seafaring men. Perhaps that is why no provision was made for a seaport. The waterfront, extending 3.7 miles from Shoreline Park to the Bird Refuge, offers no natural headlands to create a safe anchorage. Early-day mariners dreaded Santa Barbara's exposed roadstead so much they used to drop anchor a mile offshore, ready to slip their cables and head for the open sea if foul weather threatened.

In pre-Columbian times five Chumash Indian villages flourished along Santa Barbara's waterfront: Mispu, on the SBCC campus; El Banos, at the foot of Bath Street; Chief Yanonali's large rancheria between Bath and Chapala Streets; Amolomol, at the mouth of Mission Creek; and Swetete, on the Clark Estate above the Bird Refuge. Along this crescent strand the aborigines launched their sea-going "tomols," plank canoes which were unique on the North American continent.

As recently as 50 years ago the ocean used to cover what today is the City College football field, dashing its surf against cliffs now paneled by La Playa Stadium. Leadbetter Beach did not exist. But just around the corner east of Castle Rock (a long-vanished promontory) semi-sheltered West Beach became the traditional landing place for visitors. It is thus overlaid with history covering two centuries.

In 1769 Captain Gaspar de Portola's expedition camped at the site of today's Moreton Bay Fig Tree, the first white men to visit Santa Barbara by land. Captain Juan Bautista de Anza hugged the same shoreline in 1774. Captain George Vancouver, a British scientist on a globe-girdling voyage of exploration, anchored off West Beach in 1793 and filled his water butts from a spring at modern Pershing Park.

Starting around 1800 the Barbarenos lighted a lantern at dusk and hoisted it to the top of a tall sycamore near the beach. That tree's truncated, 500-year-old husk still clings to life at the northwest corner of Milpas and Quinientos Streets. A designated historical landmark, the Sailors Sycamore is known both as Santa Barbara's first lighthouse and its oldest living pioneer.

The waterfront is no stranger to disaster. On December 21, 1812, Southern California suffered a cataclysmic earthquake that generated a mammoth wave or tsunami, which sent a 50-foot wall of water thundering across Santa Barbara's flat beaches and inland as tar as Peabody Stadium and Anapamu Street. It did no real damage.

Another near-disaster involved man, not nature. In 1818 two heavily-armed frigates captained by Hippolyte de Bouchard, a freebooter hired to harass Spanish shipping and seaports on behalf of Argentina's war of independence, hove to off the Sailors' Sycamore and would have landed a raiding party had it not been for a clever stratagem by Jose de la Guerra, commandant of the Royal Presidio. Legend has it that he gathered a band of volunteers who rode their horses round and round a clump of willows near East Beach, tricking the enemy into believing that Santa Barbara was too heavily defended to risk an attack. Bouchard sailed away, and years later Voluntario Street was so named to memorialize De la Guerra and his intrepid volunteers for saving the town.

During the first four decades of the 19th Century, hide and tallow ships from Boston made Santa Barbara a regular port of call, as vividly depicted in Dana's "Two Years Before the Mast." A hide collection station was erected at the foot of Chapala Street in 1828, over which flew the first American flag to appear in Santa Barbara. The Star-Spangled Banner became official in August 1846 when the American warship "Congress" anchored off West Beach. Commodore Richard Field Stockton came ashore with a platoon of U.S. Marines to claim Santa Barbara as a prize of war from Mexico. Stockton was followed nine months later by a U.S. Army transport which discharged a company of New York Volunteers to serve as occupation troops.

Following statehood for California, the U.S. government built a chain of lighthouses along the West Coast, one of which was on the Mesa a mile east of Arroyo Burro. Built in 1856, it fell in the 1925 earthquake and was replaced by the automated beacon.

During the 1850s and 60s Santa Barbara was isolated from the outside world by lack of roads or a railway. It was a dangerous business lightering freight and passengers through the surf from coastal vessels. Steps to convert Santa Barbara into a seaport were first taken in 1865 when a group of business men including Dr. Samuel B. Brinkerhoff, Captain Martin Kimberly, Dr. John Shaw, Isaac J. Sparks and Lewis T. Burton formed the Santa Barbara Wharf Company. In 1868 they built a short pier out from the foot of Chapala Street, not far enough to permit deep-draft vessels to tie up.

In 1871 John Peck Stearns, a one-legged Vermonter who operated a lumber yard at the foot of State Street, petitioned a hostile City Council for a permit to build a 1,500 foot wharf out to deep water. This permission came reluctantly because of bitter political opposition from the rival Chapala Street wharf syndicate.

Stearns borrowed $40,000 from the town's richest man, Colonel W.W.. Hollister, leased a pile driver from Port Hueneme, and by mid-September of 1872 had a wharf ready for Santa Barbara's first steamer to tie up, the freighter Anne Stoffer. Passenger steamers, including the venerable old sidewheeler Orizaba, followed by the Senator, the Mohongo. the Kalorama, the Queen of the Pacific and many others, made Santa Barbara a port of call for years to come. Freighters, both sail and steam, which previously had had to jettison lumber cargos overboard to float ashore on incoming tides, now could unload directly to a warehouse at the pierhead. It was the beginning of boom times.

Soon wealthy health seekers made Santa Barbara a fashionable resort. To accommodate the throngs of swimmers, sunbathers and boaters who flocked to the beach, in 1870 the city extended horse-drawn streetcar service to West Beach. The sheltered area in the lea of the Mesa was historically the favorite spot for Barbarenos to bale, first the Indians and later the Hispanic settlers. Americans continued the custom - Bath Street is so named because it led to the public bathing beach - and from the 1870s onward a series of bath houses, later equipped with heated swimming pools, stood in the vicinity of Plaza del Mar park. The streetcars were electrified in 1896 and extended the length of East Beach.

Stearns Wharf did not provide Santa Barbara with a real harbor. Early in 1878 a severe sou'easter hit the waterfront, beaching all anchored vessels, destroying the Chapala Street pier forever, and smashing out a 900-foot section of Stearns Wharf. Stearns, outraged by the exorbitant taxes the city imposed on his facility, refused to rebuild the wharf unless the tax was rescinded. This was done. The wharf reopened in July, but in December a waterspout funneled across the anchorage, pounding vessels into Stearns Wharf again and causing damage which could not be repaired until the following spring.

The Santa Barbara Yacht Club was incorporated in 1887, using Stearns' home at the foot of the wharf for a clubhouse, until it was washed out to sea by a winter storm. The year 1887 also saw the arrival of the railroad in Santa Barbara. This cut heavily into the steamship lines' passenger traffic, but economical ocean freight kept the ships coming until their era was ended by trucks and automobiles.

As a result of the arrival of the railroad, in 1888 Stearns added a wye from the wharf to East Beach between Anacapa and Santa Barbara Streets, carrying a railroad spur which connected with the main line. High seas destroyed the wye in 1898 and it was never rebuilt. Today only a short stub of the original wye remains jutting from the wharf.

The railroad was not completed through to San Francisco until 1901. Anticipating a new tourist boom, in 1902 the luxurious 600-room Potter Hotel was opened on the site of Yanonali's Indian village between Bath and Chapala Streets. This concentrated the city's burgeoning tourist trade along West Beach, where it remains to the present.

Stearns died in 1902 and his widow hired Frank Smith, veteran wharfinger from the Serena pier near Carpinteria, to manage her affairs until 1917, when Pat Johnson and his wife Bertha moved into the wharfinger's apartments above the wharf warehouse. The Johnsons were the most popular figures on the waterfront for the next third of a century. Their regime included the Prohibition years, during which they discreetly failed to notice rum-runners unloading cargoes of contraband booze, for fear of gangland reprisals.

In 1915 a 15-foot concrete seawall had been built to protect West Beach. Only three feet of that wall remain visible above the sand dunes today.

Aviation also enters the local waterfront story. Starting in 1916 the Loughead Brothers Aircraft Manufacturing Company on lower State Street built hydroplanes which they launched from a wooden ramp on West Beach directly in front of today's El Patio Motel. Changing their name to Lockheed, the brothers became leaders of America's aviation industry. Santa Barbara's first "airport" opened in 1919 parallel to East Beach between Milpas Street and the Bird Refuge. Its landing strip was along Orilla del Mar, behind the Mar Monte Hotel, which was not built until 1929.

When the Ambassador (formerly Potter) Hotel was destroyed by an arsonist in 1921, the north side of West Cabrillo Boulevard was soon clotted with tearooms, candy stores, skating rinks and small cafes catering to the tourist trade. A so-called "pleasure pier" owned by the electric company, jutted into the channel at the foot of Castillo Street and was a landmark from 1895 until 1929. The West Beach area after World War II became a high density zone filled with deluxe motels and apartment complexes, after the city turned down a chance to buy the 36-acre Potter grounds for a mere $100,000 in 1921.

The most inspiring aspect of Santa Barbara waterfront's long history is the struggle waged by public-spirited citizens half a century ago to save East Beach from commercial exploitation, a struggle which is still going on. As early as 1903 the Park Commission recommended that the city purchase the old lumber yard situated east of the wharf. That took 28 years to accomplish.

"East Boulevard" along East Beach was completed in 1905 and became part of the Coast Highway. It washed out after a few weeks and was replaced in 1907. Not until 1919 did the city officially name the waterfront street "Cabrillo Boulevard" both east and west of the wharf.

The large tidal marsh known as the Salt Pond, at the east end of the waterfront, had been purchased by a group of 60 philanthropists in 1906 and deeded to the city in 1909. Later Mrs. Mary A. Clark spent $50,000 to dredge the pond and convert it into a fresh water lake, named in honor of her deceased daughter "Andree Clark Bird Refuge."

A wooden sea wall was built along East Beach in 1907. By 1924 the populace feared that developers were going to convert the beach west of Por La Mar Drive into a Coney Island type of honky-tonk row. To prevent a future slum from taking root, Frederick Forrest Peabody, the Arrow Shirt tycoon, formed the "East Beach Improvement Association" to buy up private parcels and hold them in trust until the city could take them over. In 1927 the boulevard from Milpas to Anacapa Streets was moved 300 to 600 feet farther north. Another citizens' group headed by David Gray, Sr. bought up other portions of East Beach, including "Shoreacres," an ugly cluster of palm-thatched shacks rented to vacationers. Mr. and Mrs. Gray also built a $100,000 pavilion at the eastern end of the waterfront, on the city's promise to furnish the interior. When City Hall reneged on its pledge the Grays went ahead and completed what is now known as the Cabrillo Arts Center. As a result of all this civic cooperation, the creation of beautiful Palm Park was possible.

The disastrous earthquake of June 29, 1925, buckled paving on East Boulevard, twisting and actually breaking street car rails. An ugly railroad roundhouse at Punta Gorda Street was demolished and, in keeping with Santa Barbara's post-quake "Spanish look" renaissance, was rebuilt as a replica of the bullring in Madrid. The waterfront is recognized today as the city area most vulnerable to earthquake damage, due to the instability of its saturated soil near the ocean.

A year after the earthquake the Yacht Club moved into a clubhouse built on the wharf. The club's directors voted to close the place in 1938 due to "bad conduct and excessive drinking by certain non-sailing members." The clubhouse remained vacant until 1941 when it was leased by Ronald Colman and Al Weingand, owners of San Ysidro Ranch, and converted into the nationally-famous Harbor Restaurant.

But Santa Barbara was still without a harbor. A proposal in 1903 to build a municipal moorage basin for the benefit of local yachtsmen was rejected by a caste-conscious citizenry. In the early 1920s the Yacht Club conducted an engineering survey to determine the best location for an artificial harbor. Sacks of sawdust and empty jugs were set adrift from Hope Ranch to study current behavior. As a result of these tests the Yacht Club made two recommendations: (1) don't locate a harbor near West Beach, because prevailing currents would immediately shoal a moorage basin with sand while denuding beaches to bedrock farther to the east; and (2) the most feasible and economical solution would be to widen the natural inlet to the Salt Pond (Bird Refuge), install jetties at the entrance, and give Santa Barbara a completely land-locked anchorage. safe in any weather the year around.

In 1926 Major Max C. Fleischmann, the "yeast king." Donated $200,000 to build a breakwater if the city would match the funds. The Major as looking for a safe anchorage for his 250-foot luxury yacht Haida. In response to his offer the voters, perhaps unwisely, approved a $200,000 harbor bond issue on May 4. Within a month, tons of ingenious rock quarried on Santa Cruz island were barged across the channel and dumped into the roadstead - parallel to West Beach. By ignoring the Yacht Club's warning, city engineers made a mistake which has plagued the entire waterfront for half a century.

By June 1929 a thousand-foot breakwater of riprap (loose rocks) was completed. Major Fleischmann decided it was inadequate to shelter his yacht, and paid $250,000 to extend the breakwater another 600 feet to the east. Later he would spend $100,000 for a dike to connect the west end of the breakwater to the beach.

The new harbor was a boon for vacationists, pleasure boaters and commercial fishermen. But it opened a political Pandora's Box for the city fathers, troubles that will carry over into the 1980s. Why? Because the new breakwater, as engineers had warned, interrupted the flow of suspended sand which the littoral drift of the ocean had been distributing along the shoreline for thousands of years. Now, 775 cubic yards of sand per day were being precipitated to the bottom of the millpond-placid area inside the breakwater. When a groin was added to prevent the moorage basin from becoming a waste of dry sand dunes, a build-up of sand began west of the groin. Ten acres of newly accreted land, now called Leadbetter Beach, were deeded to the city by the State Legislature in 1937. A football gridiron now occupies the center of that accrued beach land.

Meanwhile, as Leadbetter Beach was forming, from the east came howls of anguish as upland owners including the newly-built Biltmore and Mar Monte Hotels saw tidal action scouring precious sand from beaches as far east as Sandyland and Carpinteria, exposing rocky bottom. When a sea wall of planks and pilings was washed out by winter waves, the city at enormous expense poured a dike of buried rocks along East Beach in 1940. This stabilized the sand erosion. but a vast sand bar began curling like the tail of a comma from the outer end of the breakwater, encroaching on the harbor entrance.

Both wharf and harbor were closed by the Navy during World War II, terminating the Harbor Restaurant Actor James Cagney paid $200,000 for the run-down wharf in 1945 then sold it to Leo Sanders in 1948. The wharf deteriorated rapidly during Sanders' stewardship and he was glad to sell out for $125,000 in 1955. The new owners, George V. Castagnola's Santa Barbara Wharf Company Inc. poured more than a million dollars into repairing the wharf and converting the old Harbor Restaurant into one of the finest gourmet establishments on the coast. its total destruction by fire in April 1973, and the city's take-over of the wharf franchise that fall, led to the rapid disintegration of Stearns Wharf, a problem which is currently in the process of solution.

The growing sand bar at the end of the breakwater forced the taxpayers in 1959 to buy a $250,000 dredge and a $127,000 tender in an effort to keep the harbor open, a $100,000 annual expenditure. In the spring of 1976 the city was even forced to enlist the aid of the Army Corps of Engineers, after the Coast Guard cutter Point Judith had to move to Ventura to escape being bottled up by sand blocking the exit channel. This costly dredging program will continue ad infinitum.

A black, malignant tide of crude oil invaded the Santa Barbara anchorage and fouled the coastline as a result of Union Oil Company's drilling accident on Platform A off Summerland on January 28, 1969. The city was later awarded $4,500,000 damages from the oil spill.

A full decade after that traumatic experience, City Hall is still studying what to do with Stearns Wharf, how to uncork the bottleneck of the crosstown 101 Freeway flanking the waterfront, and whether to go ahead with a proposed convention center and condominium community on railroad property fronting historic East Beach. These issues await resolution in the upcoming 1980s, Only one thing is predictable: storms will always lash the Santa Barbara waterfront, be they, man-made or meteorological. But these stresses are not noticed by the tourist or even the average Santa Barbaran; they take pride in their waterfront as a thing of great beauty and everlasting interest.