Malibu Reeling 

The Malibu stretch of Pacific Coast Highway turns 100 next year. It’s strange to know its centennial will begin with a third of the houses, businesses, landmarks that have built up along this road over the past century almost entirely erased.

PCH’s history has been troubled with controversy and plagued with disasters from the start, but no disaster has ever impacted so much of the road and so many of the people who live here. 

The Palisades Fire destroyed 300 buildings along the highway, and nearly 800 throughout eastern Malibu. 

Often change is a gradual process. On the night of January 7, miles of houses and businesses lining the road were erased so completely that the result resembles the aftermath of WWII carpet-bombing. 

What remains are burnt pilings, caissons that stand like ruined columns, blackened and twisted steel beams, rubble that spills down the slopes on the land side, and onto the beach on the ocean side. All of that devastation is punctuated by the presence of burned and abandoned cars. Soon demolition crews will move in and sweep away what is left.  

Almost all of the familiar landmarks along this stretch of highway are gone. The Topanga Ranch Motel, the Malibu Feed Bin, and the other buildings lost at Topanga Beach are just the start. The old Las Tunas Isle Motel building with its painted tiki faces in front is gone. So is Moonshadows restaurant, and the little red and white house where longtime Malibu resident and local surf guru Randy “Crawdaddy” Miod died, unwilling or unable to leave his home of many years. A century of homes has burned. Contemporary architectural structures, quaint beach cottages from the 1920s and 30s, mid-century apartment buildings—all gone. 

A lot of history has been lived on this stretch of road, but it is quiet history, the kind that happens behind the walls and doors. That gate on the hill across from Las Tunas Beach? It once led to an artists colony where writers David Seidler and John Wilder, actors Arthur Malet and Mia Farrow, and artists Lita Albuquerque and Elyn Zimmerman lived and worked. 

That tangle of metal and burned concrete on the edge of the beach? English author and playwright Dodie Smith lived here during WWII, with her husband, conscientious objector Alec Macbeth Beesley, and Pongo, their Dalmatian. Pongo was immortalized in her story that became the Disney movie One Hundred and One Dalmatians. Smith’s house had long since been replaced with an apartment building, but that, too, is now gone. The one with the fragment of wall that still holds two small windows, like empty eyes? That one belonged to a friend. She grew up there. Only the rugged spine of volcanic reef visible at low tide remains unchanged on this stretch of road. An anchor point in a radically altered landscape. 

A little further up the road at the western edge of La Costa Beach a pile of rubble marks the location of the Spanish Colonial house that was home to Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs in the 1930s. He wrote several of his bestselling books there. He also wrote a letter to a friend about experiencing the devastating 1933 Long Beach earthquake while seated at the beach house’s dinner table. It was one of several original 1920s houses in this storied development. Most of the others had already been replaced. Now almost everything has been swept away.

Eventually, new buildings will rise here, too, to become new homes, and new landmarks—that’s how it is on this stretch of road. Change is a constant, but usually it is gradual. 

Before 1892, when May Knight Rindge and her husband, wealthy Massachusetts industrialist Frederick Hastings Rindge, bought the entire 21-mile-long Topanga, Malibu Sequit Rancho, the coast route was a narrow, tortuous track that ran on the beach in some places, and along the base of the towering cliffs in other. In those days, it was open to all travelers, including cattle rustlers, highwaymen, and other outlaws. Traveling on horseback was the easiest and quickest option for those who could afford it. 

Wagons and stagecoaches were sometimes swamped by waves, or became mired in the wet sand. Passengers had to get out and walk, or help the coach driver dig the wheels out. Traveling the coast route was impossible during high tides or winter storms, when the sand was swept out to sea, leaving only rocks behind. Traveling through Malibu took stamina and determination, but for the homesteaders who lived in enclaves within the ranch or just outside it, that route was a lifeline, but travel was never easy.

The Rindges closed the route when they purchased the land, installing gates manned by armed ranch hands. The only way through was by invitation, or by sneaking past when the guards weren’t present. All other travelers, including the Rindges’ neighbors, had to wait for low tide and take their chances traveling along the beach. This route became increasingly arduous as the Rindges bought more land and closed more of the coast. When Frederick Rindge died in 1905, he controlled nearly twenty-eight miles of coastline. His widow, May, continued to keep the route closed, taking the fight all the way to the Supreme Court. 

May Rindge succeeded in keeping Southern Pacific Railroad out by building her own railway—fifteen miles of it—but she could not prevail against the push for a state highway through her land. The growing automobile lobby had the clout the railroad did not. 

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The new road was named Roosevelt Highway—for former President Theodore Roosevelt, not his up-and-coming cousin Franklin. Despite the grand title “highway” and an opening ceremony that featured bands, balloons, banners and a cordial handshake between Miss Mexico and Miss Canada in 1926, the road through Malibu was barely more than a paved track feet from the ocean in some places. There was no median, not even any striping to indicate lanes, and hardly a stop sign along the entire length, from Santa Monica to Ventura.

May Rindge hated to part with any of her coveted land, but she needed money. She engaged a real estate firm to subdivide the spit of land west of Malibu Creek and offer the 30-by-100-foot lots on a ten-year lease for $30 a month—a lot of money in 1926. The lots were snapped up almost at once by a group of actors, directors, writers, and other film industry luminaries. A second neighborhood was developed along the road at La Costa Beach at the same time, and a small enclave of bungalows outside of the Rindge Ranch was also appearing around the same time at Las Tunas Beach. Those were the first beach houses in Malibu.

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Fire has always been an issue. Almost the entire Malibu Rancho burned in 1903. A large section of eastern Malibu and Topanga burned in 1911. The fire swept down to the ocean, but the only homes on the Malibu coast back then were in Los Flores Canyon. Las Flores and Las Tunas canyons burned again in 1912 and 1913, and again in 1942. Almost the entire row of houses at the Malibu Colony burned in 1929, and the La Costa and Rambla neighborhoods were devastated in 1993, when the Old Topanga fire burned 369 homes. The scale of the Palisades Fire was more than twice as devastating than any earlier conflagration, in part because there were more homes to burn, but it was only the latest in a cycle of fire and flood.

Some buildings did survive the Palisades Fire. Landmarks that are still standing include the old Malibu courthouse and the shopping center at Las Flores that began its life as a beach motel in the 1920s. Dukes Restaurant didn’t burn, but was deluged with mud flowing down Las Flores Creek during the first rains. 

The little collection of houses to the west of Topanga State Beach survived, so did the row of houses and apartments east of Big Rock. The historic La Costa Beach Club was left standing, while houses on both sides of the highway and up on the hillside were destroyed. One block of the streamlined old Malibu Beach Hotel building (now apartments,) survived the fire. All that is left of the second building is a chimney. 

There are a lot of theories about why these few structures didn’t burn. Some survived because there was a gap in the wall of houses between them, others may have fared better because the coastline they stand on has a different orientation that kept them out of the direct blast of the wind-blown conflagration. Materials may have also played a role, but some of it may just have been luck. We know one homeowner who is convinced his house was saved through divine intervention. 

Part of the problem on PCH is how close together the houses are. The Depression, followed by WWII, slowed development in Malibu, but in the boom years after the war houses and apartments began springing up all along the highway. As the area attracted wealthier home buyers, the houses grew large, earning the nickname “the great wall of Malibu.” Many of these houses occupy almost every square inch of the lots they are built on, which provided the fire a perfect path to travel from one to the next during the Palisades fire.. 

The catastrophic destruction of so many homes has revealed an uncomfortable truth about PCH. In some places the caissons and bulkheads built to support and protect residential property are all that is preventing the road from falling into the ocean. The Army Corps of Engineers, responsible for overseeing Phase II demolition, will not be touching this infrastructure, even when it is damaged. They have also declined to remove damaged septic systems, which are reportedly leaching effluent into the ocean.

On the other side of the highway, concrete and wooden retaining walls have been damaged by the fire, and every canyon and ravine impacted by the blaze has the potential to cause additional mud and debris flows.

The Malibu City Council last week hashed out the changes to the Local Coastal Program that will enable home and business owners to begin the rebuilding process. The changes will go to the California Coastal Commission for approval in April, but it is unclear how the issue raised by the loss of so many beach properties will be addressed and that’s a major logistical issue not just for property owners anxious to rebuild, but for everyone who depends on the Highway 1 transportation corridor.

PCH isn’t the only major problem for local residents and commuters. The ongoing closure of Topanga Canyon Blvd. south of Grand View means Topanga residents wouldn’t be able to access PCH even if the coast route was open. The canyon road remains buried in hundreds of tons of mud and debris, leaving Canyon residents who work or go to school on the Westside facing a grueling commute through the valley. For small business owners in Topanga and Malibu the closures are yet another disaster. Officials have not provided a timeline for reopening, and many fear the closures will extend into summer. 

The beach properties are the most visible aspect of the damage created by the fire in Malibu, but more than half of the 800 destroyed structures are in canyons and mesas above the highway. Those property owners are counting on the limited access now available to remain open for them as Phase II begins, but the risk that mud flows once again completely shut down the road remains high. It’s going to be a long, stressful journey over the next few months for everyone, one that involves a lot of waiting. Every delay is an agony for the people whose homes have been destroyed, and who are desperate to begin the rebuilding process, as costs continue to mount and time passes. 

The fragile condition of PCH shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone—this is an active, dynamic coastal environment that is going to continue to change. One hundred years of intense human activity is less than a second in the 16-million-year history of the Santa Monica Mountains and coast. In the aftermath of the fire, many are raising the question of whether all of the houses that burned on the beach, and particularly those that are at the highest risk of flooding from sea level rise and coastal erosion, should be rebuilt even if they can be. The fire was a reminder that everything here is temporary. Everything changes. The Palisades Fire took only hours to destroy eastern Malibu. The aftermath will be felt for years. 

For more information on the history of Pacific Coast Highway, check out https://topanganewtimes.com/2024/05/31/building-pacific-coast-highway/