Xanadu at the Beach: The La Monica Ballroom 

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge

It floated above the bay like a mirage, minarets gilded, pennants snapping in the sea breeze, but instead of holding the riches of an Arabian sultan, the only sheiks here were the fashionable young men who accompanied their flapper dates for a night of dancing. 

The La Monica Dance Pavilion opened in 1924, right on time to ride the wave of enthusiasm for Arabian Nights style fantasy architecture. Orientalism had already been in vogue in Europe for more than a hundred years. It grew out of the colonial expansion of the eighteenth century, and included a fascination with the aesthetics of the Ottoman Empire, Spanish and Moorish architecture and decorative arts, with some Assyrian and Egyptian motifs thrown in for variety.

“Islamic styles were perceived as novel, filling a perceived aesthetic void in “the West,” writes art historian Richard V. Francaviglia in his 2011 book Go East, Young Man: Imagining the American West as the Orient. A void left by what British architect Owen Jones once called the “Age of Ugliness.”

By the time the fad reached California it had evolved into a fantasy amalgamation of the Arabian Nights and actual Moorish architecture like the Alhambra in Spain, and it reached a fevered pitch in the 1920s, inspired in part by the popularity of motion pictures like the 1921 sensation The Sheik featuring Rudolph Valentino (from which—and whom—the slang counterpart to flapper was derived). The La Monica Ballroom opened in 1924, the same year The Thief of Bagdad starring Douglas Fairbanks dazzled audiences. The dance pavilion showcased the same aesthetic on the outside: pure Arabian Nights fantasy: an illustrated fairytale brought to life. 

The La Monica Ballroom wasn’t the first Middle East-inspired fantasy castle on the beach. The Santa Monica Pier’s carousel pavilion—officially the Looff Hippodrome—also featured a dozen minarets, and a glass-topped onion dome cupola on top, when it opened in 1914. The Ocean Park Bath House, which opened in 1904 just a little ways down the coast, also featured towering minarets, and onion domes, and every Moorish-inspired architectural extra that its architect, Canadian-born Joseph Cather Newsom, could dream up.

The La Monica Ballroom wasn’t the only local ballroom. The Venice Ballroom, which opened in 1921, newly rebuilt after a fire that destroyed much of the old Abbot Kinney Pier, had architecture inspired by Venice, Italy, and a dance floor could accommodate 800 couples. The interior was tropical, with towering palm trees made with dyed feathers for fronds. The Bon Ton Ballroom at the Lick Pier in Ocean Pier (later known as the Aragon Ballroom) opened in 1922 and featured “the only circular floor of its kind on the coast.” Its neighbor, the Egyptian Ballroom, featured obelisks, Egyptian lotus columns, and hieroglyphic friezes—or what the artist fondly thought were hieroglyphic friezes. Even the plain vanilla Crystal Pier, also known as the Bristol Pier, installed some vaguely Middle Eastern towers and built a ballroom.

The La Monica Ballroom opened its doors in 1924. It was designed by the thoroughly eccentric T.H. Eslick (The T. H. stood for Tollemache Heriot, or Thomas Henry, depending on what Mr Eslick was up to at the moment). Born in Wales in 1877 (although he sometimes claimed he was from India), Eslick was a showman who claimed to be a construction engineer. He said he “held diplomas” from the Royal Institute of Civil Engineers (London and India), and from the Institute of Civil Engineers of New Zealand, and that he was also a member of the Academy Francaise. It’s unclear whether Eslick had any formal schooling at all, or whether or not he was actually an engineer, but he specialized in building amusement parks and ballrooms. 

There is evidence that he may have also specialized in embezzling the investors in the amusement parks he designed, or else that he was a supremely bad bookkeeper—he filed for bankruptcy twice. According to the November 27, 1942 Brisbane Daily Mercury, Eslick somehow absentmindedly misplaced an astonishing amount of money, including “£22,000 in Brussels in 1922, and £43,000 more in a fixed deposit in a “California bank crash.” 

Eslick was in the news in Australia for his involvement with—and financial woes over—an amusement park he designed in Brisbane called Luna Park. Everything appeared to have been unraveling for him by the 1940s, and he died in 1948

Whatever else he did, Elsick seems to have delivered what he promised in Santa Monica. The La Monica Ballroom was spectacular. The building was 40,000 square feet. The dance floor was 15,000 square feet—advertised as the largest in the country. Comfortable seating surrounded the ballroom, where dancers could rest and enjoy refreshments, and those disinclined to dance could relax and watch.

Because this was Prohibition, the refreshments consisted of coffee, lemonade, and that exciting new beverage, the soft drink. Santa Monica became a “dry” community before the 18th Amendment passed (one of the biggest advocates for “temperance” was Frederick Hastings Rindge, the man who purchased the entire 13,400-acre Malibu Rancho in 1892, and who was a community leader in Santa Monica). 

No alcohol was allowed at the La Monica Ballroom when it opened, but the neighborhood speakeasies would have supplied the goods for those who needed a little liquid encouragement before hitting the dance floor. 

Dancing was a serious business in the 1920s. Couples and even entire teams competed for prizes. Dance marathons could last for hours or even days. Most of the events advertised at the La Monica were more benign. “Collegiate” evenings featured teams from local high schools, including Santa Monica High School. Students danced the fox trot for prizes like a commemorative cup. Band concerts and organ recitals were also popular. Flappers danced the Charleston and the Lindley here, and dancers swayed to the tango. Special themed balls were held for the holidays. 

According to James Harris, author of Santa Monica Pier: America’s Last Great Pleasure Pier, Eslick brought in a team of Russian artists who designed the ballroom’s “submarine garden,” where dancers “could revel in the illusion of dancing at the bottom of the ocean.” 

There are few surviving photographs of the interior in the 1920s, and only a glimpse of the undersea murals, but much of the undersea effect was achieved through innovative mood lighting that required its own power facility with generators and three 120-horsepower engines.

The outside of the La Monica was pure Arabian Nights fantasy, and the ceiling of the dance floor may have been intended to suggest the roof on a Bedouin tent, complete with massive chandeliers like hanging lanterns. The rest of the interior is often described as “French Renaissance,” but the few photos that exist look more like a mad mix of Rococo and Neoclassical, with a forest of Corinthian-style columns and loads of gold leaf. It must have looked a lot like the interior of the White House under the current administration: gold decorations everywhere.

This floating palace was an instant success. The Evening Outlook reported that, “50,000 people came to see the new La Monica Ballroom on opening night” and that over 5,000 danced the night away on the “finest floor in America.” The entire population of Santa Monica in 1920 was just 15,252, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. It’s a wonder the pier didn’t collapse under the weight. 

The ballroom almost did collapse two years later, during what was one of the strongest El Niño winters of the twentieth century. The pier was battered by big waves in February of 1926. Many of the pilings that supported the massive structure were swept away. Observers reported that the entire building was sagging seaward. 

Repairs were made and La Monica reopened a month later, but it was soon hit by another setback, the Great Depression. This wave of misfortune threatened to sweep away not only the dance pavilion, but the entire pier and all of its attractions. No one had money to spend on entertainment.

In 1934, the ballroom received a reprieve. As part of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal work projects, the La Monica was selected by the State Emergency Relief Agency for improvements. 

Conference rooms and offices were added to the building, and a saltwater aquarium was installed. SERA also built lifeguard facilities, including a new headquarters office, accommodations, and a glassed-in tower for observing the beach. 

Living New Deal is an organization dedicated to documenting New Deal projects and promoting their preservation and conservation. According to their website, materials from motion picture studio sets were repurposed for the La Monica construction project.

The military moved in during WWII. After the war, the giant ballroom was no longer in demand, but it had another reprieve. The Los Angeles TV station KTLA broadcast the first ever live television variety show from the La Monica, giving it a new life, but the old building was beginning to show its age. After a brief stint as a temporary jail while Santa Monica’s municipal buildings were being rebuilt, the ballroom ended its career as a roller skating rink. By the 1960s, the building was once again beginning to sag. This time it was the roof threatening collapse. Years of deferred maintenance had taken their toll on the building, and the harsh marine environment hadn’t helped. The La Monica Ballroom was condemned and demolished in 1963.

The Venice ballroom was already long gone by then. It was torn down in 1946, in the first burst of post-WWII redevelopment fervor. The Bon Ton survived a little longer. It was renamed the Aragon, and became the venue for The Lawrence Welk Show, and later, it was the short-lived psychedelic Cheetah Club. The Doors played there not long before this former ballroom also closed its doors. The building burned in 1970.

The great era of the ballroom has come and gone, taking with it the ghosts of the flappers and the sound of jazz pouring out over the water. The architectural whimsies that housed them have also vanished. Arabesque architecture turned out to be difficult and expensive to maintain. The examples that survive, like the lovely hippodrome pavilion on the Santa Monica Pier, have often been stripped of their more exuberant decorative flourishes out of necessity: maintaining tiny tipsy turrets, and gilded onion domes is a major challenge, especially when they were built for the moment and not for posterity.

T. H. Eslick may not have actually been an engineer, but he still managed to build a marvel on the Santa Monica Pier: a fairytale floating palace that endured for decades and became a unique part of the history of the Santa Monica Bay.

“[The La Monica Ballroom’s] heyday was during the pier’s most difficult years,” writes James Harris. “An era of insecurity, uncertainty, and, at times, despair, Its mere existence brought an occasional ray of hope, whether as a ballroom or as any of its other incarnations.”

TNT Editor Suzanne Guldimann, a passionate local historian, is also the author of TNT’s long-running mystery serial Maddie Ellis and the Malibu Movie Colony. This issue’s episode—Chapter 20—takes place in part at the La Monica Ballroom. The author thought it would be fun to share more of the history of this unusual former landmark with TNT’s readers.