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...
Building Pacific Coast Highway
Bands played, flags waves, dignitaries gave speeches from a bunting-festooned platform, and hundreds of motorists lined up at Sycamore Cove at the western edge of the Topanga Malibu Sequit Rancho for the grand opening of Theodore Roosevelt Highway. It...
The Hotel Arcadia
It loomed above the beach like Count Dracula’s beach residence: stark, turreted, treeless, and not exactly inviting, but Dracula wasn’t written yet when the imposing Hotel Arcadia opened its doors in Santa Monica on January 24, 1887. Celebrated for...
Rhoda Agatha Rindge Adamson
The Story of the Adamson House, Malibu, California Rhoda Agatha Rindge Adamson lived life on her own terms in a time when women—even wealthy ones— rarely had the opportunity to determine their own fate. Her story is eclipsed by...
The Bear Truth
We have a new neighbor in the Santa Monica Mountains. On April 23, National Park Service biologists captured and radio-collared a 210-pound black bear in the western Santa Monica Mountains, south of the 101 Freeway. The bear, a young...
Hollywood Comes to the Canyons, Part II
PART TWO. In our last Lost Canyons LA column, we talked about the connection between the LA canyons and Hollywood’s golden age, both as a location for movies and as home to the actors who starred in them. In...
Christmas on the Homestead
The earliest written account of Christmas in the Santa Monica Mountains appears to be one published by Frederick Hastings Rindge in his 1895 book, Happy Days in Southern California. Rindge describes his ranch house in Malibu festively decorated with...
Point Dume State Beach
There’s a special place just a few miles up the coast, where whales, dolphins, and sea lions swim close to shore, where you can watch the sun or the moon rise and set, where there are golden flowers in...
The Train to Nowhere: Travels on the Hueneme, Malibu & Port Los Angeles Railroad
Imagine a train steaming along the beach, just yards from the ocean on tracks laid on the shifting sand. It sounds like a surrealist painting by Magritte, or a scene from a Miyazaki movie, but it was real—or almost...
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