Rick Wallace
Along the PCH
Envision the New Malibu! By 2010 there will be two new high-class restaurants on Carbon Beach. The pier will be fully operational, serving food and/or bait at both ends. The Malibu Beach Inn next door will be renovated and stylish. The new Legacy Park will be built with grassy fields, walkways and ponds. In the years soon following, parks and new development will come to the Point Dume area near Heathercliff, where the current plaza is undergoing renovation, and at Trancas. The next era of Malibu will be spectacular!
€ Winter and spring bring the lowest tides of the year. Plan a low tide walk one fresh, clear weekend day and do three or four miles one way. On any beach you choose, it will be one of your best three hours of the month!
€ The late President Gerald Ford, who died in December, once made a major policy address in Malibu. He is the only president to have ever made an official public visit to Malibu, though private visits in recent administrations have occurred. It happened Sept. 20, 1975 at Pepperdine during a ceremony to dedicate the Leonard K. Firestone Fieldhouse. Huge grandstands were constructed in the parking lot to hold possibly the largest gathering of people in Malibu history for a specific event. The Malibu Times reported a crowd of 16,000 but I was there and remember 20,000 as a recognized tally. The Coast Guard patrolled the waters while sharpshooters on horseback wandered in the nearby hills in an unprecedented show of security. There was good reason. Ford had been shot at less than two weeks earlier and would be shot at again two days later, both times by a woman on the streets of San Francisco.
€ What is with the burnt orange, reddish trees in Malibu Canyon?
€ The only addresses in 90265 that begin with 7, practically, are a few dozen homes at the tip of Point Dume. There are scant few addresses that begin with 8 or 9 anywhere in 90265. From Corral Canyon east, every address begins with a 1, 2, or 3, except a handful at the top of the mountain. Latigo Canyon, from Kanan to PCH, is the only street with addresses that begin with every numeral.
€ Imagine a beach house with three stories holding 110 bedrooms, 55 bathrooms and 37 fireplaces. It once existed, but not in Malibu. It was the mansion of Marion Davies on Santa Monica Beach along the PCH just south of Channel Road. Later, after the palatial Georgian Revival home was torn down in the late 1950s, the guest house survived as the Sand and Sea Club from 1960 – 1990 and has since been abandoned. William Randolph Hearst built the home for his mistress in the 1920s, about the time he was building his famous Castle near San Simeon. There was a 110-foot pool made of white Italian marble. While the Malibu Movie Colony was just getting its legs in the 1930s, the Davies estate down the coast was home to some of Hollywood’s most famous parties of the time.
€ During 1957, The Malibu Times was printed on huge 14-inch by 22-inch paper. One of the articles from almost exactly 50 years ago was of a threat by the county to take over Paradise Cove and turn the beach of the Malibu Riviera cliffs of Point Dume into a large boat harbor.
€ When the Malibu Inn opened in its current location in 1937, it was also a depot for the Greyhound Bus Line.
€ According to the U.S. Geological Survey, 15 earthquakes in the past 50 years have hit 5.0 or more on the Richter scale in the Southern California region. The Malibu fault gets credit for three of them (Feb. 1973; Jan. 1979; Jan. 1989).
€ The current Ralphs was originally a Mayfair Market, with a weeklong grand opening that began on July 31, 1958 and 1,000 residents at the inaugural event. We don’t get that many people for one event now. One of its competing markets at the time was the Pantry N’ Keg Market that is long forgotten. (But not its location, where A & B Hardware is currently.)
€ I will surely shed a tear soon when the Windsail restaurant building gets torn down. In its busiest days, it was Carlos & Pepe’s, Malibu’s favorite hangout during the 1980s and early ’90s. Before that, it was Nantucket Light seafood and steak restaurant. I worked at Nantucket Light for eight years when I first came to Malibu, mostly in the late ’70s as a waiter. I had the best job of any college student in America; tips from Nantucket literally paid my way through Pepperdine. Nantucket was the personal favorite of many restaurants owned by Dave Alderman, the sister restaurant to Moonshadows, and the nicest place in town. I distinctly recall waiting on Paul Newman, Neil Diamond, Johnny Carson, Cary Grant, Barbra Streisand, Laurence Olivier, Ringo Starr, John Travolta, Diana Ross and maybe 100 other celebrities during that time.
It was the era of huge tropical saltwater fish tanks, giant salad bars, oyster bars; it had a romantic cocktail lounge with fireplace and specialty drinks, the best food in L.A., and a wood-planked entry with a small lighthouse that beamed out to sea every night. The sunsets over the pier were spectacular. At least 25 co-workers from those days I still know as friends today. Nantucket Light was where I realized dreams could come true and endless opportunity existed in this town of immense beauty. Even more than the social, scholastic and fraternity stimulation of Pepperdine at the time, it was where my heart-and the rest of my life-became anchored in Malibu.