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Introduction to Santa Monica Beach In 1839 the Mexican government granted the land that eventually became the City of Santa Monica to three Mexican citizens, Francisco Marquez, Ysidro Reyes and Francisco Sepulveda. These men had no idea at the time that their home would become a major city known throughout the world. Initially, this land was issued as two separate Mexican land grants: the 33,000-acre Rancho San Vicente, granted to Francisco Sepulveda, and the Rancho Boca de Santa Monica grant, a mere 6,656 acres given to Francisco Marquez and Ysidro Reyes. Marquez and Reyes soon began cattle ranching on their joint land, built simple adobe homes and started raising their families. Even though they privately owned the beautiful area called Santa Monica Canyon, people from the hot, dusty town of Los Angeles were welcome to camp there and enjoy the scenery and the cool ocean breezes. My interest in exploring the history of Santa Monica Beach has much to do with these two men, the owners of Rancho Boca de Santa Monica. Francisco Marquez and Ysidro Reyes were my great-grandfathers, and like my father and grandfather before me, I too was born in Santa Monica—in 1924, the same time movie stars were building magnificent homes on the beach. I grew up in Santa Monica Canyon, where my boyhood friends and I caught polliwogs and frogs in the creek and munched on the tangy watercress that grew wild in the water. I often wondered then, as I do now, if my grandfather and my father played in this same creek as boys. As I grew older, my friends and I spent our summer days at the beach, which was within walking distance from my home. We went swimming and body surfed on the south side of the groin that jutted out to sea in front of actor Nat Pendleton's home. To maintain our frantic energy and feed the hunger that went along with it, we collected discarded soda bottles on the beach and then claimed their deposit at Mr. Edwards's small grocery store at the mouth of the canyon. With our few coins, we'd walk over to Ted's Grill and for fifteen cents buy a cold drink and the best hamburger you ever tasted. Occasionally, we rowdy boys would try to swim alongside Buster Crabbe, the Olympic swimmer who trained everyday by swimming from Santa Monica Canyon to the Santa Monica Pier and back. Even at our best, we could only keep up with him for a few strokes. At ten years of age I'd never even seen a swimming pool, but I was an excellent swimmer since I had learned in the ocean and, during the summertime, if the weather permitted (and it nearly always did), was at the beach with my buddies every day. Years passed and I was allowed to wander further from home. My friends and I would ride our bikes to Ocean Park, spending entire days inside the Fun House there, or we would make our way down to the Venice Pier. I remember well the marathon dance contests at the La Monica Ballroom on the Santa Monica Pier. I stared in wonder at the exhausted dancers trying to stay on their feet after hours of dancing in hopes of some small prize. Fishermen on the Santa Monica Pier pulled in large fish of all kinds, and during the Depression it was thrilling to see men unload gunny sacks full of fish from incoming boats. I saw Santa Monica beach change dramatically during my lifetime, and as I started looking into the history of both my family and the area, I began to understand that such radical changes were long a part of the beach's past. When my great-grandfathers moved to Santa Monica Canyon, the area was considered to be wilderness. Francisco Marquez and his wife Roque Valenzuela built an adobe house in the upper mesa of the canyon — the first permanent structure in the area. They had eleven children, only five of whom survived to adulthood. Ysidro Reyes and his wife, Maria Antonia Villa, built their home in the new rancho on land that is now the Huntington Palisades. Later, the Reyes family abandoned that location in favor of a place near what is now 7th Street and Adelaide. They had eleven children, and Reyes often complained about the wild animals coming down from the mountains that ate his chickens and small animals. In 1879, Francisco Marquez's youngest son Pascual married Ysidro Reyes' daughter Michaela. Marriage, as well as their common interest in land, united the families. Pascual and Michaela had ten children, one of whom was my father. During the course of my grandfather's life, Santa Monica Canyon went from being considered rough country to a popular weekend resort. For me the beach has never lost its appeal, although times are different now. Sure, people still pile into their cars and drive to the beach every summer, with the hope of finding a parking space, but these visitors lie on a blanket with a bottle of sun block rather than the old umbrellas we used in the 1930s and '40s. And there's so much technology on the beach nowadays — cell phones, portable radios, laptops, even DVD players — that our little portable radios with glowing tubes seem totally antiquated. These things might seem like small details, insignificant even, but I assure you — had you been on the beach during Muscle Beach's heyday, you would have tossed the DVD player aside in a hurry. We didn't have to bring entertainment to the beach; the beach was the entertainment. Memories remain for those of us who wax nostalgically about what Santa Monica Beach used to be, and new memories, I'm sure, are made daily for those experiencing its majestic beauty for the first time. Sadly though, many of the important and beautiful buildings featured in the photographs in this book are no longer in existence today. Not photographed in this book because it's not at the beach — but of tremendous personal importance to me — is a little portion of land in Santa Monica Canyon on San Lorenzo Street that remains much as it was more than a hundred years ago. This area, the only portion of the original Mexican land grant that remains in the hands of my family, is the site of the Pascual Marquez Family Cemetery. When the Marquez and Reyes families first moved to Rancho Boca de Santa Monica it was a day's trip to the nearest Catholic cemetery. Francisco Marquez therefore set aside a portion of his land for a cemetery within view of his adobe home. Though no official records were kept, it is believed that the cemetery was established in the late 1840s. Over the years, member of the Marquez and Reyes families, along with their close friends, were buried there. In 1916, Pascual Marquez was the last person to be buried at the cemetery. In tribute to Pascual's love for his home, his casket was placed inside the outline of the remains of the family adobe at the same angle and in the same place as the bed in which he was born. His granite headstone remains there today, and my family continues to care for and maintain the cemetery. I'm extremely proud that this small piece of land—and of Southern California history — has been designated as a cultural-historic landmark by the City of Los Angeles. Today the cemetery's simplicity and charm is nearly hidden in a heavily populated residential neighborhood filled with houses that range from huge estates to modest homes built in a variety of architectural styles. My family's contribution to early California history led me to a life-long search for historical documentation of the Marquez and Reyes families as well as the history of the Rancho Boca de Santa Monica. After many years of collecting photographs of family members as well as scenes of early Santa Monica I realized that I had a visual record, encompassing more than a century, of the development of the beach at Santa Monica. Many of the photographs, taken years apart, were of the same scene photographed from the same location by different photographers. The result was documentation of the area's tremendous growth, a visual record of transformation, rich both for its aesthetic beauty and vast information.
Excerpted with permission from Santa Monica Beach: A Collector's Pictorial History, published in October 2004 by Angel City Press. The writer: Ernest Marquez grew up in Santa Monica Canyon on what remained of Rancho Boca de Santa Monica. He graduated from Santa Monica High School, served in the United States Navy during World War II, and eventually became a successful freelance cartoonist in New York during the 1950s. When he returned to California as a commercial artist in the aerospace industry, he grew concerned about the many inaccurate and conflicting stories of his family's role in early California history. Thus began his own study of his family's involvement in early California. Marquez also began collecting original photographs. His book includes more than 225 images, some of them dating back to 1877. He now resides in the San Fernando Valley, separated from his birthplace only by the Santa Monica Mountains. |
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