Western Avenue: Street’s End Marks the ‘Marriage’ of Hollywood to the Sea

Sixty years ago, when Western Avenue was scraped through the dry hills toward San Pedro, some civic pashas wanted to celebrate the coming thoroughfare with bunting and ballyhoo.

Barbecues and boat rides were the least of the plans for “the marriage of Hollywood to the harbor.” After an allegorical pageant representing “highway and traffic improvement, parks, playgrounds, county and city planning and community cooperation,” they planned to have the U.S. Pacific Fleet escort King Neptune to shore, there to be married, over nationwide radio hookup, to Miss Hollywood, bridally attended by the U.S. Army, and given away by the city engineer.

It never came off. The Chamber of Commerce pointed out that Western was “still a mere trail” and that boosters should “avoid the bad effect of having a celebration on a dirt road.” The boosters, in turn, charged their detractors, in Victorian bombast, with “deceit . . . calumniating . . . persistent, lying mendacity and moral turpitude amounting to a criminal bent.”

It was certainly the most exciting thing that would happen along Western Avenue for more than 30 years.

After the dust kicked up by that 1920s’ hoopla settled into the grim terrain of the Depression, Western Avenue lay neglected for more than a generation, the province of truck farmers, coyotes and adventuresome kids.

Much of what is now an official “scenic drive” was then only a twisting wagon path on the arid western edge of San Pedro, a rugged seaport town with a mind and an identity of its own, where even today, the Los Angeles Police Department’s San Pedro station is often referred to as the San Pedro Police Department--occasionally by the officers themselves.

Anything that linked San Pedro to that rapacious city to the north was mostly a distressing fact of life, like an alcoholic uncle in the back bedroom. It wasn’t until 1958, after the subdivisions began climbing down the mustard- and lupine-covered hills from Palos Verdes and up from San Pedro, that Western Avenue was completely straightened and paved into presentability, with only a subdued ribbon-cutting to mark the occasion.

Some of the early wagon ruts were made by the garbage carts of James T. Agajanian, an Armenian refugee from the czar’s army who settled along Western Avenue in 1913, said his grandson, Cary, and built up what is a still-thriving refuse collection business. The family’s name may be better known for his auto-racing impresario son, J. C.

“The history of our family starts right around Western Avenue,” said young Agajanian.

“Pappy” Agajanian made good in the New World. A city street was eventually named after the old man who was the area’s first recycler. The garbage he collected, in a pre-plastic world, fed the hogs at his San Pedro ranch off Western Avenue until the 1950s, when new suburbanites complained of the odor, and the family sold the pigs and the land.

By 1940, Los Angeles was creeping south toward San Pedro. In that brief, hopeful year before World War II, workmen built the Harbor Hills housing project at Western

and Palos Verdes Drive North in Lomita, one of the county’s first ventures into public housing--a modern model, 300 brick apartments on greenswards, rented at between $16 and $23 a month when the first tenants moved in in 1941. More than 40 years later, monthly rents average $156 and go up to $600.

The project cost all of $1.2 million to build; now, said its manager, Mel Spriggs, they will be spending $4 million just to bring bathrooms and kitchens up to code. Its flat roofs were very up-to-date in 1940; now, Spriggs said, they need patching.

During World War II, the complex and the 35 acres it sits on, catty-corner from a Navy fuel tank farm adorned with a Little League diamond, housed enlisted men’s families at bargain rents--as many as a third of its tenants were military, said a Navy historian, Harvey M. Beigel.

The seafaring town is a military town too; south on Western, a military housing project from the Korean War era still thrives, a neighborhood of mostly chief petty officers and families, said a Navy spokesman. And even farther down Western, another military housing project, promised as “temporary” 40-odd years back, was torn down only within the last several years. But a more permanent civilian facility, opened on Western in the late 1940s, was the first sign that the city was pushing its western boundaries. Green Hills Cemetery, with its 120 acres, was developed by San Pedro businessmen when the town’s other graveyards were full. And as local entrepreneur Nels Ostrem--a developer whose friends have elected him “mayor of Western Avenue”--tells it, the boys in San Pedro cut through zoning red tape by reburying six people from the potter’s field up at Green Hills one night, making it automatically a consecrated burying ground.

But the nonsectarian cemetery started out with more wildlife than people, dead or living. General Manager Arlene Gleich, who drove out to her job interview there 25 years ago “in farm country,” found a place overrun with pheasants, jack rabbits, quail, foxes and coyotes; the groundskeepers had to battle cactus and rattlesnakes, recalled Paul Brown, the longtime park superintendent.

It was just as placid and rural farther south where dairy farmer Walter Lochmann sent his 300 black and white Holsteins out to pasture every morning until 1970, when they were sold, and the land they grazed later disappeared beneath a racquet club and condos.

The Swiss-born Lochmann, now 71, made his buttermilk and cream and chocolate milk right there, and the people who once bought from his drive-up dairy still stop him in the street to reminisce about his eggnog.

The fauna, wild and domestic, has gradually been displaced, fenced out and hemmed in by housing, and even without looking out his office window, veterinarian Robert Streeter, who opened for business on Western in 1958, could tell that the area was being settled: instead of coming in with rattlesnake bites or foxtail burrs in their ears, his canine clients began coming in with automobile injuries.

When Streeter built his animal hospital then, its terrazzo floors and Palos Verdes stone facade were the latest design marvel. Now, they look almost quaint next to the glittering glass mullions of the nearby First Federal Bank, once a little, local fishermen’s and merchants’ bank.

“I was about the first business along here and about the only surviving old-timer,” said Streeter, whose son, David, has joined the family business. “I’ve been here for 27 years; maybe he’ll be here 27 more,” his father said.

One of Streeter’s original neighbors was developer Ostrem. The strapping, white-bearded man went to sea at age 11 with his father, getting paid $1 a trip, “and I never got the dollar.” He later decided to get his land legs on “the hill”--Western Avenue.

On the slopes where Ostrem’s business partner, Frank Trani, used to pursue jack rabbits with his slingshot and hunt quail before school, Ostrem envisioned a neighborhood. The first few people putting in homes up there “were wanting to know where they could get a quart of milk, a loaf of bread, without going all the way into town.”

With private financing--no local bank, he said, would touch the scheme, and even friends warned that he would go broke--Ostrem began grading the steep ravines and hills along Western, filling in gullies, including “Mosquito Hollow,” a gully where people had been dumping trash for 30 years.

Behind what is now Marie Callender’s, Ostrem’s machinery exposed a fossilized tree in the strata. Word spread among South Bay rock hounds, and, driving by one night, Ostrem found them chipping out the fossil by the light of their car headlights.

By December, 1957, several shops, including an ice-cream store and a gas station, were in business, and by the time the first shopping plaza, with a dime store and a drugstore, were planned a few years later, Western looked so promising that the local retail clerks union guaranteed five years of labor peace if the shops went in, Ostrem said.

“I don’t know how many people work there, but as an independent, I’ve probably created 5,000 full-time jobs” by opening Western to commerce, he said. “That’s the thing I’m most proud of.”

Louise Ruggiero was a Western Avenue pioneer. When she came to work in Patmar’s dress shop 23 years ago--even helping to paint the walls of the new place when the owners realized that Western “was going to be a boom town, because downtown was going to the dogs”--she drove to work through dusty bean fields and scrubby canyons.

Now Western enjoys a boomlet of competing shops and plazas, but Patmar’s, three owners later, is prospering all the same.

So is another Western landmark, the Tasman Sea, from the days when just about everyone around there either ate lunch at “The Tas,” or out of a brown paper bag.

On a street now banked with fast-food emporiums, it was the only place around, right across from another lonely outpost of civilization, Peck Park, donated in the 1930s by a local wealthy man, to the bewilderment of locals who wondered, said historian Art Almeida, “Why put a park there?”

Restaurateur Peppy Pielago, now 65, who as a boy swiped string beans from Western Avenue farmers, opened the Tasman in 1963, a rambling structure built in United Nations style: a Tudoresque Swiss chalet with Moorish touches, painted rooster red (except for a disastrous few experimental days with green) and named, said Pielago, after “the roughest spot in the world to navigate.”

He put in the restaurant, Pielago said, because “I said, ‘The town’s moving up, and I better get there before anyone else,’ ” and added the motel because he couldn’t get a bank loan without it.

Below, where Western cuts into the hillsides, homes and condominiums crowd down the slopes that twist and bend, now open to the sea breeze, now backed onto the searing hills, where “the climate varies so quickly,” said resident Yvette Kovary, that “you can drive two or three minutes (on Western) and be in a totally different environment.”

For fewer than 10 years during the late 1940s and early ‘50s, some of San Pedro’s swankiest “do’s” did make it up to Western Avenue, celebrating proms and anniversaries and graduations at the Hacienda Hotel, its swimming pool and dance floor as much a neighborly meeting place as the grocery store. It drifted out of business, said Almeida, who attended a class reunion there, because it had come to San Pedro “either too early or too late.”

Where it once stood is a condominium complex. Many of the slopes around it, bare two decades ago, are now houses. One rare remnant of the original scrubby hillsides is the split-level “Friendship Park,” on Western and the promontory above, land left intact down to its inhabitants: The native rattlesnakes, the posted warnings say, are “important members of the natural community.”

At a crest of Western Avenue, the venerable Fermin LaSuen High School, a Catholic boys’ school since 1958, and named for the Franciscan sidekick of Father Junipero Serra, has become a home for the elderly, operated by the Little Sisters of the Poor.

The 1971 earthquake had damaged the sisters’ home in downtown Los Angeles, recalled Sister Winefrid, and the faraway boys’ school, offered for sale, was donated to them by the archdiocese. The 15 sisters declined the offer of the football field. After the buildings were remodeled--the aged tenants were brought down to pick their own rooms and paint shades--the sisters’ move from downtown Los Angeles went so smoothly that they were able to serve the 120 residents breakfast at the Los Angeles site and lunch at the one in San Pedro.

Now, from the enviable hilltop the vistas of harbor and sea are open on three sides. The anchor resting out in front, left from the building’s high school days, has stayed where it is; the order’s founder, Jeanne Jugan, was herself from a small fishing port in France.

But like the ocean at the end of it, Western was not always placid.

Sumi Seo Seki, whose father had farmed at White Point, the tip of Western, since leasing the land from Roman Sepulveda in 1913, was walking home from school in early 1942 when, along a stretch of Western Avenue, she saw a dozen black cars, and in them, men in snap-brim fedoras: FBI agents, rounding up Japanese-Americans for internment camps.

The Seo family’s celery crop went unharvested that year. Their evacuation sale didn’t raise much money; they ended up giving their German shepherd, Poochie, to the nice Georgia soldiers who had come over from Ft. MacArthur for dinner on New Year’s Day, 1942. “They cried when we left” for internment in Arkansas, she recalled.

After the evacuation, the Seo family’s plowshares were turned to swords: The property they farmed became part of the coastal defense system in 1943, with 16-inch guns set up in Bunker Battery, named for Col. Paul Bunker, a one-time coastal artilleryman and a hero of the battle of Corregidor, who died in a Japanese prison camp. Later, during the Cold War, the same property became a Nike missile site, an elaborate underground complex with 33-foot-long Nike Ajax and Nike Hercules missiles.

With detente, the Army gave the land to the city in 1977. Now the Air Force wants some of it back for military housing--and since “we feel strongly that this is the last (local) piece of coastal view property,” said Bernie Evans, an aide to Councilwoman Joan Milke Flores, it “should be preserved for the public.”

Ken Malloy, head of the Isaak Walton League, agrees: It is a crucial layover spot for migratory birds and home to many others being squeezed out by coastal building.

The state Coastal Commission agrees too, voting last month against military housing at White Point, but it is a state agency’s gesture to the federal government, about as binding on the Air Force as Christmas ribbon on King Kong. The city has offered the Air Force a chunk of inland Bogdanovich Park, a handful of yards away, instead of White Point, but the Air Force has not replied.

For now, Western ends as it begins: in rugged wilderness, this one a wilderness of water. Not a place for Sunday picnickers or sun-worshipers, the rough, stony Royal Palms State Park beach is a favorite spot for the more sophisticated divers and surfers who go there because of the quality of the waves on the ocean, not the curves on the beach. The same isolation that keeps the crowds down sometimes invites the occasional roughneck crowd; it is, said one local, “not a preppie beach.”

Once a settlement for the Chumash Indians, who navigated between the coast and Catalina Island, and still the home of coastal birds like the white-shouldered kite, the beach area below White Point was used briefly as an abalone fishery around the turn of the century, a business revived during World War I by the Tagami family, who eventually built a lavish beach-side resort, which would be destroyed by storms before World War II.

The foundations of the saltwater swimming pool are still discernible in the sand, a relic of the 1920s, when wealthy Japanese took the waters--including a warm sulfur springs--at the point. Indeed, Seki recalled, Japan’s 1932 Olympic team, feted with Japanese food and stage shows, rested up there for the Los Angeles Games.

In 1927, some wealthy Anglos founded Royal Palms, a lavish Spanish-style resort and private golf course on 166 acres west of the spa. Billed as the “only oceanfront golf course in Southern California,” it folded in 1933, and its clubhouses, rented out for social events, burned in 1955.

All that is left is the gate house, with its octagonal living room, cherry-wood beams and field-stone fireplaces and walkways. Local storytellers hold that a man committed suicide there because of stock market losses, that a Pasadena family named Jones once bought it, then sold it quickly because it was too isolated, even that it changed ownership during a poker game.

The gate house, occupied by its current owner, now has neighbors. In an apartment house at the end of Western, two women, both Marymount College instructors, lay sunning by the pool. One of them grew up on the wide, inviting California beaches a few miles north, the other, in a small town near the deep, murky harbor of Boston. And for both, the rough, rock-edged shore at the far end of Western Avenue is a pleasant change.

Both drive Western Avenue some distance to work, and while “Western is certainly one of the ugliest (streets), all the way into L.A.,” said California-born Michele Pierce, it has its points.

For one, said Massachusetts-born Ann Kesslen, who came to San Pedro by way of 13 years in Wyoming, Western is backstopped by the Pacific Ocean. “You come here and you know the craziness stops,” she said. “They can’t follow you any further.”

To come over the promontory, Pierce said, “see the peninsula, the ships coming in, then nothing but unobstructed ocean--look at that and tell that how important you are.”

And at night, to drive Western Avenue home over the crest of the hill, to plunge toward their ocean-edge apartment as abruptly as driving into the sunset, is “kind of a Southern California martini.”