Santa Monica's greatest moment - includes a Santa Monica travel planner - Southern California's premier beach town

Sunset, July, 1999 by Matthew Jaffe

Southern California's premier beach town has never been more exciting - don't miss it

Interstate 10 ends its 3,000-mile cross-continental journey as it sweeps through a tunnel, reaches the beach, and morphs into Pacific Coast Highway at Santa Monica.

Up the coast, a line of mountains drops down to the Pacific, following and accentuating the curving shoreline. A broad beach spreads out before meeting the rolling surf, while out on the restored 1908 Santa Monica Pier, a Ferris wheel spins laggardly above the break.

Santa Monica may be at the end of the road. But it is here that a peculiarly American journey also rolls on. Embodying the region's timeless beach allure, its diversity, and its growing glamour and sophistication, Santa Monica has become Southern California's destination of the moment.

In 1875, orator and newspaperman Colonel Tom Fitch declared, "We will sell a southern horizon, rimmed with a choice collection of purple mountains, carved in castles and turrets and domes; we will sell a frostless, bracing yet unlanguid air, braided in and out with sunshine and odored with the breath of flowers."

And they did. Santa Monica was incorporated in 1887, and it developed into a major tourist destination. Crowds thronged a beachfront lined with honky-tonk attractions, while roller coasters and turreted ballrooms formed its skyline. But by 1976, the last of the great seaside attractions, Pacific Ocean Park, had been torn down.

Ruth Seymour, general manager at public radio station KCRW (89.9 FM), arrived in Santa Monica in 1973 and remembers the way the town was then. "This was a sleepy little seaside village," she says, "with politics to the right of Genghis Khan."

Within a few years, Santa Monica again underwent a transformation, when artistic types and progressive-minded seniors shifted local politics significantly. And now you could drop $2,000 on an oceanfront hotel suite, then go out for dinner and order up a $20 plate of purple asparagus at Capo, one of the best of the city's new restaurants.

While there is concern that Santa Monica will lose its edge and become some kind of high-end Pleasantville-by-the-Sea, Seymour believes that the city's funky beach-town soul will endure.

"You lose something and gain something else," she says. "But you can't go backward. It's still attracting artists, but now they're people in the kind of arts that pay big, big dividends."

Actually, Santa Monica is attracting just about everyone. And on some nights, they all seem to descend on the Third Street Promenade. Once a moribund pedestrian mall, Third Street was reborn in the early 1990s as a retail and entertainment center.

The Promenade has evolved from a local destination into a major regional attraction, as well as a national model for urban rebirth.

If it is in some ways a contrived place, the Promenade is made real by the people who come here, whether the residents who visit its twice-weekly farmers' market (one of the West's best) or the nightly infusion of newcomers, who marvel that such a scene could exist in Southern California. You know, where no one ever walks.

At the end of the day in Santa Monica, heavy surf rolls onto the beach as offshore winds peel back a veil of spray from each wave's curl before it crashes ashore. Daylight dimming, the red, green, and gold neon starburst of the Ferris wheel lights up. The sun descends on a collision course with the wheel and then passes through its gaudy spokes before disappearing behind the seaward-sloping ridge, 20 miles distant.

Trying to capture the beach and the light and the sunsets of Santa Monica is inevitable, yet somehow doomed to failure. In one 1931 pamphlet, an anonymous writer said of the view, 'Artists have pictured it, photographers have illustrated it, and poets have written of its marvelous glory, but no adequate description or reproduction has yet been produced. It is beyond human ability to portray."

No matter. As one shop owner says unsentimentally of Santa Monica in 1999: "It ain't the '50s here anymore. But it's still good."

Santa Monica travel planner

It has become a pattern. When asked where to Stay in Southern California, I always say Santa Monica; it's the perfect summer destination. With the end of "June gloom," you can expect clear, comfortable conditions. Improvements to Palisades Park and the beachfront should be done by the end of July.

If you stay near the beach, you won't even need the car, although boutique-lined Montana Avenue and art-enclave Bergamot Station, with its 5 acres of galleries (see Best of the West, June, page 16), are also a must for any Santa Monica visitor.

Santa Monica is 7 miles north of L.A. International Airport on Pacific Coast Hwy. (State 1). For more information, contact the Santa Monica Convention & Visitors Bureau; (310) 319-6263 or www.santamonica. Com. Area code is 310 unless noted.

* Third Street Promenade and downtown

The success of the jammed and jumping Promenade has spilled over onto nearby streets. Parking garages fill up quickly on weekend nights, so arrive early and settle in for the show. Or catch the farmers' market (9-2 Wed, 8:30-1 Sat).