Les Storrs Santa Monica Portrait of a City Yesterday and Today, Santa Monica Bank: Santa Monica, CA, 1974, 67 pp., 1948
"Under the 1937 ordinance, certain variances were granted by the Planning Commision, others by ordinance of the City Council. There was no professional staff.
"As a result, the legal requirements for variances were largely ignored; dispensatins frequently were politically motivated or handled on a basis of expediency.
"The map of the city was dotted with uses not proper to the zones in which they were located.
"Even before the advent of the city council-manager form of government, the Planning Commission had taken two imporant steps:
"It had persuaded the City Council to employ Lester Brinkman and Jack Simon, two members of te Los Angeles City Planning Department, to draft a new ordinance, and to set up a budget for the employment of an administratior to handle the day-to-day work of zoning administration and enforcement.
"The new ordinance provided that variances should be the subject of public hearing and approval or disapproval by the administrator, and, in keeping with the growth of the city, the ordinance was more sophisticated than the earlier one.
" . . . the off-street parking requirements recommended by Brinkman and Simon also were watered down , , ,
"The new ordinance . . . became effective in 1948 . . . resulted in administrative improvement . . . served well for a decade . . . was again updated.
" . . . zoning in Santa Monica . . . the pattern for the ultimate growth of the city was established by the 1929 ordinance and confirmed by those of 1937 and 1948.
" . . .
"In these documents were written provisions which later caused the development of a very large portion of the city in apartment houses, which set aside the whole area bounded by Ocean Avenue, Wilshire Boulevard, Lincoln Boulevard and Colorado Avenue as the central business district, and allowed strips of commercial use on 26th Street, Montana Avenue, Wilshire Boulevard, Santa Monica Boulevard, Broadway, Pico Boulevard, Ocean Park Boulevard, 14th Street, and Lincoln Boulevard, which designated the airport as an industrial area together with the general area which roughly parallels Colorado Avenue and the Santta Monica Freeway. [Where is Main St. in this plan? KR]
"The ordinances . . . made inevitable . . . that in 1974 four out of five residents of the city would be apartment dwellers. . . . they also increased . . . the average age level of the residents. Young families prefer single family residences.
"With the post-war boom under way, and with population climbing steadily in the post-war years, Santa Monica entered upon a period of unprecedented physical change.
"During the time when housing was still in very short supply, a veterans' housing project was set up on the present [1974] site of the Rand Corp. buildings on Main Street. Temporary buildings once used by the army {what had the Army used them for?] were converted ito housing, and made available to ex-servicemen and their families only. George Bundy, later city manager, was in charge.
"Soon after this project was phased out, it became known that Rand, with its large payroll of scientists and other specialists, would be forced to leave Santa Monica if it could not find more adequate quarters than those it then occupied in the one-time Evening Outlook building on the southwest corner of Fourth and Broadway.
"Rand purchased its present property from the city. Proceeds were used against an area of badly deteriorated housing where the Civic Auditorium now stands.
"With dreams, largely to be fulfilled, of conventions and cultural attractions, money was voted for the construction of the auditorium, and the present site won out over a beach location by the margin of one vote in the City Council.
"The building itself was designed and then redesigned after competitive bids failed to come within the limits of the funds available.
" . . . the city got a building which has a capacity of some 2800 persons, and, thanks to a floor which can be either flat or tilted, may be made suitable for anything from basketball to Bach, from rock to Shakespeare.
"Parks were expanded, new parks added; libraries including the handsome main library at Sixth Street and Santa Monica Boulevard were built; Santa Monica High School was enlarged; Santa Monica College, once located in temporary buildings adjacent to the high school grew to its present proportions on the campus on Pico Boulevard.
"Innumerable buildings were erected by private enterprise, largely in the field of housing, but including also a number of major commercial and industrial structures.