Long Beach, California

“ The southern coast is a vast summer resort. The soft, luxurious climate, the sea-bathing, the picturesque scenery, the fruits and flowers form attractions that draw countless thousands of people from all parts of the United States and from foreign countries as well. Santa Barbara, San Buenaventura, Venice, Newport, Long Beach, Naples, Ocean Park, Huntington Beach, San Diego, Oceanside, Coronado and Santa Monica are some of the best known towns.
The interior of California on the north consists of the Sacramento Valley, an empire of agricultural land. ”

“ Although ferociously bewhiskered, he is the mildest and best-natured man in town. He has had charge, in all parts of the country, of many exhibits so unique and so successful that he is known from coast to coast.
On May 24th, 1913, while many thousand people were assembled at Long Beach for a Southern California celebration of Empire Day, one of the worst of local catastrophes occurred through the caving-in of the defective floor of a crowded dancing pavilion. Medical and police aid were at once despatched from Los Angeles ”

“ Corner lots in San Diego, Del Mar, Azusa, Redlands, Riverside, Pasadena, anywhere brought fabulous prices. A village was laid out in the uninhabited bed of a mountain torrent, and men stood in the streets in Los Angeles, ranged in line, all night long, to wait their turn in buying lots. Land, worthless and inaccessible, barren cliffs' river-wash, sand hills, cactus deserts' sinks of alkali, everything met with ready sale. The belief that Southern California would be one great city was universal. The desire to buy became a mania. ”

“ But Willmore had planned well—his streets were wide, 80 and 100 feet being usual, and one, American Avenue, being 124 feet wide, and the natural beauty of the land and ocean frontage made it attractive to others. Soon a syndicate under the name of Long Beach Land & Water Company took up the sale of the lots and Willmore City took the name of Long Beach. ”

“ A feature of Los Angeles is its beautiful sea beaches. Easily accessible by trolley and by rail, Santa Monica, Redondo, Long Beach, and San Pedro provide unsurpassed facilities to the citizens, and the island of Santa Catalina, twenty miles off the coast, is even more attractive—a seashore resort where bathing is a comfortable pastime every day in the year, and where fishermen find delights unending. ”

“ Now the sheep are all gone, and the shearers and [132] dippers are gone too. The pastoral life gave way to the agricultural, and that in turn to the town and city. There is Long Beach. Once it was a cattle range, then sheep pasture, then, when I first knew it, a barley field with one small house and shed standing about where Pine and First Streets cross. And the beach was our own private, wonderful beach; we children felt that our world was reeling when it was sold. Nobody knows what a wide, smooth, long beach it was. ”

“ Carter. ( (Herewith more detailed accounts) ) Found sister Alice and her friend, Miss Brookman, staying at the Krosnest. [this page contains a listing of train stops between Los Angeles, Santa Ana and San Diego] Long Beach, Cali. Long Beach, CA, Sunday, July 3, 1910 July 3, 1910.
Bright day. We stayed home all day except to go out for dinner. In evening we went down to the water front. Found tide high, with heavy surf. The pier and "roller coaster" are so much damaged that they have been closed by the city authorities.
Long Beach, Cali. Long Beach, CA, Monday, July 4, 1910 July 4, 1910. ”

“ Brook and Waterfall
California, the land of sunshine and roses, with its genial climate, its skies as blue as the far-famed skies of Venice, and its pure life-giving air, invites the lover of nature to take long tramps over hill and dale, mountain and valley, and to search out new trails in the rugged mountains.
It is a common sight to see parties of men and women meet at the ferry building, dressed in khaki suits, with knapsacks strapped on their backs, waiting to take the boat across the bay to some of the numerous places of interest. ”

“ Avenues of almost endless variety lead off through the circling steeps, and winding through long, shadowy ravines, lose themselves in the vine-clad recesses of the distant hills. It is no wonder California centered her taste, pride and wealth here. ”

“ California’s coast is a big bathing beach. The state is not only famous for its walnuts, but for its beach nuts one sees every day, especially Sunday.
The ocean strand is covered with half-dressed women, boys and girls sprawled out like goats and satyrs hugging the shore and each other. It is the playground of the sexes. ”

“ The meeting of the General Convention of the Church in San Francisco, in 1901, gave the writer the long-desired opportunity to visit the Pacific coast and see California, which since the early discoveries, has been associated with adventure and romance. Who is there indeed who would not travel towards the setting sun to feast his eyes on a land so famous for its mineral wealth, its fruits and flowers, and its enchanting scenery from the snowy heights of the Sierras to the waters of the ocean first seen by Balboa in 1513, and navigated successively by Magalhaes and Drake, Dampier and Anson? ”

“ Our memory of Los Angeles and the whole entourage of that garden spot will always be a vision of palms and flowers, of beautiful homes embowered in roses, of orange-trees in fruit and flower, and of a far-extended city whose future must be as magnificent as its present is beautiful.
We spent a delightful afternoon on our journey southward from Los Angeles to San Diego and Coronado Beach. We passed through the distinctive orange belt of Southern California, and the golden fruit was in evidence on every hand. Oranges lay on the ground. ”

“ It is twenty-two miles from Los Angeles by rail, on a splendid ocean beach ten miles long, where tourists and invalids may enjoy surf bathing the year round, with all the accommodations of civilization, in a mild climate, tempered by the ocean in winter and summer. ”

“ Few parts of the island are summer resorts in the ordinary use of the word; there are large hotels hardly anywhere save on Coney Island, at Far Rockaway, on Long Beach and on Shelter Island; and a large part of the summer population lives in private mansions. Some Long Island “country places” are huge estates with game and fish preserves and luxurious “châteaux.” The roads are good. The course of the Vanderbilt automobile races is along the roads of the Hempstead Plains. ”

“ To one who has never been buoyed on the waters of the Gulf of California, no description can convey an accurate idea of its stillness and beauty, when, at the close of the long, sunny day, it is resting beneath the smile of the unclouded, starry sky, which is ever above it. ”

“ And these will thrive so long as men seek health or fortune with closed eyes and open hands.
In no way has the unearned increment been more mischievous than in the booming of towns. With the growth of towns comes increase in the value of the holdings of those who hold and wait. If the city grows rapidly enough, these gains may be inordinately great. The marvelous beauty of Southern California and the charm of its climate have impressed thousands of people. ”

“ The ocean, at Long Beach and other points is beautiful, restful and invigorating, but the great ships have found no harbors in the vicinity of Los Angeles. The harbors must be made artificially and the commerce must be wrested away from San Francisco, Portland and Seattle and Tacoma. It will be a great struggle for supremacy. No American can ride down this great Pacific coast line without feelings of pride in the developments of this western country. It is all American, intensely American. ”

“ Don Roberto Duncan, into whose shrewd Scotch hands California had poured her wealth for forty years, had long ago taken to himself a wife of Castilian blood; to-morrow their eldest remaining daughter was to be married to a young Englishman, whose father had been a merchant in California when San Francisco was Yerba Buena. Not a room was vacant in the house. Young people had come from Monterey and San Francisco, Santa Barbara and Los Angeles. ”

“ San Diego, rising on a gentle slope, makes a pretty appearance from the water. A United States barracks (yellow) , with a flag-staff rising in the centre, is the most prominent object in front. You round an immensely long, narrow sand-spit of a peninsula, which contributes to form the excellent small harbor, and make fast to an immensely long mooring wharf. It is a feature of all California ports to have immensely long wharves. ”

“ The first impression which California had made upon us was very disagreeable:—the open roadstead of Santa Barbara; anchoring three miles from the shore; running out to sea before every south-easter; landing in a high surf; with a little dark-looking town, a mile from the beach; and not a sound to be heard, or anything to be seen, but Sandwich Islanders, hides, and tallow-bags. Add to this the gale off Point Conception, and no one can be at a loss to account for our agreeable disappointment in Monterey. ”

“ California has for many years suffered greatly from domestic troubles; civil wars have been the poisoned fountains which have sent forth trouble and pestilence over her beautiful land. Now those fountains are dried up; the star-spangled banner floats over California, and as long as the sun continues to shine upon her, so long will it float there, over the natives of the land, as well as others who have found a home in her bosom; and under it agriculture must improve, and the arts and sciences flourish, as seed in a rich and fertile soil. ”

“ Eastward their extension forms a high barrier against the colder airs of the Rocky Mountain region. Los Angeles lies at about the point where these protecting mountain ranges recede to near sixty miles from the sea, itself some twenty and thirty miles from the twin ports of Santa Monica and San Pedro, and is the commercial center of this rich alluvial and sheltered region, of which Santa Barbara, on a lovely bay, is the chief northern center, and San Diego, one hundred and fifty miles to the south, upon the second finest harbor in California, is the most southern port and trade outlet. ”

“ But still the Basin in general is not like Long Island, swarmed upon by daily and weekly waves of millions, hard put to save even traces of the natural magnificence it once had. It is not like much of Southern California, packaged and delivered over whole to automobiles instead of to human beings. It is nine million acres or so of still mainly rural and agricultural, Eastern, temperate, humid North America with a resident population of only about 3.5 million people, some two-thirds of whom live in a relatively few square miles around Washington. ”

“ The coast is generally clean and sandy, the beach detached and broken into islands. Eastward from the North River lies Long Island, about forty leagues in length, forming a fine wide river, which falls at either end into the ocean, and affording a very convenient passage between the shores which is protected from the dangers of the sea by a great number of good bays and other places of anchorage, so that vessels even in winter can readily pass east and west. ”

“ Each Florida city or resort is violently jealous of every other resort or city. The residents of Palm Beach speak sneeringly of Miami as being a bit plebeian. The residents of Miami speak compassionately of Palm Beach, as young and pretty girls speak of decaying beauty. St. Petersburg and Tampa and Miami have little of a favorable nature to say concerning one another. They only unite to resist attacks from resorts outside the state, or to say a few tart words about California. ”

“ Santa Barbara looked very much as it did when I left it five months before: the long sand beach, with the heavy rollers, breaking upon it in a continual roar, and the little town, embedded on the plain, girt by its amphitheatre of mountains. Day after day the sun shone clear and bright upon the wide bay and the red roofs of the houses, everything being as still as death, the people hardly seeming to earn their sunlight. Daylight was thrown away upon them. ”

“ Long after the individual argonauts have laid their weary brows upon the drifted pine needles in the deep eternal sleep of Death, the problem will be solved. When their lonely graves are landmarks of the Sierras; when the ephemeral tent towns have been folded up forever, the broad lands of California will support great communities. To them, these early days will be as unreal as the misty wreaths clinging around the Sierras. ”

“ It is a cloudless morning, the white sands of the South-shore beaches shine like silver in the sunlight, and the fresh sea breeze that is stirring holds its own the whole length of Long Island, and blows its purifying way into every street and alley of the vast city that lies at its farther end. ”

“ I found the night air extremely unpleasant last winter, and after hearing from a veracious druggist, to whom I applied for a gargle, that there was an epidemic of grip in the city, and that many died of pneumonia and that a small majority of the invalids got well, I packed my trunk hastily and started for Pasadena.
Those who live in the city and those who do not dislike raw, bracing winds from the ocean pronounce Los Angeles to be the only place worth living in in all Southern California. ”