A Piecemeal Tour of Los Angeles - The Beaches

People often associate Los Angeles with its beaches. The iconic images are sun, surf, and sand, bikinis and muscles. Not only is this a ridiculous characterization of the beaches--mostly the product of good marketing and movie magic--but it's not representative of the city as a whole. For most Angelenos, it is easy to forget that we live in a beach town. Riverside, CA is as far from the ocean as Eugene, OR.

The oceans are certainly important; the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach see hundreds of billions of dollars of trade with east Asia. But the oceans play no role in the day-to-day lives of Angelenos who do not live right along them. Surfing is possible, but it's better in San Diego or Santa Barbara. A fish industry exists, but it's hard to find good seafood.

And the beaches are just hard to get to. If you live east of Hollywood, a drive to the beach on a nice weekend can easily turn into 2 hours one way in constant gridlock. The main arteries funnel traffic into narrow and confusing coastal roads, and parking is aggravating. I know few inland Angelenos who visit the beach more than once or twice a year. I've met more than a handful who've lived here for years and never gone even once.

Let me also say upfront, by way of full disclosure, that I dislike beaches. I dislike almost everything about beaches. I don't like being wet. I don't like being in the sun. I don't like sand. I think beach culture is kind of gross. I tried surfing and it was awful. I know how to sail, but I've never enjoyed it, even when I wasn't seasick. I like seafood, but LA has nothing on New England or the Pacific Northwest. If you take any activity that I would normally enjoy in a park (e.g. cookouts, ultimate frisbee, quiet reflection) and move it to a beach, I will instantly like it less. I have had good experiences on beaches, but they were exceptional. Beaches, to my mind, are like banjos: occasionally they're impressive, but most of the time they just make good things bad and bad things worse.

So keeping in mind that if you are a person who absolutely loves beaches then you will disagree with me, here is my rundown on the beaches and beach communities of Los Angeles.

Long Beach

As I noted in the freeways post, Long Beach feels very isolated from the rest of the city. Though three major freeways--the 710, the 110, and the 605--all terminate in Long Beach, it's a long and unpleasant trek from most of the city and goes through areas that most would rather avoid. The public transit to Long Beach, the Blue Line, is by far the worst of the train lines, dirty, dangerous, and still takes an hour from Union Station.

Long Beach has a Cal State campus and a prominent megachurch. It's also the location of a major industrial port. But I think of Long Beach as a convention town. The downtown section along Ocean Blvd. exists exclusively to serve the convention center. It has the same vibe as the Gaslamp district in San Diego with its generic overpriced restaurants and sterile bars and towering hotels. The Aquarium of the Pacific and the Queen Mary are also in this area and both worth seeing but not as destinations.

Palos Verdes

Palos Verdes is not really a beach community because Palos Verdes doesn't really have a beach. The shore in this area is rocky and the land rises sharply from the sea. If you look at a topo map, you'll see that the Palos Verdes Peninsula (just called "The Peninsula") is essentially a mountain. Everyone living on the Peninsula gets a wide ocean view. For this reason, Palos Verdes is extremely affluent.

It's also the home of the famous Portuguese Bend landslide, accelerated by residential development, which undermines a section of the coastal road pretty frequently and sloughs it off into the ocean. They just keep paving over it, so now the road dips ridiculously. I once nearly got a moving truck stuck here.

Redondo and Manhattan Beach

I have never been to Redondo or Manhattan Beach, but I intend to go soon. I've been told that these are more mellow beaches with classic piers and good, cheap seafood. If that's the case, then I might dig them.

Venice

Venice is iconic. It's famed for the boardwalk, the street performers, the drum circle, the old sunburned beach hippies. It's the home of Muscle Beach and the symbolic heart of the last big fitness craze. When you tell people that you are visiting Los Angeles, they will insist that you must go to two places: Venice Beach and Hollywood Blvd. I will disabuse you of the second in another post, but let me assert right now that you don't need to go to Venice.

There is only one reason to go to Venice Beach, and that's for the freakshow. And I don't mean the freakshow in the sense of watching all the weirdo beach people. I mean the actual Venice Beach Freakshow. It's old school, and one of the best in the world. They have a legitimate sideshow running continuously all day featuring such classics as the electric chair and the rubber girl. They have the world's youngest sword swallower (one of my favorite live performers in LA). As if that wasn't enough, the place is also a museum of natural oddities which includes not only taxidermy, but several living two headed animals and a five legged dog. And all of that for just five dollars. If you're into this sort of thing, and I sure am, you must make the pilgrimage.

Between the freakshow and some of the better buskers, Venice Beach is possibly worth going to once. But just once. And only if it won't interfere with your pilgrimage to Phillipe's. Even with the freakshow and the buskers, which I loved, I've still never, ever, not even once have had a good aggregate experience in Venice Beach. I always leave wishing I'd gone somewhere else. There's no good food on the boardwalk. Parking is idiotic. It's dirty. Any unique character that the place once had was long ago replaced with shitty little tourist trap tchotchke shops and advertisements for medical marijuana. And on top of that, it's a beach and suffers from all of the things that I hate about beaches generally.

Santa Monica

Santa Monica abuts Venice. You can easily park in one and walk to the other. The city of Santa Monica is pretty modern and developed. I'm under the impression that there is good food here, but I haven't found it. The pier is an amusement park. There are rides. I can think of no reason to ever go there. The beach to the north of the pier is a little more inviting than in Venice to the south, but I say that if you've made it this far, you might as well drive another 15 minutes for the quality beaches in Malibu.

Malibu

Malibu is the long stretch of south-facing housing development pinned between the ocean and the Santa Monica Mountains. It has a reputation for being a wealthier area, and it is, but I think that many of the very best properties are up in Malibu State Park. If you have time, the park is extremely scenic and worth driving around. Malibu proper, along the coast, is no doubt also very high rent but feels a little dirty.

If you must go to the beach, this is the place to do it. They keep the beaches in Malibu nice, and it is less of a tourist trap than Santa Monica and Venice. Near the far western side of Malibu is Point Dume State Beach which is a great place to stop. Point Dume is also a popular filming location, notably the location of Jackie Treehorn's garden party in The Big Lebowski and of the broken Statue of Liberty scene in Planet of the Apes. (If chasing filming locations is interesting to you, you should also seek out the Paramount Ranch inside of Malibu State Park. It's where they filmed MASH, Tarzan, and countless westerns.)

Although I think it's not technically in Malibu, the Getty Villa is nearby. This was the home and personal art project of J. Paul Getty, founder of the much more visible Getty Center in Los Angeles proper. While the Getty Center is certainly nice, I prefer the villa. It is the location of Getty's antiquities collection, one of the very best in the world. The structure of the Getty Villa itself is also impressive, a faithful reproduction of the Herculaneum at Pompeii. The Getty Villa is worth the trip to Malibu. Tickets are free, but you should reserve them well in advance.

Comments

[Nick]

I like some of the walking spots at Palos Verdes. I saw a whale swimming from there during a sunset. It was very picturesque. This is also very close to Torrance and its respective beach which is pretty nice and connects to Redondo.

[Nick]

Oh and the canals and the giant copper Predator I think are notable things in Venice.

[Katie]

Chase, I agree with you almost entirely, despite the fact that I generally love beaches. I think you pretty much nailed it on all of these. Fyi, Redondo and Manhattan Beaches are both nicer than Long Beach/Venice Beach/Santa Monica, and you might like them, but they are not devoid of tourist trap restaurants and stores. Redondo is probably the nicer of the two. Malibu is the only beach I ever visited "regularly" (I lived inland, and only went once or twice a year).