The Castle on the Coast : Beautiful Santa Barbara Is a Town That Doesn’t Want, or Need, to Bustle
In Santa Barbara, the rich are inheriting the earth. The seniors just graduated from UCSB, the ones who managed to fight off the relentless seduction of the pounding surf long enough to get an education, know this all too well. They cannot stay in Eden any longer. “Go elsewhere and make thy fortune,” they have been told. Don’t even try to start in Santa Barbara. Even the humblest beginnings are beyond your reach.
Many wanderers have been taken by the area’s regal and sultry charms, and many have tried to claim it for their own. In the 1540s, Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo claimed it for the King of Spain. In the 1840s, a roving French consul took note of the oceanside paradise and proposed that the area come under the protection of France. In the 1940s, during World War II, the beaches were thick with Europeans escaping the French Riviera; after the war many decided that this tangly garden, where descendants of Castilian aristocracy mingled with children of Eastern maritime families, was a truer Riviera, and stayed.
“And now,” groused one retired industrialist and resident, “the movie people are coming up here and raising hell with the real estate prices.” He and his wife are among the many locals who departed the high-starched-collar community of Pasadena and traveled a hundred miles up the coast. They retired to a house on the hill in the quietly fantastic suburb of Montecito. Unlike Pasadena, where grandness is on display, Montecito is deceptive, cloaked in thick gardens. Towering hedges line the narrow country lanes, and behind the green walls one can find everything from crusty Tudor mansions to breezy Cape Cods, all private and perfect.
“People around here mind their business,” said my host as we walked out on the patio for the sweeping view of a rolling, leafy blanket that tumbled down to the sea. Somewhere below were the estates of Montecito, sheltered by oaks and eucalyptus, sycamores and lemon trees, birds of paradise, lupines and poppies. Farther out, over the gray sea, were oil-drilling platforms. They looked a little out of place, as if the misted horizon was scattered with umbrella stands. Behind the house were the mountains and canyons of Los Padres National Forest. “If we had a fire in this neighborhood,” he went on, “people coming out of their houses would meet each other for the first time.”
“I don’t think it’s a good place for the young,” his wife warned. “There’s too much money up here, and not enough jobs. There’re not enough good influences.” She offered a tart smile. “Of course, a brilliant young surgeon could always get a job here.”
Everyone knows of Santa Barbara’s rare and precious air. Any U.S. 101 traveler waiting at the stoplight sees wide green La Cumbre Peak looming over the town, and the veil of ocean’s sunlight filtering the afternoon with lightly dusted honey, and the traveler does not mistake it for Oxnard.
Drifters and road people have staked a claim on the city, and they know this is a fine place to be down and out. They can be seen gathering under the century-old Moreton Bay fig tree, a tough but amiable crowd. The presence of the homeless has prompted much-publicized legal challenges to city and county attempts to discourage their number, but stretched out grandly on the steps, they almost seem part of the city now--regal, sultry Barbarenos.
Like Carmel, Santa Barbara seems fated to be the perfect and romantic place that can only get more so. Even the poorest shanties are on neatly swept streets and have geraniums planted in coffee cans on the front porches. The grid of the central city, sloping southward to the sea, is bounded on three sides by verdant hillsides--in the east by Montecito and to the west by Hope Ranch, the Chumash tribal lands turned into estate lands. In the flat live the middle class, scratching to make the escalating rents and mortgages, and asking themselves, “What price beauty?” Those who find the price too high migrate west, over the hill and past Hope Ranch to the normalcy of Goleta and the university area of Isla Vista.
Even the plainest neighborhoods in Santa Barbara seem to be at least within waving distance of splendor. The Mexican-American families of Milpas Street look up at the hillside homes of Alameda Padre Serra and call it Enchilada Heights. They mockingly refer to their own neighborhood as Tortilla Flats.
This is the first neighborhood seen by most people driving up from the south. Although Latinos make up at least a quarter of the city, and although the Mission Revival look is so predominant that at least one architect has bolted town because he couldn’t face another red-tile roof, and although this intensely proud community traces its families back either to the Mexican state of Durango or to the old California land-grant dynasties, the Latino population gets precious little publicity. It is almost a parallel universe to old-line Anglo Santa Barbara, but separate, under-represented and heralded only at the annual Old Spanish Days Fiesta.
Etelvina Menchaca, a warm, robust 47-year-old mother of nine and grandmother of six, grew up in Santa Barbara and has seen the changes in the town where her grandparents once sold tamales door to door. “It used to be a small town. Between Milpas and State streets, everybody was from the state of Durango, and everybody knew everybody. They had their own ‘networking.’ People used to talk over the fence.”
Now they often go to the compulsively helpful Menchaca, who manages to be everywhere in town as metiche , “the meddler.” Maybe two Latinos in town have never heard of her. Mornings she often works the front desk at Casa de la Raza, the Latino community center. The telephone never stops.
“They call because they are lonely and need someone to speak Spanish,” Menchaca says during a break. Most of those she talks to provide the area with a work force available at $3.35 an hour. According to Menchaca, they sustain the life styles of people up in Enchilada Heights. But how can the rent get paid on those wages?
“The middle class are moving out,” she figures, “but not the poor people. When you have four and five families living in a house, they can come up with the money.” She too voices the fear that Santa Barbara’s young cannot start a life in this expensive town.
“It’s a shame,” Menchaca says, suddenly sentimental, “that we are creating a monster, in that no one can enter the castle--the fortaleza .”
The castle has been secure because the City Council decided more than a decade ago that their town is best suited to a limit of 85,000 people. By way of contrast, Oxnard, to the south, has in the last 10 years almost doubled its population. Growth may have helped bustling Oxnard, but Santa Barbara is a town that doesn’t want or need to bustle. When a group led by actor-turned-real-estate-tycoon Fess Parker proposed a hotel-convention center on Santa Barbara’s beach in 1978, it was hit by a tsunami of civic protest. A scaled-down version of the project was finally approved by voters last year. The oil-drilling companies face a similar battle promoting industry in an area that doesn’t want it, thank you.
For its size, Santa Barbara supports a staggering number of different societies. A mere half-hour gambol through the city will put a visitor in touch with thousands of layers of civilization: the horsy set, the sailing set, the surfing-and-salooning crew, the academics and the think-tank wizards, the computer crunchers, the spiritualist sects, the artisans, the bench-makers, the writers, painters, dancers and photographers. And, yes, as the man complained, the movie people.
Cinema’s citizens here range from Dame Judith Anderson to Eva Marie Saint to John Travolta. And then there is the big guy in Montecito, Robert Mitchum.
Walking up Stearns Wharf one sunny afternoon, graying but square-shouldered, wearing a yachtsman’s powder-blue leisure suit, Robert Mitchum discoursed freely and somewhat surrealistically about his adopted town.
Mitchum migrated to the area nine years ago, not from Beverly Hills, but from a farm he owned on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. “I used to keep my horses here up near Atascadero, and we came through here on a detour once, and my wife, Dorothy, said, ‘This is it. This is where we’ll stay.’ ” Mitchum shrugged. Like Atlas.
Through a long lunch in a restaurant at the end of the wharf, not a single soul attempted to glad-hand the actor, even though his face broadcast that outsized familiarity, as if he were everybody’s favorite rascally uncle. The town gives him this peace.
It also gives him friends who come from what are often called “all walks of life.” Mitchum spoke of his town pals, of a jazz musician married to an heiress, of a famous aviatrix who raises snakes as the natural way to kill gophers, of Saudi Arabian financier Essam Khashoggi. “I went out to his place in Hope Ranch,” he grunted. “Must have been 30 acres. Khashoggi is very visible around town. I met him years ago in Beirut. He told me then that all he wanted to be was the richest man in the world. So--”
A little later, Mitchum was launching into a story about William Faulkner’s horse when he glanced out the window and stopped, startled. Outside on a wharf piling, two pigeons were fluttering in a mad, passionate embrace. Mitchum shook his head and barely cracked an ironic smile. “Romantic Santa Barbara,” he said, nodding, and returned to his meal. Like everything else outside under the fresh blue sky, it was a perfect lunch.