P.V. Estates Plans to Pull Out Stops for City Jubilee : Celebration Stirs Many a Memory

When Palos Verdes Estates became a city nearly 50 years ago by a handful of votes in a lively incorporation election, the victors were said to have danced around the landmark Neptune Fountain at Malaga Cove Plaza.

Some may well do that again Sunday evening when the city launches its 50-day-long, half-century jubilee celebration with a $50-a-person dinner, show and dance outdoors on the plaza from 5 to 9 p.m.

“They’re the hottest tickets in town,” said Mayor Ruth Gralow, explaining that the celebration--being staged by a volunteer group--evolved after it became clear that people wanted to display their civic pride.

Enough People Cared

“We’re a conservative community and we don’t celebrate much at all,” said Gralow. But when the City Council asked in a newsletter early this year whether anybody cared, enough said “yes” to form a committee in March and the ranks have grown to more than 100.

“We have a tendency to take Palos Verdes Estates for granted. We want to make sure people know how fortunate we are to live there,” said Ben Loughrin, publisher of the magazine Palos Verdes Review, who is co-chairman of the Golden Jubilee Committee, along with designer Juan Forteza.

The celebration--which also includes a family sports day and cultural heritage day in October and a community birthday party in November--is stirring memories in some old-timers. It’s also sending people to the archives to find out what incorporation was all about.

And, it turns out, it involved the stuff of many elections: taxes, development and local control.

Fred Thomas, 91, a motorcycle rider and jazz buff, recalled the incorporation year of 1939 as one when some people “got all worked up” about what the community should be.

An engineer, he had bought his modest, white stucco home--where he still lives on Via Gavilan--in 1937. Then, it was an almost treeless street with barley and oat fields across the way.

There was no town hall, so political meetings were held in peoples’ homes. “I voted for incorporation because I felt we needed to get organized,” he said. “We had only a two-person police force, the chief and a night man. We needed a city manager, a city council and all that sort of thing.”

According to books on Palos Verdes Peninsula history and newspaper accounts of the day, debt lay behind the incorporation drive, which originated in 1938, when the community had about 1,200 people who had moved there to escape city congestion.

“It was very rural, and we had to take the children to school and go down to the post office at Malaga Cove to get our mail,” recalled Ruby Field, who is 92 and lives in the Espinosa Circle home that she and her late husband built on a then-barren hill in 1929.

Begun in 1923 as a master-planned private land development with strict building controls, Palos Verdes Estates--like the rest of the country--was hit by the Great Depression in the 1930s. Not yet a city, the homeowners association went into debt and that created the impetus for incorporation.

By 1938, the Palos Verdes Homes Assn.--described as a kind of “community body, improvement association, chamber of commerce and general welfare group all in one”--owed Los Angeles County $33,723.43 in back taxes.

To settle accounts, the county wanted title to the association’s parklands, or alternatively asked for title to Lunada Bay beach and the cliffs above it for use as a county park, picnic ground and beach.

Some favored the alternatives, saying they would draw tourists. But even then, the peninsula’s sense of place and privacy was evident. As one anonymous letter writer complained in the local newspaper--going public would bring “loafers, prowlers, drunkards, degenerates . . .”

Cityhood was proposed as the only way to save the parklands by bringing them under control of the new city.

Petitioners brought about an incorporation election for Dec. 9, 1939. The Palos Verdes News called the ensuing campaign “our little civil war.”

Proponents touted cityhood not only as a way to save the parklands, but to gain local control over development and better police and fire protection.

On the other side, people feared double taxation by the city and the homeowners association, which--then, as now--collected assessments. They also contended that incorporation could dilute association-imposed restrictions and give businesses the upper hand in the community.

In the end, 419 votes were cast for incorporation, with 412 opposed. The County Board of Supervisors canceled most of the back taxes.

Although the city was not born until December, the 50-year anniversary celebration is being launched early to avoid a conflict with the holidays, committee co-chairman Forteza said.

To make the city look festive for the celebration, the committee has borrowed an idea from the Los Angeles Olympics by putting up 450 pole banners along Palos Verdes Drive and city plazas. The banners’ colors include, hot pink for the community’s youth, green for its vegetation and purple for tradition, said Forteza.

Mayor Gralow and committee co-chairman Loughrin said the celebration is a “thank-you note” to the founders of Palos Verdes Estates who gave them a city with what Gralow describes as “openness, naturalness and calmness,” with the ocean as a backdrop.

“It’s a quiet corner of paradise we have here,” said Loughrin, adding that architectural controls and such things as the Palos Verdes Golf and Country Club, and the Italianate Neptune Fountain in Malaga Cove “separate us, really, from the other cities on the hill and all of Los Angeles.”

But there’s been some change--even trouble--in paradise.

Much of it stems from money in a city that originally was built for people with a variety of incomes, but where the average household income today is estimated at $93,000 and the average home costs $800,000.

John Pusey, 42, who lives in a house half a block from Malaga Cove Plaza, said that when he was growing up in another part of the peninsula in the 1950s and 60s, the income level was more balanced than it is now. “You did not have to be wealthy to live here,” he said. “Now you have to be.”

In recent years, there have been quarrels among those who want large homes and people who say that such houses destroy the ambience the community has preserved for years. In a city where trees are sacred, an unidentified person last year poisoned about 30 pine trees in an apparent attempt to improve a view.

Malaga Cove Plaza, the closest thing Palos Verdes Estates ever had to a downtown, has been the source of sorrow for some who’ve watched markets, bookstores and a Norman Rockwell-style soda fountain disappear to be replaced by real estate and financial offices. The change is attributed to high rents on the plaza and the growth of retail centers elsewhere.

Pusey said: “There’s a little less open space, the streets are generally a lot more crowded, and there’s a little less of a small town feeling,” than there was when he used the Malaga Cove Library to do homework nearly three decades ago.

But even those with regrets continue to extol the wonders of Palos Verdes Estates. “There’s not other place I want to be,” Pusey said.

Ann Hugh, a 15-year resident and chairwoman of the city parklands committee, said: “When you come home, go around the curve at Malaga Cove and the hillside rears up in front of you, you heave a sigh of relief. You’ve been through all the concrete mass, and you know you’re home.”