Early Topanga Beach residents endured tense times during WW II but had a front row seat for the birth of California’s surf culture. Their experiences were a key chapter in Topanga’s creative…
The Way We Were
Rumrunning was a major industry that made its mark on local history. Prohibition has the unique distinction of being the only amendment to the Constitution to have ever been undone. The 18th…
Clayton and Ina Rust arrived in Lower Topanga Canyon in the 1920s, and helped transform what was still a corner of the wild west into a neighborhood of interconnected families and family…
In 1907, the newly widowed Keturah Catherine Spence (1857-1940) left Brantford, Canada to start over in Los Angeles. Catherine, as she called herself, risked her fortune on an avocado orchard, becoming one…
Landscape painter Laura Way Mathiesen brought an indomitable spirit, a formidable mind and boundless curiosity to Topanga in the 1920s. A woman with red hair and “dancing brown eyes,” Laura Way Mathiesen…
The earliest account of Christmas in the Santa Monica Mountains appears to be one published by Frederick Hastings Rindge in his 1895 book, Happy Days in Southern California. Rindge describes his ranch…
Around the same time that the Los Angeles Athletic Club (LAAC) bought Lower Topanga in 1924, its President, William May Garland (1866-1948), also managed to get Los Angeles selected as the host…
An unusual Topanga Beach sight in August 1924 would have been Sam Rizzio, 18, walking back and forth, repeating, “I am a dead man,” while a woman sprinkled a vial to wet…
While the Topanga Yacht Harbor never materialized, in 1975, the Topanga Woman’s Club formed the Topanga Creek Yacht Club, “in view of the importance of the creek to life in Topanga.” (See…
The Santa Monica Pier turned 110 on September 9. It’s an impressive anniversary for a structure whose fate has so often been in the balance. This much-loved and nationally recognized landmark has…