What Say You: Palisades Park June 13 Tour

Great parks are physical expressions of our history and our aspirations. They tell the story of the people, past and present, who have claimed the parkland as their own, intertwined with the story told by nature, geology, wind and water.

Palisades Park, given to the City by Sra. Arcadia Bandini, Colonel Baker and Senator Jones, is a great park. Made great by the ocean and the palisades, its place as a connector between the City and sea, by its history and by all the forces, natural and human, that have created this public space.

I had the chance to meet with the Santa Monica Conservancy docents who will be at the Park on June 13, 2010 to welcome people to a tour of the park and to talk about the history, the landscape, and the events that make Palisades Park what it is today. www.smconservancy.org

Walking the length of Palisades Park from north to south was, as always, wonderful. But walking with the Conservancy docents and hearing their stories, I was also in the company of the Tongva/Gabrieleno Indians who lived for centuries on the coast we now call home. They truly lived lightly on the land and so there are few physical traces of the as many as 5000 Tongva who lived, in small villages, on the Southern California coast.

The plants have changed as well as the people, from the natives of the time of the Tongva to imports such as the Dragon Trees from the Canary Islands. Pink Melaleucas, twisted trees with ground-hugging branches, pink blossoms and whitish flaking bark and Australian Tea Trees with dark furrowed bark and small white flowers are signature trees in the Park and favorite climbing spots for small children. Eucalyptus trees, from Australia, were brought in by Abbot Kinney of Venice Canal fame. He hoped Eucalyptus would prove to be useful for construction. He grew them at an experimental nursery built on land also donated by Arcadia Bandini.

Iconic colonnades of Mexican Fan and Canary Island Palms echo the shape and form of the linear park, their image recognizable far beyond Santa Monica. Italian Stone Pines repeat linear patterns, each new planting design overlaying the past with the aesthetic of its own time. Now, again, working to save the palisades from erosion, we have returned to the native plants that express our commitment as a city to the principles of environmental sustainability.

The park is continuously reinvented. The Senior Center was originally the location of the North Beach Station of the Pacific Electric Railway. The new building, constructed in 1955 by architect Weldon J. Fulton, was given to the City by philanthropist Marcellus L. Joslyn, in memory of his wife.

The funicular that once spanned from the park to the beach is long gone, but the desire to re-create a way to get from the park to the beach is getting a new look by the City.

Along the recently created natural paths are a timeline of monuments that celebrate our history. The totem pole anchoring the northern edge of the park honors the Native Americans of our Country. Walking south through the park we come to the stone marker dedicated to George Washington by the Daughters of the American Revolution. Our walk takes us past the sculpture of Arcadia Bandini, surrounded by a formal rose garden; the Montana ridge, a ceramic bench designed to look like the rocks; the Craftsman Idaho gates with the emblematic Batchelder tiles; and, of course, the Pergola. At the south end of the park we relearn the ironies of history when we come to the monument dedicated to Mr. and Mrs. Henry Chichen. Unfortunately, their achievements have been lost to memory.

Everyone seems to agree the weather is perfect for playing in the park. Not too hot, not too cold, not too bright. The park is filled with people. Bicyclists in cycling outfits, joggers and walkers, grandparents and grandchildren, hand-holding couples, people and their dogs, photographers, people practicing yoga, people exercising with their trainers, chess players, and picnickers mix comfortably together. It was a pleasure to see the way each person made the park his/her own. It was also a pleasure to know that this has been a special place for generations, and, if we do our job as good stewards, it will continue to be a special place for the generations to come.

Knowledgeable and welcoming Conservancy docents will be in Palisades Park on Sunday, June 13 to share their stories with you. I, for one, raise my glass in a toast of gratitude to Arcadia Bandini. Her gifts to our City have not been well recognized. She was the daughter of one of the original Ranchero Families of Southern California, known as a good businesswoman, a gracious hostess and a generous philanthropist. I say, muchisimos gracias Arcadia Bandini. What say you?

Hometown Hero: Barry Barish

Ocean Park resident, physicist, Linde Professor of Physics at Cal Tech and President-Elect of the American Physical Society, the association of physicists, Barry Barish, in talking about his work, said, “I study matter. At the beginning there were equal particles and anti particles. When put together they annihilate each other and make energy. For a reason we don’t know, after the Big Bang, there were excess particles and those particles are why we exist.

“I believe the best science comes when we do science to learn science and not to create widgets. But you should know that the World Wide Web comes from the work of particle physicists and was invented at CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire) near Geneva and at SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center). The collaboration necessary between the two labs required transmitting huge amounts of data. In solving the problem of how to share the data, scientists created the World Wide Web, which has become part of, and changed, our daily lives.

“Stimulated emission was an idea postulated in 1917 by Einstein. The laser (light amplified stimulated emission radiation) was first demonstrated 50 years ago this month, at the Hughes Research Lab in Malibu. The science of the laser has made possible laser printers, the DVD, bar codes, and, of course, many advances in medicine.

“Probably the biggest problem of our time is energy. The evidence for global warming is overwhelming but not irrefutable. Whatever you think of global warming as a problem, it’s a fact that we are putting a huge amount of carbon into the atmosphere because of the use of fossil fuels. It’s a ‘one-time experiment’ we’re doing without knowing what the effects will be. What we do know is that we have no way to reverse global warming.

“We can’t afford a one-time experiment. We’ve never seen this much carbon in the atmosphere. It’s a scientific and technical problem but it’s a real problem and we need to improve the ways to go from research to practical applications. There can be no ‘one way’ now to meet our demand for energy, so all alternatives to fossil fuels should be used.

“It’s hard to spend money on pure science when there are so many problems in the world. But these problems can’t be solved with only slogans or only money. We need knowledge.”

Writing this article, I thought he might prefer if I used his “real’ name, which I didn’t know. Seems his first grade teacher, without any way of knowing he would one day be a physicist, also wanted to know his ‘real’ name. When she asked, he said, ‘Barry.’ Assuming he was just giving her a hard time, she told him she would call him ‘John’. That lasted until Parents Day when his parents confirmed his ‘real’ name was Barry.

As a young student, Barry was interested in how things worked and remembers, that at age 6, he puzzled over why ice floated in water since both were made of water. (If you also wonder why ice floats in water, try Google.)

At 13 his father gave Barry a job helping on wheel alignment and wheel balancing at his shop. Barry then went to the library to study and taught himself everything about car suspension, much more than he needed to know for the work he was supposed to do.

Barry said, “I didn’t have the objective of being a scientist. In high school what I wanted was to be a tennis player. And I was All City in LA. In college, still playing on the Berkeley tennis team, I studied engineering. I was soon cured of the idea of engineering by the drafting and survey classes. But the problem solving of physics appealed to me. My interest increased over time. I enjoyed physics and was good at it and the more I learned the better I got and the more I liked it.

“I have questions that can’t be answered and I look for answers. Being a physicist is a combination of having a high aptitude for math, a great curiosity and a willingness to be creative. I was always a scientist in attitude, but it took many years to develop the tools to be a real scientist.”

Barry often rides the beach bike path, enjoying the good weather and sunshine. He thinks about Santa Monica and offers this idea, “Our city could be a model energy efficiency city. The question would be how to stimulate energy efficiency in the city so that we achieve a meaningful result.” And he wonders if that’s a problem we want to solve.

What Say You? Seventh Generation and Living Homes

The Iroquois concept that, “In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations," is the origin of the company name ‘Seventh Generation.’

Jeffrey Hollender, the head of Seventh Generation, a company that manufactures and markets sustainable cleaning products, spoke about the company he founded 22 years ago and his new book “The Responsibility Revolution.”

The decision to write the “The Responsibility Revolution came from Hollender’s realization that “although the concepts of responsible business are making their way into the larger business world, we are no where near what it will take to meet the problems we face.”

One of the challenges, says Hollender, is that “we have confused ‘less bad’ with ‘good’ and that will not get us to where we need to be. We need to repair the damage to the environment and the culture, not just to stop doing harm.”

In order not to fail, in order to force change, Hollender makes a series of suggestions beginning with requiring ‘full cost accounting.’ He suggests that we no longer allow companies to keep books that externalize costs. His example is agriculture. “Require agriculture to pay for costs of pollution to water, soil, air, and public health which are caused by standard agricultural practices. Currently those costs are externalized and become public governmental or personal costs. “If agriculture paid for externalized costs then sustainable farming would be the more cost effective model.”

Transparency should be the rule in organizational structures as well as in bookkeeping. “Transparency is about what your stakeholders want to know rather than what you want to tell. Stakeholders want to know the good, the bad and the ugly. It is important to remember that disclosure of what is wrong is almost always helpful. More, transparency creates an authenticity that is beneficial.”

“I live,” said Hollender, “in a world of irreconcilable differences. I run a sustainable business. I sit on the Board of Greenpeace and I am a consultant with Wal-Mart. Five years ago I started the American Sustainable Business Council to be a counterforce to the Chamber of Commerce. We now have about 40,000 members and are becoming a voice that is listened to in Washington.”

“The rate at which our problems are accelerating makes me afraid that we will fail.” Hollender warns. He has a blog called the ‘inspired protagonist.’ The name suits him.

The event was sponsored by the Sustainable Business Council (SBC) and was held at Steven Glenn’s home in Ocean Park. Glenn founded SBC to provide a local forum for businesspeople working to develop sustainable businesses. He is also the owner/developer of the pre-fab company www.livinghomes.net.

Crowded into the house were bankers and accountants, developers and architects, tech and green business owners, wanting to hear Jeff Hollender and also wanting to see the Ray Kappe designed, pre-fab home built and owned by Steven Glenn.

The 2500 square foot house had six sustainability criteria to meet. The “Z6” goals. Zero energy, zero water, zero carbon, zero emissions, zero waste, and zero ignorance. Glenn wanted to place a value on form, function, health, and sustainability and offer a beautiful alternative.

The house itself is modern, light and airy, with a two-story living space, a second story of bedrooms and studies connected to the outside with large decks.
You can see the rain chain and the native plants in the garden, but the elements of the house that meet the Z6 criteria are not immediately noticeable.

The steel used in the construction comes from steel in old cars; photovoltaics, used a sunscreen on a second story deck, provide power; gray water systems and a large, underground cistern provide garden irrigation; toilets are low flow and dual flush; the insulation rate is high; appliances are energy efficient.

For the final Z6 goal Glenn used his background in Internet technology and has created programs such as tracking systems for home energy use that provide feedback and offer alternatives. He thinks people are serious about wanting to make sustainable choices and his goal is to assist people to take their responsibility seriously.

Any of these ideas could be incorporated into existing buildings and all new buildings could be required to meet all these standards.

What Say You?

Hometown Hero: Nancy Goslee Power

“Trust your instincts and throw fear away” is the advice Nancy Power gives to garden designers. Advice that is seen in her own garden designs and which has brought her many notable awards, among them: House Beautiful Giants of Design Award for Landscape Design, Pacific Design Center Star of Design for Landscape Design, and an American Academy in Rome Residency in Landscape Architecture.

“I’m mad for plants and it’s hard to restrain myself when it comes to saying ‘yes’ to garden projects.” For the past 5 years Nancy has been the Chair of the Board of Trustees for the Garden School Foundation and the garden designer for the 24^th Street Elementary School.

The 24^th Street School Project began when the LAUSD announced a plan to re-asphalt the school grounds. The neighbors wanted to create a school garden where children could experience growing fruits and vegetables in a beautiful and healthy environment.

Nancy was asked to create a garden plan and present it to the School Board. The Board approved Nancy’s plan, but trees and plants cost money. To raise money they had to become a non-profit, and so the Garden School Foundation was formed.

In the past five years, over 1,000 students have benefited from the garden curriculum. The students have become the proud chefs and boosters of the broccoli, cauliflower, chard, and greens that they grow. The garden changes how the elementary school students think about nature, about themselves, about food and about what they want from life.

The Garden School Foundation is a continuation of Nancy’s work creating gardens for children, including Kidspace in Pasadena and the non-profit Children’s Institute in downtown LA. Whether designing a school garden, the Master Plan for the 127-acre LA County Arboretum, the Norton Simon Museum garden, or a private home garden Nancy has the same vision.

“People want the same things in a public space that they want in a private space and these goals can be achieved through design. Through the placement and choice of trees and plants and the use of space, color, light, sun and wind to create a sense of place.”

Nancy is from a long line of Delaware farmers and remembers her family farm. The farm and her mother’s interest in gardening informed her values. Her real education, she believes, began when she lived and studied in Florence, Italy. Returning to the States, she worked in New York and then moved to California.

“I worked as the West Coast Editor for House Beautiful and scouted gardens for the magazine. For myself I created small landscapes, plants in terra cotta pots and so on. Other people liked them and asked me if I would do the same for them. I soon realized I was much happier when outdoors.”

A chance meeting at Merrihew’s Nursery brought Philip Chandler into Nancy’s life and he became her mentor. He was a well-known garden designer and a respected member of the SMC faculty. They talked about plants and from there things began to ‘just happen.’ Moving into garden design from her success at the magazine was a natural move for her.

“All the gardens I like relate well to their sites. I travel to see gardens. I’ve seen the Villa Gamberaia in Florence Italy and the Courances in France, Dumbarton Oaks in Washington DC, the Winterthur Gardens in Delaware and private, home gardens all over the world. My favorite garden is a fabulous ruin in Sri Lanka called Sigiriya.

“‘My basic ideals have come from the Persian and Mediterranean gardens that are based on science and hydrology and from the American agrarian past. American farms are based on the efficient use of water and so we get orchards, rows of trees and walled gardens, but you have to be able to see out. Gardens have evolved and they keep evolving and adapting to their climate and their conditions.”

The same ideals are true in the home garden. Nancy’s advice is to “look outside and think about what you see and imagine what you’d like to see. Then stand outside and look at the house and think about what you see and what you’d like to see. Think of wind, sun, shelter, calm. The more you define your space the larger it becomes.”

California historian Kevin Starr has named her style ‘Eclectic Boldness’ and describes her as blending culture and landscape, color and light, and human use and comfort. Nancy says of her self, “I’m really very old fashioned and believe in the Aristotelian golden mean of beauty.” You can see for yourself the gardens she creates in her book, “Power of Gardens.”

What Say You: Stars of the Garden

The stars of this show have names that aren’t household words yet. But, if you go on the Theodore Payne Garden Tour this weekend, you just might come home lauding the Pacific Coast Iris, the California Poppy, the many varieties of Ceonathus, and the Bush Anemone. http://www.theodorepayne.org/Tour/

The tour showcases fifty regional gardens featuring native plants and water conservation. Two of the fifty gardens on the tour, the Williams and the Zinner gardens, are in Santa Monica. The plants are showing off for spring and docents are there to answer all your questions.

The Williams, retired scientists, are passionate about their grandchildren, travelling and gardening. They bought a house on 23rd Street with a front lawn and an overgrown back garden. Gone, along with the maintenance and the water bills, are the lawn and thirsty plants. The natives that have taken their place are hardier and easier to care for.

Filling the front yard is a scent created by the mingling of flowers. Two rock doves sit like old friends on the garden bench and greet me. The front entry is green, welcoming and water conserving. The back is exuberant with ceonathus, irises, and poppies, all in bloom. Rocks and a re-circulating water pond bring a fresh coolness to the garden. It’s easy to imagine the games their grandchildren could play in such a yard.

The Zinners moved to their house on 21^st Place with the intent to make their garden an environmental showcase and they succeed. The Yankee Point Ceonathus, at this time of year in full bloom and making people, birds and bees happy, sets the tone for a garden with gracious outdoor eating and seating areas and play areas for their son.

Next to the Ceonathus is a rocky dry creek bed, designed to collect and filter roof and garden storm water. As storm water run off is now the main polluter of the Santa Monica Bay, allowing the storm water to infiltrate on site is the number one way to protect the Bay.

Lisa Novick, Theodore Payne Staff Member, teaches, “Native plants save water and save insects and animals. Only 10% of all insect species can eat non-native vegetation and insects are an essential part of the food chain. Many land animals are dependent on the work of the insects. All plants may be green, but they are not all equal. Any drought tolerant plant is beneficial in Southern California but native plants conserve water and provide habitat that non-native plants can’t.”

Garden/garden, 1718 Pearl Street, is a demonstration project sponsored by the City of Santa Monica and the DWP. There, you can see two, side by side, gardens, comparing the use of native and non-native plants, designed to show the water conservation, low maintenance, and habitat benefits of the native garden. Their web site has good information on sustainable plants. http://www.smgov.net/Departments/OSE/Categories/Landscape/Demonstration_Gardens.aspx.

More information is available through the City Office of Sustainability. There is even a registry in the City that matches people who want to garden with people who need help in their gardens! Go to ‘garden sharing’. http://communitygardens.smgov.net.

I wish you the joys of the spring garden, the virtues of providing habitat, the benefits of conserving water. To that list I’d like to add one more thought. Southern California is often seen as an impermanent stage set. Visit one of the well-designed native gardens and I think you will find there a sense of permanence. What Say You?

Hometown Hero: Nancy Cattell

Nancy wanted to major in Political Science and International Relations. She asked her professor what she could do when she graduated. He said, “Be a good citizen.”

“He wouldn’t have said that to a man. It was a prejudiced world in those days,” remembers Nancy. The year was 1937. She was a freshman at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

Born in 1921 into the Gossard family in Ohio. Her father, a banker, had a degree in agriculture. The mission of his bank was to loan money to farmers. Her mother was a housewife. “My father didn’t think I should work. He gave my brother summer jobs at the bank I wished he would have given me. But he believed in education for girls. The tradition of getting an education was in their family history.”

Nancy followed the family tradition and graduated from the University of Michigan in 1941 with a Bachelor of Science in Psychology and went into the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps in 1942. Her first job was as a Company Commander for a 150 women unit. The women were drivers and mechanics and cooks and office workers.

When WWII ended in Europe Nancy was assigned to Germany.
“I played a significant role in running the country as Chief of Military Personnel for the U.S. Military Government in Germany. Our job was to restore Germany and make it function.”

“We should be taking lessons from our successes in Germany. We are taking the wrong approach in the Middle East. We need to focus on education; especially for women, and we need to make sure people have clean, running water and electricity, food, safety and health care. Look at the billions we spend on military campaigns and look what we could do if we spent billions doing a better job of giving people life’s necessities.”

Returning to the States after two years in Germany, she went to Columbia University on the GI Bill. At Columbia Nancy met David Cattell, the man who was to be her husband of 20 years and the father of her two children. When they both graduated from Columbia he got a position as a professor at Brown University. Nancy also wanted to teach, but wasn’t able to get an interview, much less a job. Her husband taught both at Brown and then, in 1952 he became a Political Science Professor at UCLA. The Department had 48 professors, all men. “After WWII there was a discernable improvement in opportunities for women – but only up to a point.”

“The most blatant discrimination for me was that UCLA Law School, in 1968, would not accept me. Fortunately, Loyola took me right away – those Jesuits were not as prejudiced as UCLA.” Now Nancy Cattell, Esq., is a graduate of Loyola Law School (1971) and practices law in Santa Monica.

Nancy’s love of education led her to Santa Monica College, where she taught Political Science for 31 years and was elected, twice, to be a Member of the Santa Monica College Board and is now a Member of the Santa Monica College Foundation Board. “In this country, when we supported education, we formed the Community Colleges and what do you know, we educated people, they got good jobs and they became good taxpayers.”

It was while Nancy was teaching at Santa Monica College that she resumed her pilot’s training, finally getting her license. She was thrilled to be flying at Santa Monica Airport (Clover Field), where Amelia Earhart, Nancy’s childhood hero, used to fly.

In 1998, now single, she re-met and married the man who had been her commanding officer in Berlin. To read about that story or the story of how she met her hero, Eleanor Roosevelt, and all the triumphs and difficulties of her life, you’ll have to wait for the autobiography she is writing to be published.

When Nancy was 4 and her brother 5, they took the train to visit their grandparents. She is still travelling. Mementos from her travels, photographs of her family, her law books and her library fill her living room to overflowing.

“My advice to women today is do whatever you want. Pay no attention, just do what you want.” If you look at her life, she took her own advice.

What Say You? Santa Monica 2025

Santa Monica 2025. The elegant and welcoming gardens and park in front of City Hall are very busy this summer Saturday in the year 2025. A jazz concert is the center of activity, with people sitting on blankets on the lawn and listening to the music. Nearby, children who live in the Civic Center Village are playing a game of tag between the trees. The day is warm and clear. There is a view all the way to the ocean and the horizon. It’s a postcard Santa Monica moment.

To get to the park, Santa Monicans walked on wide, tree lined sidewalks, rode their bikes or took local jitneys. Visitors from, really, everywhere, came by light rail; some to the park, some to the beach, some to shop at Bloomingdales or Nordstrom’s at Santa Monica Place or at the 3^rd Street Promenade, and some to eat in Santa Monica’s restaurants. Others came, along tree lined boulevards, by car and have parked their cars in a central location, planning to spend the day and to get around by walking, renting a bike, or by using the fun, local transportation.

Are you wondering if I’ve been reading too much Alice in Wonderland? In fact, I’ve been reading the Santa Monica Draft Land Use and Circulation Element, affectionately called ‘the LUCE.’ Produced by City Planning, the LUCE document was developed through a strong and deep process of public discussions and meetings with the community and with the full participation of all the City Boards and Commissions and the City Council.

As described in the LUCE, in 2025, our neighborhoods will look pretty much the same as they do today, each with its character and identity carefully protected. Our local shopping streets will have almost everything we need, making it easier to get our errands done without getting into our cars. Neighbors and friends meet at local cafes with outdoor seating. New neighborhoods have taken root at Bergamot Station and in the Creative Arts District. New development will be designed to protect existing neighborhoods and our historic buildings and places will be protected.

All neighborhoods, from Sunset Park and the Pico Neighborhood on the East to Ocean Park and North of Montana on the West, will be connected by ‘green streets’; with bike lanes, a substantial tree canopy, and wide and safe sidewalks.

Santa Monica has made the responsibility for environmental stewardship a core responsibility of the City and that is expressed throughout the LUCE. By 2025, through our stormwater infiltration designs, we protected the Santa Monica Bay and made it cleaner and safer for swimming and surfing. As a City, we developed systems for the use of recycled water for landscape and so our water conservation is very high. We changed the way people get to Santa Monica and we changed the way people get around the City and so have greatly reduced both traffic congestion and environmental pollutants.

This LUCE represents the dreams, hopes and aspirations of our City. Will those dreams translate to reality? Some parts of the plan are already in the works. Expo (light rail) is coming to 4^th and Colorado and is planned to be here by 2015. Planning for the Civic Center Park is underway. It is scheduled to open in 2014. The green design for Ocean Park Blvd from Lincoln Blvd to Neilson Way is in progress and construction is planned to begin in early 2011. Santa Monica Place will reopen, in August of this year, with Nordstrom’s and Bloomingdales as its anchor stores.

But the LUCE is really a vision statement. The reality will come from how well we, as a City, can implement the vision. That will take real work, over time. And it will take the continued actions of a concerned and caring community.

For now, please read, for yourself, the LUCE, available online at www.shapethefuture2025.net or in hard copy at all our City libraries. It’s a thick book. But it has a good, short, Executive Summary and is clearly divided into sections by issue and by area and so it’s pretty easy to fine the sections that interest you.

What Say You?