Redondo Beach

A friend wonders what Redondo Beach is like and I reply:

Redondo is very sweet, but not quite as quaint as you imagine.

Yes, it is an affluent suburb of Greater Los Angeles. It is on the South Bay, at the south end of Santa Monica Bay, and it sits comfortably between Hermosa Beach to the north and Palos Verdes to the south. It is beachy, the balmy sunsets are grand, and the pounding of the surf is a lullaby at the end of the day. There're still surf shops and there’re lots of palm trees.

(These drawings of are from a note book made last year.)

But Starbucks and Botox clinics along Pacific Coast Highway have replaced the incense shops and used bookstores you imagine. There is no real central downtown to Redondo Beach, there never was. Neighborhood corner stores still exit. Old Tony's is a great old style Italian restaurant on the Pier. Thai, Korean and Mexican restaurants are mixed with laundromats and Pilates studios at strip malls built during every decade of the last century. The Whole Foods on PCH sells organic range fed turkey to beach bunnies from the sixties while intensely earnest and tattooed young clerks swipe credit cards and ask if everything was found all right in the aisles, across the generations. I rather love it.

Amazing and hideously wonderful mid-century apartment buildings stand along the esplanade interspersed with smaller Cape Cod, Craftsman or Monterey Colonials, one family or duplexed, or triplexed. Tiled balconets held up by baroque columnated piers overhang driveways. The lots are small and sandy; there are usually another set of buildings behind those facing the street. Lots and lots of blazing bouganvillea; all the exotic botanic wonders of the Southland are abundant.

Yards are high maintenance, kept trim and special; the sound of mowers and blowers and whackers is constant. The sound of the Spanish, or the Mexican or the Aztlan, or whatever it is the gardeners speak like flocks of birds is musical while they take breaks at the tail of their trucks and smile at the little dog I get to walk twice a day. Lots of urban dogs on leashes, nice dogs.

Lots of Yuppies, lots of retired people too. One old couple uses an electric funicular to ride up and down the steps to their house. Redondo is all built on dunes and soft bluffs.

Redondo Beach from the Pier, looking South to Palos Verdes, 2004, 11x14 inches.

From the collection of Janice Pober and Brian Higgins.

My dad and I day-sailed out of King Harbor in Redondo when I was a boy and we lived in Manhattan Beach, the beach town just north of Hermosa. All these towns are connected by PCH; there is no separation between them, no banlieu as it were, it is all one beach town with varying degrees of desirability; the closer to the ocean, the more desirable. The urbanization of coastal Southern California runs in a similar fashion from Santa Barbara to San Diego.

Here, and here, are other watercolors made on the beach near the Redondo Pier in June of 2004.

On the twice daily walks with little Coco this Winter we sometimes passed a favorite spot. Maybe next time we'll go in.