Why the railroad tracks go through some of the most expensive real estate in Santa Barbara


I love the sound of a train whistle in the distance, and the click-click-click of a train going by. In the distance. My house in Glendale, Arizona is just a few miles from the train tracks and I love it, especially at night. There's such a wonderful, lonesome sound of a train passing. In the distance.

Of course, if it were a few feet away from me, I'd think differently. The sound of a train whistle right nearby late at night, or the clatter of a train going by every closely is annoying loud. And trains are dirty, they burn diesel fuel, and before diesel it was even worse, pouring out black smoke, and soot. And that's why it's always puzzled me that some of the most expensive real estate in Santa Barbara is right next to the railroad tracks, near the beach.

It made me wonder if people "back in the day" didn't mind being woken up by the noise of a train going right past their house. Or if somehow they weren't bothered by the smell, and the smoke. But it's not that at all, it's the change in the past 100 years about being close to the beach.

Nowadays, of course, we want to be right near the beach. Closeness to the beach is all the rage - people who have houses so close that they can walk to the beach, or have a view of the ocean right at the beach, are considered lucky. 100 years ago it would have been the opposite.

If you've spent much time in Santa Barbara, you know it's windy. Down by the beach at night it's windy, damp, and unpleasant. The beach is an unprotected area from strangers, too, dark and lonely. 100 years ago it would have been the last place that you would have wanted to live if you could afforded to live inland a bit. And that left the beach area pretty much open, and unwanted. Left to people too poor to live elsewhere, and transients, and tramps.

And that's why the train tracks are there. They were built long before attitudes about living at the beach changed. When the attitudes started changing, in the 1920s, the building started close to the beach. Luxury places, fancy hotels. Go visit the Santa Barbara Biltmore, the train tracks run right next to it. Take a look at the Santa Barbara Hilton, same thing. Train tracks. And where the Hilton is was empty and unwanted right up through the '80s. It's where the bums used to sleep.

Of course it's too late to move the railroad tracks now, so they do the best they can. And hopefully people staying at these luxurious resorts will just consider the train going by, seemingly inches from their windows, to be part of the charm of Santa Barbara.

Thank you to my patrons on Patreon who help support History Adventuring! If you like these blog posts, and would like to make suggestions for future ones, please go to patreon.com/PhoenixHistoryAdventuring where you can show your support for as little as $1 a month. Thank you!

What Patreon is http://bradhallart.blogspot.com/2016/03/supporting-creators-on-web-with-patreon.html

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the
Read more