Visiting Santa Barbara in 1897

It's been a long time since I lived in Santa Barbara, but I have fond memories of it. The last time I was there, a few years ago, I was surprised at how much came back to me, and how easy it was to find my way around. And since I'm a history adventurer nowadays at my computer, I decided to visit Santa Barbara on the Library of Congress site, looking at old newspapers. I found an article from the Los Angeles Herald in 1897. Let's time-travel.

The drawing is from the newspaper, and I tried my best to match it up using Google Earth. The angle isn't exactly right, but you can see the ocean to the left, and the mesa at upper right. The artist who drew this wasn't flying, he was simply standing on a ridge that nowadays has a road called Alameda Padre Sierra, which locals just call APS. The modern view is much higher, but it was best I could do.

I don't see many buildings in the drawing, but of course they were there. Most of them fell down during the 1925 earthquake, and that's why Santa Barbara looks the way it does, it was pretty much all rebuilt after the quake.


I haven't read the whole article yet, but it seems like the phrase "equable climate" says it all. It was a good place to get away to in the summer and winter, and of course spring and fall are beautiful there, too. It's always beautiful in Santa Barbara. I'm not kidding, the most amazing climate in the world. I would consider living there again, if I had the money, and if weren't for the earthquakes (I hate earthquakes, although I never felt any when I lived there).

Hang on, I'll do some math here. Looks like California had only been part of the United States for 48 years when this article was written. Before that, of course, it had belonged to Mexico, and before that, to Spain. So you do see a lot of Spanish influence. I learned a little Spanish in high school, and it helped me make some sense of the street names, although the locals pronounce them in an anglicized way, such as "GOO-terrace" for Gutierrez. I was laughed at quite a lot until I learned the correct way to mispronounce the names of the streets. My guess is that no one would have laughed at me in 1897.

And that's Santa Barbara. Other than a freeway being built through it, it really hasn't changed much, and hopefully it never will. Words cannot express how beautiful it is, and neither can photos or drawings. Go there.

Here's a link to the article if you want to read more
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/data/batches/curiv_nicasio_ver01/data/sn85042461/00280769745/1897080801/0468.pdf

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