La Jolla Then and Now

Stand at the Torrey Pines Glider Point and face south. If you squint, La Jolla looks like a quaint Mediterranean fishing village. Houses, engulfed by dark green shrubbery, bleacher down from the top of Mt. Soledad to the deep blue water of a little bay.

But boat masts don’t rock back and forth in the gentle tide, and drying nets don’t sprawl across the pure white sand. And picturesque little villages don’t have boutiques where years ago, legend still has it, Oprah bought a $25,000 gown to wear once.

L. Frank Baum, author of the Oz books, was so enamored of the town he has Trot, a child heroine of three books, inhabit a small cottage just above sea caves like those at La Jolla’s Crocodile Point.

The novelist Raymond Chandler, who lived on Caminito de la Costa in the Fifties, disagreed. La Jolla, he said, “is a place where old people go, and they bring their parents.”

For decades, La Jolla was largely unknown, and preferred it that way. It became a hideaway/playground for the rich and famous. Strollers down Shores Beach included various presidents, J. Edgar Hoover, movie stars, and artists. Andy Warhol spent his summers in a u-shaped house at the northeast end of the Beach & Tennis Club.

Locals swore they’d spotted Jackie Kennedy under a big floppy hat, or Dianna Ross.

“Packards chauffeured west,” writes Thomas Gwynne, La Jolla born and raised. “Big parties packed into little cottages for the short spell of summer. La Jolla was talked about as a memory, and those that were there nodded to each other and cried when they passed.”

Even the name contained mysteries. In Spanish, “Joya” is either “jewel” or “a hollow surrounded by hills.” “Jolla” is — who knows? Some say a corrupted Spanish or Native American word. Others, a typo that somehow became official. In the early 1900s, residents solved the problem by nicknaming their town El Nito — “the nest,” writes John Nolen, because it appeared to hang “like the sea gull’s nest between the sea and the sky.”

La Jolla may have first gained national attention when the Beach Boys sang “all over La Jolla/At Wa’imea Bay” in “Surfin’ U.S.A.” in the early Sixties (though people had to look it up, since it sounded like a beach in Hawaii).

Originally, two narrow roads led into La Jolla, from the south and north. This limited access made the town like Sherwood Forest, far enough from Nottingham to avoid the Sheriff — and his ilk — but close enough to partake in various activities, if necessary.

La Jolla lost its geographical exclusivity when Ardath Road was completed in the mid-1960s. Built along the lines of an old water trail to Rose Canyon, the road provided a direct route to the heretofore-sheltered village. Cars spilled over the hill, and to this day Ardath/North Torrey Pines Road is one of the most widely traveled in the county.

The original developers, New Yorkers Frank T. Botsford and George W. Heald, named streets after their hometown: Wall Street, Exchange Place, Park Place. More recent names come from scientists and engineers: (anatomist Baron George) Cuvier Street, (chemist John William) Draper Avenue, (zoologist Charles Frederick) Girard Avenue, (astronomer Sir William) Herschel Avenue.

These names are apt. Since the arrival of the University of California, San Diego in 1965, La Jolla has boasted more Nobel Prize winners, per capita, than any other American city.

They have brought national attention to the community, as have the world famous Scripps Institute of Oceanography, several research institutions, Torrey Pines Golf Course, which hosted the U.S. Open in 2008, and the La Jolla Playhouse, which sends on average at least one show to Broadway every year.