How a legacy of preservation as beautification set the tone for La Jolla’s civic volunteers generations later, as presented by historian Molly McClain.
Early and renowned La Jolla benefactor Ellen Browning Scripps wasn’t only generally generous; her philanthropy had a particular focus on preservation as civic enhancement that still inspires advocacy and action nearly a century later, according to historian Molly McClain.
During her March 19 lecture “Beautifying La Jolla: Ellen Browning Scripps and the Preservation of Coast and Grove,” presented by the La Jolla Historical Society, McClain posited Scripps as understanding “that La Jolla’s coastline is not just a beautiful landscape, … [but] an irreplaceable heritage that requires active protection.”
Most civic leaders of Scripps’ era discuss beautification as adding ornamental gardens, grand buildings and formal parks, said McClain, professor of history at the University of San Diego, author of “Ellen Browning Scripps: New Money and American Philanthropy” (2017) and a leader in the inclusion of the La Jolla Park Coastal Historic District on the National Register of Historic Places.
Scripps, however, “looked at San Diego and saw something different,” McClain said. “She saw a place where natural beauty could become the highest form of civic art.”
Scripps honed her approach to beautification through conservation via her extensive travels.
A Victorian-era child born in 1836 who moved to La Jolla in the 1890s, Scripps, emboldened by the railroads’ and steamships’ revolution of travel, spent time in places like Devon, England and the Scottish Highlands, once isolated from visitors.
On her visits, Scripps became enamored with scenic tourism and a tourist infrastructure of hotels, overlooks and walking paths that “presented natural beauty instead of trying to compete with it,” McClain said.
Realizing “preservation could be more transformative than any construction project,” Scripps began three decades of “remarkable” philanthropy in La Jolla; she founded and commissioned several of the now-iconic La Jolla institutions and also turned an eye on developing the scenic tourism of La Jolla, McClain said.
The already-thriving mechanisms of drawing visitors to La Jolla via the railroads meant “tourism, then as now, threatened to destroy the sense of wilderness that people came to see,” McClain said, with piles of trash strewn about the coast, fires lit among the groves of Torrey pine trees and other destruction.
Scripps, in her own lecture called “The Future of La Jolla,” scolded her neighbors “for failing to consider the need for both scenic tourism and conservation.”
She then revitalized the La Jolla Improvement Society, tasked with making small, incremental improvements around the community like placing rubbish bins in parks.
Scripps extended her efforts to managing tourist routes, McClain said, with volunteers empowered to develop stairways leading from the railway depot to the shoreline, installing belvederes along the coast to maximize views and creating paths along the bluffs’ edge, all to keep people from scrambling down hillsides, trampling and disturbing wildlife.
Image courtesy of San Diego History Center
Scripps financed many of these projects, along with building a better bathhouse at La Jolla Cove and establishing the Marine Biological Association – now the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
About that time, Scripps began to be concerned about the future of a grove of exceedingly rare Torrey pines, a tree native only to San Diego and a small island off Santa Barbara.
The Torrey pines grew in La Jolla along a “narrow band of suitable habitat that was increasingly threatened by development as La Jolla grew,” McClain said, “close enough to be easily reached, but isolated enough to feel wild,” making the land valuable as a scenic resource but also vulnerable to destruction.
Scripps bought the lots containing the trees, conceiving of the mesa on which they grew as an “integral part of [a] broader campaign to enhance the scenic beauty and the tourist potential of La Jolla,” McClain said.
Aerial view looking south over Torrey Pines Park, north of La Jolla in 1956/Image courtesy of San Diego History Center
That broader plan included Scripps’ vision of what is now North Torrey Pines Road – the northern tip of La Jolla – being the highway from which visitors would increasingly arrive from Los Angeles via car, and what became the Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve would function as “a scenic gateway” to allow those travelers to have a “dramatic first impression of this exceptional landscape,” McClain said.
Image courtesy of San Diego History Center
This development led to a boom of scenic tourism along the coast, she said, with hotels like La Valencia, the La Jolla Beach and Tennis Club and Casa de Mañana all capitalizing on this influx of automobiles and local shops and restaurants prospering.
Scripps died in 1932, “having lived long enough to see the success of her plans to create a community that was defined by what it chose to preserve, and not just what it chose to build,” McClain said, noting the lecture’s audience contained many “who are carrying forward Ellen Scripps’ remarkable vision for San Diego.”
Commending the La Jolla Historical Society, the Torrey Pines Conservancy, La Jolla Parks & Beaches and the La Jolla Coastal Conservancy as groups with active participants committed to preservation, McClain implored people to further dedicate themselves not only to admiring what’s been accomplished, but also continuing to engage in “what still needs to be done.”
