This past week, Q-line asked: Is Santa Monica’s history, culture and heritage properly celebrated and preserved, or should bygone eras just be allowed to be gone?
Here are your responses: ✆ “For the most part, Santa Monica has become a city of Skid Row ugliness. Preserve what? In the face of what? Ludicrous.” ✆ “Santa Monica Hospital is nothing like it was before UCLA took over 10 years ago. All that history of the Lutheran hospital we visited in times past is gone. Although UCLA would like us to believe it’s still the nice small local place it was. Now it’s just another huge bureaucratic heartless, faceless extension of the other UCLA hospitals.” ✆ “Any time a longtime tenet of a business or apartment building is unwillingly forced to vacate a property, then the tenet should be paid a realistic relocation payment from the owner. If the developer of the (Horizons Surf Shop) property is the original owner, then it was the tenet who paid off the property. The tenet is always the one who pays off the owners’ rental property. The original owner should be willing to understand and appreciate that fact. Prudence would dictate that the original owner treat these longtime tenets as quasi partners. If it is a new owner planning to redevelop the property, then I have very little sympathy for the new owner. These high money people are not stupid. These new owners should have, and I am certain that they did, understand the new obstacles they would have to endure in the process of excising these longtime tenets from the property. It is unrealistic to believe that the surf shop will be able to stay. I trust it will be relocated to bigger and better quarters nearby.” ✆ “They should save all these old buildings and things. Not for the sake of history, but for the sake of the present. Every time they tear down an old building they build up something bigger, which means more people, more crowds, more traffic that we have enough of already. They should just leave everything the way it is and get rid of a few of these modern buildings and put up something smaller. That would be even better.” ✆ “History and heritage are totally overrated. If a building is more than 20 to 25 years old, then we don’t need it. Just tear it down and build a new one. We need new buildings to support the new Santa Monica. The new Santa Monica is about tourism. It’s about shopping. It’s about the future. We don’t need the history or the heritage. Good riddance.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on October 21, 2006. Read the original PDF.