Les Storrs Santa Monica Portrait of a City Yesterday and Today, Santa Monica Bank: Santa Monica, CA, 1974, 67 pp., 1933
"One of Santa Monica's major fiascos occurred during the years of the Great Depression.
"Despite the condition of the economy, interest in yachting and boating was increasing rapidly in Southern California, and a bond issue was submitted to the electorate for the construction of a breakwater. Taggart Aston, an engineer of considerable repute, was commissioned to design a breakwater, and he produced plans and specifications for one which was to have been made by casting a row of reinforced concrete caissons, each cylindrical and formed in groups of three, these to be tied together after being located in the bay.
"The contract was let, and after many delays the first of the units was towed from San Pedro, where it had been cast, and was duly filled with sand and placed on the floor of the bay at a point roughly opposite the end of the municipal pier.
"No rock or other foundation was placed under the structure . . .
"Currents washed the sand away from either end of the unit, leaving it standing on a narrow bar of sand at the middle. It cracked apart in the center, and the contractor pleaded that the design was unworkable.
"A change order was negotiated, by which the 2,000 foot breakwater was made of rock, although the new design show a grossly inadequate cross section [ . . .] the entire wall was [to be] made of relatively light stone from Santa Catalina Island [which] would have been acceptable for the lower parts of the breakwater, but the cap rock should have been heavy granite or similar stone . . . quarried from inland mountains . . .
" . . . the breakwater [was] built in 1933, and almost as soon as it was completed heavy seas began rolling the cap rock off the top, so that as this is written [c. 1974], little of the wall is visible at high tide.
"Even so, Santa Monica enjoyed a brief period of yachting activity befoe the harbor became a thing of the past.
pp. 36, 37 [Photo captions; "During the brief period in which the Santa Monica breakwater was more or less intact, steamers plied between the municipal pier and Catalina Island. The trip enjoyed great popularity, but not for long."; "This was the city hall of Santa Monica until the present building was erected in 1938, but the photo shown was made much earlier by H.F. Rile, who recorded innumerable scenes of old Santa Monica."]
"Boating activity virtually ended with World War II, and about the best that could be said of the breakwater was the fact that by interrupting the natural currents which carry sand from northwest to southeast, it vastly increased the area of public beach in Santa Monica.
"For some time, dredging occurred at irregular intervals, but the sand has widened steadily over the years, and, by 1974, there had been no dredging in many years."