One cliff and every generation found a new use for it: the Lindberghs, an Army camp, a thoroughbred farm, a tram house for the son of the founder of General Mills, and the roll call of 1974. All records sourced and cited.
On February 24, 1930, Charles Lindbergh took off from Mount Soledad in a sailplane built by the man who had supervised construction of the Spirit of St. Louis. He rode the wind rising off the cliffs above Black's Beach north along the coast to Del Mar. A month earlier, from the same hill, Anne Morrow Lindbergh had become the first American woman to earn a first class glider license.
Forty four years after that, on April 18, 1974, the San Diego City Council voted five to two to ban nudity on every beach in the city except one. The one was the beach under those cliffs.
In between, the land on top became an Army camp, a horse farm, and a university. At the bottom, a man named Sam Bell built a round concrete guest house with a tram down the cliff to reach it. Everybody calls it the Mushroom House, and it is boarded up now.
I sell houses in San Diego, and I do not know another piece of our coast that has been used for so many different things.
Black's Beach is the city end of a long strand under the bluffs of Torrey Pines, north of La Jolla Shores and south of the state beach. The bluffs run up to about 300 feet. Offshore, the Scripps submarine canyon focuses the swell, which is why it is one of the best known surf breaks on the coast.
The name on the map is not Black's. The city's part is Torrey Pines City Beach, and the state's part to the north is Torrey Pines State Beach. Nobody uses either name.
First, the wind. When the prevailing west wind hits a 300 foot wall, it goes up. Anything with wings can ride it.
The gliding at Torrey Pines started on the sand. According to the National Register nomination for the Torrey Pines Gliderport, in 1928 and 1929 pilots towed gliders behind cars along the beach below the cliff, to get them up into the rising air. Those pilots built their own planes and taught themselves to fly them.
The man who brought real sailplanes to it was Hawley Bowlus. The nomination says Bowlus had "previously supervised construction" of the Spirit of St. Louis, the plane Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic in 1927, and then started his own sailplane company in San Diego.
So when Lindbergh came to fly gliders, he came to Bowlus.
Anne went first. On January 29, 1930, she flew a Bowlus sailplane from Mount Soledad and qualified as the first American woman to earn a first class glider license. The Journal of San Diego History, in a 1978 photo history of San Diego women, calls it "a breath-taking flight from Mount Soledad." The same piece records that a club called the Anne Lindbergh Gliders was formed that year, and that Ruth Alexander, a San Diego flier of the same years, was "the first female glider instructor in the country."
Four weeks later it was Charles's turn. The nomination puts it this way: on February 24, 1930, Lindbergh "flew in the lift at Torrey Pines" on a flight along the coast from Mount Soledad to Del Mar, "thereby establishing a claimed distance record." Gary Fogel's history of San Diego soaring describes it as the first soaring flight in a sailplane above the Torrey Pines cliffs.
Mount Soledad is the hill above La Jolla. Del Mar is up the coast to the north. The only way to get from one to the other in an engineless plane is to fly the cliff, and the cliff is the one over Black's Beach.
For a few years the pilots launched off the sand. Then they moved to the top.
In 1935, according to the nomination, Woody Brown, who had flown off the beach before, became the first pilot to launch and land on top of the cliff. By 1937 he had stayed up over Torrey Pines for nine hours.
That same year the Associated Glider Clubs of Southern California, founded in 1929, leased the land on the cliff top from the City of San Diego to build a proper gliderport.
On January 1, 1939, Mayor Percy J. Benbough dedicated it to the "youth of California." The nomination says that at the dedication, John Robinson looped his sailplane as he dropped the tow rope at three hundred feet, with more than a thousand people watching.
Robinson matters to this story because of what he built here. He developed a more sensitive variometer at Torrey Pines in 1939, the instrument that tells a glider pilot whether he is climbing or sinking. With Woody Brown he worked out a pulley tow that could launch a glider by cable over a very short run near the cliff edge. He went on to be the first person in the world to hold the Diamond C badge, the top award in the sport, and the first three time national soaring champion, in 1940, 1941 and 1946.
The flying stopped in 1941.
The nomination says it plainly: the gliderport property "became the Army's Camp Callan." The San Diego History Center's guide to its Camp Callan collection, as cited in the gliderport's encyclopedia entry, describes it as an anti-aircraft artillery training facility. The camp ran to the end of the Second World War.
The pilots did not sit it out. According to the nomination, many of the men who had learned to soar at Torrey Pines became instructors at the military glider school at Twentynine Palms.
If you want a sense of what the top of the cliff looked like then, the postcard on this page was sold to the soldiers. It was printed around 1942, and the copy shown here was mailed from San Diego in July 1943.
The camp was torn down after the war. The land went back to the City.
This is where the name comes from.
William H. Black was born in Texas in 1898, according to a local history of the area that cites UC San Diego Library records. He had lived in San Diego in the 1920s and came back in 1937 with his wife, Ruth, and their children.
Just after the war he bought the unimproved land on top of the bluffs south of the gliderport. Accounts put the size at 248 acres and the date at 1947 or 1948. The Estancia La Jolla, a hotel now built on part of it, says the Blacks turned it into a thoroughbred breeding and training operation with a half mile exercise track and paddocks. Their best known horse was Cover Up, a stallion who had won the Hollywood Gold Cup in 1947. The hotel's history says the Blacks leased him from his owner, Zack Addington.
The family called the place La Jolla Farms. The name stuck to the neighborhood that was later cut from it, which people still call the Farms.
Their own house went up between 1950 and 1952, the first house built in La Jolla Farms. The Blacks lived in it until 1967. It belongs to UC San Diego now, and it is the university's official residence, the Audrey Geisel University House.
The record I trust most on who owned the land is a dry one. A City of San Diego historic resource form for a house on La Jolla Farms Road includes a chain of title, and it opens with "William H. Black and Ruth F. Black (1955)." The subdivision is recorded as La Jolla Farms, Map No. 3487.
The beach below the farm took the family's name. People walked down to it across Black land, and it was Black's.
There is a second William Black in this story, and it is easy to merge the two. William F. Black, the son, was born in 1933 and died in 2019. He co-founded the Bank of La Jolla in 1963 and was active in civic life for decades. One obituary describes the son as the founder of La Jolla Farms. The title record and the ranch history point to the father and mother, who bought the land when the son was a boy. I have written it that way.
In the early 1960s the University of California was choosing a site for a new campus in San Diego. The City gave the Regents part of the old gliderport land. The nomination's boundary description dates the transfer to March 12, 1964, under City resolution number 179278.
In 1966 a deal between the Regents, William H. Black and his son began the sale of 132 acres of the Black land to the university as well. The father died in 1967.
So by the late 1960s the cliff top had been a glider field, an Army camp, a horse farm and a university. The gliders never left. From 1947 to 1979 the Pacific Coast Mid-Winter Soaring Championships were held at Torrey Pines, and the nomination estimates that between thirty and forty million people watched the 1957 meet on the NBC program Wide Wide World.
Paul MacCready learned to soar there. He became the first American to win the International Soaring Competition, in 1956, and later designed the Gossamer Albatross, the first human powered plane to cross the English Channel, in 1979. Walt Disney's studio filmed part of "The Boy Who Flew With Condors" at the gliderport in 1967. The nomination says the radio controlled seagulls in the film "Jonathan Livingston Seagull" were designed and flown by a member of the gliderport's model soaring club.
South of the gliderport, on the bluff above the south end of the beach, Sam Bell had a house. Around 1965 he had La Jolla architect Dale Naegle design a guest house for him at the bottom of the cliff, on the beach itself, with a private tram to carry people down roughly 300 feet of sandstone. Newspaper coverage in 1969 put the track at 295 feet top to bottom.
The guest house is a round living room set on a concrete pedestal, which is why it has been called the Mushroom House for as long as anybody can remember. Its first names were the Pavilion and the Bell Pavilion.
According to a 2023 history of the house on lajolla.ca, the work crew walked off the job before the tram was finished, and the three founders of the Elevator Electric Company, who had built the outdoor glass elevator at the El Cortez Hotel in 1956, finished the last hundred feet themselves. The Los Angeles Times was running pictures of the interior by 1966.
The timing matters. The Pavilion went up before the California Coastal Commission existed. The City's own permit file calls it a "Pre-Coastal Act" residence. A house like it could not be built on that beach today.
Almost every retelling calls him a potato chip heir, the man behind Bell Brand chips. That one does not hold up. Bell Brand Foods was founded in 1925 by Cyril C. Nigg, not by anybody named Bell, and its later corporate owner was General Foods.
The better answer comes from his family. Esoteric Survey, a San Diego architecture blog, citing his youngest daughter, identifies him as Samuel Heffelfinger Bell, the youngest son of James Ford Bell and Louise Heffelfinger Bell of Minneapolis. James Ford Bell founded General Mills in 1928. The University of Minnesota's history of the Bell family lists four children, James Ford Jr., Charles, Samuel and Sally.
His daughter's account is that he was a sculptor until the Second World War, farmed and ranched in Arizona afterward, lived in Arizona and California, and died in 1987. She lived in the Pavilion as a small child and remembers getting stuck in the tram.
So the Mushroom House was built for the son of the founder of General Mills. The blog also makes the fair point that General Mills was never a family company, so "heir" is a stretch even there. The family sold the property in the late 1970s. According to the daughter, the tram was the reason: it was costly and hard to keep running.
The nude beach story is usually told in a sentence. The ordinance itself did something slightly strange.
Ordinance 11307 was introduced on April 4, 1974, and passed on April 18. It added Section 56.53, "Nudity on public lands," to the Municipal Code. It made it illegal for anybody "over the age of ten years" to be nude in public view on any public beach in the city. Then it carved out an exception: areas of beach the Council designated by resolution as a "Swimsuit Optional" zone, with signs placed by the City Manager to mark the limits.
The ordinance was introduced as a ban, and it was a ban everywhere but one place. The zone the Council drew was the stretch under the cliffs at Black's.
The roll call is on the last page of the ordinance.
Voting yes: Gil Johnson, Floyd L. Morrow, Bob Martinet, Jim Bates and Mayor Pete Wilson.
Voting no: Lee Hubbard and Jim Ellis.
Absent: Maureen F. O'Connor and Leon L. Williams.
Five to two. It took effect thirty days later.
KPBS, drawing on La Jolla Historical Society historian Carol Olten, reported in 2019 that the vote came after hours of testimony, and that a representative of the La Jolla Farms Homeowners Association told the Council the neighbors feared a nude beach would change the character of the neighborhood. Olten's view was that the real fight was about access. The beach was hard to reach, and the crowds parked in the Farms.
The signs that went up, as Voice of San Diego reported in 2010, read "Swimsuits Optional Beyond This Point. San Diego Muni. Code 56.53." KPBS called Black's the only legal nude beach in the country at the time.
It lasted three summers.
In September 1977, Proposition D asked city voters whether nudity should be illegal at all public beaches in San Diego, with no exception. It passed. Voice of San Diego gives the margin as 55 percent to 45. The city portion of Black's went back to swimsuits required.
The anti nudity campaign, according to Voice of San Diego, ran billboards, radio and newspaper ads calling the beach "a disgraceful carnival."
What the vote did not do was change the beach. B. Chris Brewster, a retired lifeguard who started at Black's in 1981, told Voice of San Diego that ticketing nudists "would have been a tremendous distraction from the primary job of making sure nobody drowns." On the state beach to the north, State Parks told KPBS its officers patrol "on an as-needed basis."
The law has said one thing since 1977, and the beach has done another.
The bluffs that lifted Lindbergh are soft sandstone, and they fall.
In February 2020, according to the City of San Diego's permit file for 9044 La Jolla Shores Lane, the property "experienced a geologic bluff failure." Debris came down around the Pavilion. The City's notice says "The tram track and landing were damaged and are currently inoperable." The California Coastal Commission issued a notice of violation on February 19, 2020, over unpermitted work moving the debris, and the City later took up an after the fact permit for the mound of fallen bluff piled near the house.
The owner of record in that file is the R.B. Woolley Jr. Trust, dated July 15, 1987. Ralph B. Woolley Jr., the San Diego philanthropist known as Buzz, is the owner Times of San Diego named in its reporting on the house.
In January 2023 a much larger slide came down a few hundred yards south of the gliderport. Geologist Pat Abbott told NBC 7, "This is the biggest landslide we've seen around here in many years."
The Pavilion has sat empty since. Times of San Diego reported in February 2026 that a 2024 City investigation found the beach level unit had been essentially abandoned several years earlier, and that the City considers it a public nuisance. Woolley had crews board it up and paint over the graffiti in February 2026. The first coat went on February 12. New tags were up within a week.
The tram has not run since 2020. Woolley told the paper, "Pre-existing structures can be maintained, but not enlarged." What happens to it next, he said, is "absolutely unknown."
The Farms are still there on the bluff, and the houses on it are some of the most expensive in the city. Current numbers are in the La Jolla market report. San Diego's other first in the air is the Montgomery glider on Otay Mesa, and the beach below has its own place in San Diego surfing history. Farther south, in a different fight over the same coast, is the Children's Pool.
Floyd Morrow, one of the five yes votes in 1974, was also the only council member to vote against paying for the 1972 Republican convention. That convention never came, and it is why San Diego is called America's Finest City.
When the Pavilion's cliff came down. The City's permit file dates the bluff failure behind the Pavilion to February 2020, with a Coastal Commission notice of violation dated February 19, 2020. Times of San Diego's 2026 article says 2022. This page uses the City's date. The large slide in January 2023 was a separate event farther north.
Who Sam Bell was. Most retellings say potato chip heir. Bell Brand was not founded by a Bell. The identification here as Samuel H. Bell, son of James Ford Bell, rests on his daughter's account as reported by Esoteric Survey, and the University of Minnesota record confirms that James Ford Bell had a son named Samuel. I have not found a public record that ties that Samuel to the La Jolla house directly.
When the Pavilion was built. lajolla.ca gives 1965. The Los Angeles Times was photographing the interior by 1966, so it was standing by then. No building permit has been published.
When the Blacks bought the land. lajolla.ca says 1947. The Estancia says 1948. The 1955 title record is the first dated document I have.
Who founded La Jolla Farms. An obituary of William F. Black, born 1933, calls him the founder. The title record and the ranch history point to his parents, William H. and Ruth F. Black. This page credits the parents.
When Woody Brown first flew from the top. The National Register nomination says 1935 in one place and 1936 in another. This page uses 1935, which is the date the nomination gives in its chronology.
More San Diego history: every story, oldest history first.