San Diego History · Solana Beach
The gap in the bluff at Solana Beach was cut with a fire hose.
One man, three months, water off the Lake Hodges spillway. All records sourced and cited.
One man, three months, water off the Lake Hodges spillway. All records sourced and cited.
There is a notch in the sandstone bluff at Solana Beach that everyone walks down to get to the sand. It looks like the ocean made it.
The city's own history says otherwise. Hydraulic water pressure was used to break up the hard pack and cut a notch in the bluff. It took one man three months with a fire hose.
The water came off the spillway at Lake Hodges Dam.
Three things before the story runs. That dam was, by the federal engineering record, the only source of water for Solana Beach, Del Mar and Rancho Santa Fe until 1964. Colonel Ed Fletcher bought the town for two hundred dollars an acre. And when the cut was finished they opened the beach on the Fourth of July with horse races on the sand.
The Lake Hodges Dam, its flume and the San Dieguito Reservoir were built between July 5, 1917 and January 29, 1919, for the San Dieguito Mutual Water Company, by the Bent Brothers Construction Company.
The flume runs four and a half miles from the dam to the reservoir as a gravity structure, concrete channel and steel pipe on trestles, carried across every ravine in between on a steady grade because water will not climb. It was designed for thirty cubic feet a second.
The Historic American Engineering Record states what it was for. "This structure was the only source of water for the communities of Rancho Santa Fe, Solana Beach and Del Mar until 1964." The same record says the flume "is directly associated with the activities of Colonel Ed Fletcher, a key figure in the development of San Diego's infrastructure."
Which is the thing to hold onto. On that coast the water came before the towns, and the man who arranged the water is the man who then sold the towns.
In 1922 Fletcher bought two hundred and one acres from a farmer named George H. Jones at two hundred dollars an acre.
His plan was for Solana Beach to be the commercial center serving Del Mar, Rancho Santa Fe and itself. That part did not work. Del Mar and Rancho Santa Fe eventually overturned the severe restrictions on commercial development they had written for themselves, and once they could have their own shops they had no reason to drive to his.
Solana Beach grew anyway, through the boom years from 1924 to 1929, along with everything else in the county.
A beach town with no way down to the beach is a hard sell.
The bluff at Solana Beach is hard packed sandstone. Rather than blast it or dig it, they washed it out. Water coming over the Lake Hodges spillway went into a fire hose, and one man stood there and cut a notch through the face of the cliff with it over about three months.
The loose sand this produced was scooped up with a steam shovel, trucked down to the surf line, and dumped where the ocean would take it away.
On July 4, 1924 the beach opened. The city's account says it was done with great fanfare, including horse races on the beach.
He opened the Bank of Solana Beach, which he later sold to the Bank of America. He put in a train station, a Ford agency and garage, a grocery store and a hotel.
That was enough seed to start the rest. Businesses followed on the Plaza, on Highway 101 and on Cedros Avenue, which is still where you go.
Three years after the cove opened, Rancho Santa Fe was formally established, and the city of Solana Beach quotes the section of its covenant that matters here.
"No part of said property shall be sold, conveyed, rented or leased in whole or in part to any person of an African or Asiatic race or to any person not of the white or Caucasian race."
That language stayed in the document until 1973. The city states the consequence directly: racially segregated communities had to be established elsewhere to house the mostly Mexican American workers who maintained the Rancho Santa Fe estates.
Those workers built La Colonia de Eden Gardens. The city says they lived in tents before they could get materials to build their own houses, that it is the oldest neighborhood in Solana Beach, and that many people living there today are direct descendants of the first families.
Solana Beach incorporated in 1986, with La Colonia de Eden Gardens inside the city limits.
The notch, with stairs and a railing in it, a park at the top and a lifeguard tower at the bottom. It is called Fletcher Cove.
The flume still runs, or ran until it was due to be replaced with buried pipe.
The bluff that one man cut with a hose is the same bluff that erodes, and bluff retreat on that stretch of coast is the structural question that governs everything near the edge of it. It is a slow, permanent, well documented process, and it is regulated.
If you are looking at a blufftop property anywhere on this coast, the condition of the bluff, what is permitted at its base, and what the current rules allow are the first questions and not the last ones. They are not market conditions and they will not change when the market does.
Current numbers are in the Solana Beach market report, and the wider area is in North County Coastal.
Nobody names the man with the hose. The city's account says one man did the work over about three months. It does not give his name, and this piece does not invent one.
La Colonia is bigger than a paragraph here. The covenant, the exclusion it enforced and the neighborhood that was built because of it are quoted above from the city's own history because leaving them out of an account of how Solana Beach was built would be a choice, not neutrality. But a paragraph inside a story about a beach access is not an adequate telling of it, and it should have a piece of its own.
The 1887 photograph is not Solana Beach. It is the coast at Del Mar, immediately south, photographed thirty seven years before the cove was cut. It is here to show what that bluff line looked like before anyone put a hose on it, and it is labeled for what it is.
The flume's present tense. The federal record, written in 2002, lists the flume as functioning and notes it was to be abandoned and replaced with underground pipe. This piece says what the record says and does not assert the current state of it.
More San Diego history: stories from around the county, one place at a time.