San Diego History · La Jolla
A woman spent ten years building a pool so children could swim safely. The seals have it now.
Finished April 4, 1931. She was ninety four, and she died the next year. All records sourced and cited.
Finished April 4, 1931. She was ninety four, and she died the next year. All records sourced and cited.
Ellen Browning Scripps was in her eighties when she started.
She had lived in La Jolla since 1897, and she had watched the cove take people. The article of record on the project quotes the problem plainly: a rapid cross current, and an ocean that had "taken toll of human life" more than once. Scripps put it in her own terms. "I have always had an innate interest in children, particularly those handicapped in life's game."
So she paid for a breakwater. Three hundred feet of reinforced concrete curved out from the bluff to make still water behind it, finished on April 4, 1931, at a contract price of about fifty five thousand dollars.
She was ninety four when it opened and she died the next year.
Two other things before the story runs. She started the work in 1921 and wrote a clause into her will to make sure it got finished if she did not live to see it. And the sand that makes the place what it is today was not in the plan. It arrived because the engineer had to fix something.
Scripps contracted a hydraulic engineer named Hiram Newton Savage to run preliminary surveys in 1921, and approved his survey in 1923.
Then it sat. Permits, redesign, and the better part of a decade.
She was old enough to know she might not see it, so she inserted a codicil into her will: if the work is not accomplished during her lifetime, she requested that it go forward with it anyway. That is the instruction of someone funding a thing she expected to outlive her.
An updated survey was commissioned in May 1930. Permits came through between June and September.
One of them is worth reading. The War Department permit of August 30, 1930 let the structure be built on the condition that the city would allow the Engineer Office to alter its position or remove it entirely, at Scripps's expense, and would keep the adjacent navigable water free. It also set a deadline. The thing had to be built by December 31, 1933.
The architect on the project was William Templeton Johnson. The contract went to W. M. Ledbetter and Company of Los Angeles at about fifty five thousand two hundred fifteen dollars.
Construction started September 17, 1930.
The breakwater runs roughly three hundred feet, with an arc of about a hundred and seventy eight feet.
Most of it, about seventy nine percent, stands ten feet high. The rest goes to sixteen. The ocean face is sloped and curved at the top to throw surf back. The pool side carries eighteen inch steps along its whole length. Three pilasters hold wrought iron ladders up to a four foot walkway with galvanized pipe railings, three feet high, posts every eight feet.
And cut through the base, four sluiceways, each four feet wide and six feet high.
The sluiceways are the part that matters later.
The sluiceways were there to let water move through, so the pool would flush rather than stagnate.
They did something else. Savage found that water running into them created a strong suction pull, and that pull was building an unstable sandbar. A sandbar that moves is a hazard to exactly the children the pool was built for.
So on March 27, 1931, eight days before completion, he sealed the four wooden grillages shut.
The pool floor dropped about a foot and a half. Sand came in and stayed, and a beach formed on its own. Savage recorded that he considered this an improvement for children bathing in the pool.
Finished. Dedicated on May 31.
A trust between the State of California and the City of San Diego set the terms the same year. The water and the land were to be used as a public park and bathing pool.
Ten years from the first survey. Scripps died in 1932.
A colony of harbor seals has used that beach since the mid 1990s. By 1999 there were roughly a hundred of them, and the argument over who the place belongs to has run ever since, through courts and councils and ballot language.
Every side of that argument is standing on sand that exists because a hydraulic engineer plugged four holes in a seawall eight days before his deadline.
Coast Boulevard is one of the most contested stretches of public shoreline in California, and the reason is structural rather than seasonal. A privately funded seawall, a state trust with specific language in it, a federal permit that reserves the right to remove the whole thing, and a protected marine mammal colony all occupy the same two hundred yards.
That is not a market condition. It is a permanent feature of owning near that block, and it is worth understanding before you buy into the view.
Current numbers for the area are in the La Jolla market report, and the wider coast is in Coast and Peninsula.
Nobody has shown that sealing the sluiceways brought the seals. The record says Savage sealed the grillages on March 27, 1931, that sand accumulated afterward, and that harbor seals have used the beach since the mid 1990s. Sixty years separate those facts and the source does not connect them. This piece puts them in order and stops there.
The price. The figure given is the winning contract bid, about fifty five thousand two hundred fifteen dollars. What Scripps ultimately paid across ten years of surveys, redesign and permits is not stated in these terms.
Her age. Scripps was born in 1836 and died in 1932, which makes her ninety four at completion. Published accounts of her age at various project milestones vary, because the project ran a decade and people date it from different points in it.
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