Beached Boat at Dockweiler for Months (c) 2010 Richard Beban
D. J. “Duke” Dukesherer is a local writer and official historian of the Ballona Blog. He is the author of Beach of the King, The Early History of Playa Del Rey, Westchester, Playa Vista, CA, and ‘Round the Clump of Willows.
The NOT-So-Wide Beaches
By Duke Dukesherer
We take for granted the wide sandy beaches at Dockweiler Beach, but they weren’t always the case. You might be surprised to learn that the present width is man-made.
When the beach areas of Playa Del Rey; Palisades Del Rey (the Playa del Rey bluff) and Surfridge (the now abandoned suburb under the LAX airspace west of the airport) were first developed, the sandy beaches were just a few yards wide. If you take into account that the majority of that coastline–just below the bluffs and Vista Del Mar Coast Highway–was graded to handle the trolley-car tracks that ran along the coast as far south as Redondo Beach, in some cases the usable sandy beach was only a few feet wide.
In the 1920’s, tons of sand was dredged near Imperial Highway and Vista Del Mar when the Los Angeles Hyperion sewage treatment plant was expanded. Then in the 1960’s, the area known today as Marina Del Rey was excavated. It was the sand from these two projects; deposited at Dockweiler Beach, that created the wide sweeping sandy beaches that we enjoy today.
Los Angeles Red-Car trolley tracks heading south at Surfridge, Playa Del Rey; about 1921. (Compliments, Los Angeles Public Library)
