Between Google trying to bury its search under an “AI” chat and me moving most most of my website over to a new domain, I’ve been checking to see how well-indexed the old and new pages are at various search engines.
“Marineland of the Pacific” seemed to be a good phrase to test. Marginalia Search still has the old location for my Remembering Marineland (or not) post, but that search also turned up a page with scans of a Marineland ad flyer from 1962.
As someone who’s spent a lot more time hiking the Palos Verdes Peninsula than visiting an ocean theme park that closed when I was a child (not to mention way too much time updating OpenStreetMap), I was immediately drawn to the map…which strangely enough, shows Crenshaw Boulevard running over the hill, down through the Portuguese Bend landslide and connecting to Palos Verdes Drive South along the coast, just east of Wayfarer’s Chapel.
Wait, did Crenshaw actually connect sometime in the past? If so, how?
Today, Crenshaw runs up to the top of the hill and stops just past Crest Road, at Del Cerro Park. A dirt road continues past a locked gate, narrowing to a switchbacked path through the Portuguese Bend Nature Reserve. A landslide below it has been moving slowly for decades, preventing much in the way of construction on the land. Some people bought land and built houses on adjustable stilts so they could level the house every few months.
The first time I checked out the view from Del Cerro back in 2011, I took this photo of the area to the east, where Crenshaw appears on that map.
Over the last few years the land has been sliding faster, and a lot of the area has been closed for safety. Wayfarer’s Chapel has been dismantled to prevent it from flat out collapsing.
It’s no longer possible to connect Crenshaw to the coast.
But had it connected in the past, and been wiped out by the landslide? I went looking for the history, and found some articles that answered my question. I must have read this 2023 LA Times article when it was published, which means I’d forgotten a key detail about Crenshaw Boulevard’s relation to the landslide:
It caused it.
Crenshaw never connected to the coast. An extension was planned, and initial construction reactivated an ancient landslide in 1956, as crews moved enough dirt around to shift the underlying structure out of balance. At the time, the Portuguese Bend section hadn’t moved in roughly 4,800 years. In the 70 years since, it hasn’t really stopped.
If the map was drawn when the park was new, it would have been reasonable to assume that the road would be completed soon enough, and draw it in early. (“It’s finished on the map!”) But the scan shows a 1962 copyright date at the bottom. That’s six years into the landslide, more than enough time to realize the road was never going to be completed and paint over it for the latest printing. That makes me wonder why they hadn’t fixed it by then.
