Malibu vs. Nobu

A personal history of place

Feb 07, 2025

Amidst the catastrophic fire losses suffered by so many Los Angeles County communities, including Altadena, Pasadena, Pacific Palisades, and Malibu, I want to offer this personal history of Malibu in its various dimensions—natural, cultural, meteorological, architectural, recreational, culinary, and more.

“Malibu vs. Nobu: Why SoCal’s Surfing Paradise Stinks” was published in County Highway Vol. 1, Issue 3, Nov-Dec, 2023. “America’s Only Newspaper” has graciously dropped the paywall on the piece, and you may read it here:

"Malibu vs. Nobu"

Below is an excerpt of my original, longer, unedited version, which had a slightly different title.

"Malibu Creek vs. Nobu" is a story in the simplest sense about the damming of a creek and the destruction of its steelhead trout. It is also about the privatization of one of America's most beautiful stretches of coastline, about how romantic myths of landowning beget greed, exclusion, environmental degradation, and ultimately deep alienation from place even as we fetishize and profit from the myths about place. It is also about food: local vs. global, sustainable vs. mined, linked to place, consciousness, and responsibility, or severed from them entirely—as the dam severed the creek and its geological and biological processes from the ocean, beginning the decline of creek and ocean alike. It is also, inevitably, about surfing, movies, sushi, and Teslas.

Malibu Creek vs. Nobu

by Wade Graham

Surfing Malibu, when the conditions are right, can be an experience so iconic and mythic as to feel like a waking dream. Can be, because usually, surfing Malibu means fighting surly crowds, with ten people hassling for position for every wave. But once in a while, I’ve caught that wave all surfers rehearse in their heads: on a classic longboard, you turn towards shore and paddle to catch the wave at the moment it rises to break; accelerating and dropping down the face, you pop to your feet, push on your back foot to turn the board rightward halfway up the face, then straighten out at the best angle for speed, take two steps forward and pause, trying to be as motionless as a ballet dancer poised for an impossible moment on her toe, holding a line just ahead of and under the curling lip unspooling so perfectly it seems to actually be rolling off of a spool. The width of that moment of stillness balanced on swirling water might be a second, at best a few—before its reprieve collapses and you have to move, turn, shuffle, adjust, or maybe wipe out.

When the wind cooperates by not blowing, the water’s surface is what surfers call “glassy,” a curving mirror with a dark green tint, rising and revolving past your shoulder as you glide, reflecting in spinning, distorted layers the green water, the brown of the hillsides, the confetti blur of cars shooting past on Pacific Coast Highway, and above them the clear periwinkle of California’s blue sky dreaming. It’s the best movie in town. But it isn’t everything there is to see. Beneath, unseen, is another world: algae-covered rocks, waving kelp, fish in neon orange, stripes, and spots, camo-print leopard sharks, limpid-eyed seals, and the infinite shapes of anemones, nudibranchs, limpets, mussels, and urchins. Hiding among the rounded, mossy boulders are mottled bottles and trash, rounded pieces of concrete and brick being turned back into geology by the patient battering of the waves, and, possibly, the rarest of things: the hollowed-out, eyeball-like grinding stones used by the Chumash Indians who once lived here.

Home improvement nearly ruined one of the world’s best waves before anyone ever surfed it. Not garden-variety home improvement, but estate-making—on a scale to rival Thomas Jefferson, that fantasy gentleman farmer, if not quite to rival a Vanderbilt. One Frederick Hastings Rindge bought a goodly chunk of what he reckoned the earthly paradise, in 1892: 13,330 acres, nearly 21 square miles of the Rancho Topanga Malibu Sequit. The land, originally granted by the Spanish crown to a soldier attached to the 1775 Juan Bautista de Anza expedition sent north from Sonora, comprised “about ten leagues” of canyons and mesas on the south slope of the Santa Monica Mountains, stretching along the Pacific shore from the border of Santa Monica on the east to what would become the Los Angeles/Ventura County line on the west. He paid $10 an acre—no small sum then, but he could afford it, having inherited a $2 million estate in 1883 as the only surviving child of six children of the patrician Rindge family of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Four years later, he moved to California with his young wife, May, a devout former schoolteacher from Michigan, in search of “a farm” where they could settle.

His wish list was short but explicit: a piece of property “near the ocean, and under the lee of the mountains; with a trout brook, wild trees, a lake, good soil, and excellent climate, one not too hot in summer.”^[i]Malibu—“the Malibu” as it began to be called—would do nicely: lying just to the west of booming Los Angeles, it was a 21-mile string of pearls: sandy bays and strands framed by cliffed headlands and rocky points made by the numerous creeks that spill out of the mountains from steep, twisting, spectacular canyons.

Rindge was well-pleased with his acquisition, roaming it on foot and horseback, taking in its trees and birds, winds and weather, fish-filled ocean and trout-filled creeks, even the brushfires that periodically swept through the chaparral that clothed the mountainsides. He rhapsodized about the land’s rhythms and beauties in a self-published book, Happy Days in Southern California (1898), filled with witty verse and romantic descriptions of the life and work of the mostly-Mexican farmers, ranchers and cowhands, or vaqueros, of his and adjoining properties:

“Oh, the happy vaquero ! Who would be a banker, when he could ride the smiling hills and hide himself and horse in the tall mustard ! Who would be a slave to desk and electric-light darkness in a back room, when sunshine is free to all? Aye, a liberal competence is splendid, but slavery is often its price.”

”But then we cannot all be vaqueros,”^[ii] he admitted in the next line, being, as he was, not far removed from a banker. The Massachusetts Rindge family wealth had been built on shipping and banking, and Frederick fattened it nicely with investments in California mines and real estate, Mexican timber, and an insurance company he founded. He was, in addition, a vice president of the Union Oil Company and a director of L.A. Edison (later Southern California Edison), and well-remunerated with their stock. He endowed his hometown of Cambridge with its public library, city hall, and what would become the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, alma mater of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.

Fred Rindge wasn’t the first to appreciate Malibu. For millennia, native peoples inhabited the California coastline, particularly the productive mixing zones of fresh and salt water made by river and creek mouths. As far as knowledge knows, the Chumash people lived, for, essentially, ever, at Humaliwo, meaning “the surf sounds loudly,” where Malibu Creek meets the Pacific. By far the largest of the watercourses on the rancho, Malibu Creek twists through a narrow, thickly wooded canyon which opens to a large brackish lagoon facing the ocean. This rich creek-estuary-ocean confluence with its acorns, plants, game, fowl, trout, and seafood, sustained 150 or so Chumash, according to Spanish records, in a village of houses lined up in regular rows, deploying sophisticated fishing gear, and paddling ocean-going canoes called tomols, made of planks, hewn from redwoods and other big trees floated down from the north coast by winter storms, sewn at the seams and caulked with naturally-occurring asphalt tar. These were among the richest settlements on the Pacific coast of the continent when Europeans first glimpsed them.

When Frederick died in 1905, at the age of 48, he left his widow, May Knight Rindge, three kids, a fortune of $22 million (equal to half a billion today), property from Massachusetts to Sinaloa,^[iii] and a family “farm” by then increased to 17,000 acres—20 times the size of Monaco, that other Mediterranean principality.^[iv] And the Malibu ranch was in actuality, while he was alive, just the family’s weekend place, where they repaired after spending the work week in a splendid Romanesque Revival mansion that still commands 2263 Harvard Boulevard in LA’s West Adams district. In summer, they vacationed in Marblehead, a sort of Atlantic Malibu for the Boston WASP elite.

Yet the happy rancho life Frederick had described in his tales was about to get more difficult. In 1903, the Rindge’s ranch house had burned to the ground. The next year, the behemoth Southern Pacific Railroad applied for eminent domain right of way to run its tracks through the length of the property, to join Los Angeles and Ventura. The following year, Mr. Rindge passed away, leaving May in charge of the family and a complex agriculture business—growing sheep, cattle, goats, pigs, alfalfa, barley, grains, hay, lemons, and 1,500 acres of newly-planted lima beans near Zuma Beach—clearly in the crosshairs of an outside world that wanted in.

Resourceful and with nearly unlimited resources, May went on the offensive. Finding an obscure legal provision barring duplication of rail lines, she built her own to block the Southern Pacific: the Hueneme, Malibu and Port Los Angeles Railway, with 15 miles of track to bring the ranch’s grain and hides to be shipped from the family’s private wharf (now Malibu Pier) finished in 1908 for a cool $1 million. In 1907, LA County announced its intent to build a road along the coastline, to make permanent the informal access route used since the 1870s by canyon homesteaders outside of the boundaries of the ranch. May put up fences and locked gates, guarded by armed riders of legendary ill nature. So began 22 years of escalation, as the county, then the state, fought her in the courts, and May responded with more lawyers and more armed men. She became famous for her inhospitality. Four cases went to the California Supreme Court, and two to the U.S., which ruled against her, in 1923.

Seeing the writing on the wall, May began planning for a future of real estate rather than ranching. She would need to welcome people, some of them, instead of excluding them. She knew she would need water to sell land, and so in 1924 started the construction of a dam on Malibu Creek, the only significant, perennial stream in the mountain range, draining a 109-square mile watershed that lies behind the mountains (the result of a geological anomaly: it is an “entrenched meander,” or stream that existed before the mountains rose and cut down through them, making its spectacular canyon). The creek happened to also have a perfect dam site, 2 miles in from the ocean, conveniently at the mouth of a steep, narrow gorge poised just above the largest area of flat, developable land on the ranch. It was plugged with a concrete arch 100 feet high, costing $65,000, finished in December, 1924. Steel rails from the railroad, which was shut down in the 1920s were used as reinforcement.^[v] Two years later a separate spillway was finished, bringing the entire span to 175 feet wide at its crest and 95 feet at its base, with a capacity of 574 acre-feet of water—an impressive structure for a private dam, then or now.

Called by the rapt Los Angeles press “The Queen of the Malibu,” she spent like a queen to achieve her husband’s dream of an “American Riviera” in Malibu: more than half million on “Laudamus Hill,” a 50-room house started in 1928 and never finished; more on 1929 “Vaquero Hill,” an elaborate Spanish fantasy house built on the beach for her only daughter, Rhoda Rindge Adamson (now Adamson House State Historic Site). Both were festooned with Spanish-style ceramic tiles from Rindge’s Malibu Potteries business. Also in 1929, Pacific Coast Highway opened, finally letting the public in. But 1929 was a bad year to get into the real estate business. A series of development schemes in the 1930s failed. In 1931, the potteries burned. More of the leftover rails were sold off as scrap to Japan.

The dam, plagued with engineering and construction problems, and disputes with contractors, engineers, and state inspectors, was finally issued a permit in 1935, 11 years after starting construction.^[vi] It was too late. The same year, May was sued by creditors; in 1938 she was declared bankrupt; in 1939 she was arrested for debt, and died in 1941, aged 76, with $750 to her name.

—To be continued…

Wade Graham's The Extended Field

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