Topanga Beach Rodeo Grounds, Spiral Staircase & Snake Pit
Sept 10, 2020 2:10:37 GMT -6
Morgana likes this
Post by elantric on Sept 10, 2020 2:10:37 GMT -6
www.mansonblog.com/2018_05_02_archive.html
Spiral Staircase
House (rare pic)
There are many legends regarding the Spiral Staircase. What is known is that it was located in an area in lower Topanga collectively known as The Rodeo Grounds. More specifically, the building stood in a part of the Rodeo Grounds known as The Snake Pit. The Snake Pit got its name from the number of rattlesnakes there and the unsavory types who gravitated to the cottages in the late 60's and after. Local legends claim that devil worshippers, motorcycle gangs and drug dealers once hid in the Snake Pit.
The Spiral Staircase stood somewhere behind what is today called the Topanga Ranch Motel.
Local legends also claim the Rodeo Grounds got its name from the fact that Tom Mix (a 1920’s cowboy actor) held actual rodeos there for the cowboys who worked the ranches in the region. In 2005 the state of California conducted a historical/archeological review of the area. Part of the objective was to identify any historically relevant buildings in the area before the state bulldozed the cottages down for a state park. That study was unable to confirm the Tom Mix connection.
The Motel in 1939
Another rumor claims that William Randolph Hearst (or more likely one of his companies) owned the property in the 1920’s and built an auto court there where his Hollywood buddies could come and spend the weekend. Hearst did not build the auto court (Topanga Ranch Motel) but may have built the cottages along Topanga Lane (in the Snake Pit) that included the Spiral Staircase. One rumor claims the Spiral Staircase was actually a dining hall, dance pavilion and ‘speak easy’. Fact or fiction? Again, the state study could not corroborate those claims.
The map at the top is from 1925. The one below that is from the web site, below. The 1925 map shows the then existing buildings. I marked the Snake Pit (lower circle) and the Rodeo Grounds.
messengermountainnews.com/topanga-yacht-harbor-planned-at-coopers-camp/
Topanga Yacht Harbor Planned at Cooper’s Camp
Here are a couple aerial photographs. The first is from 1927. The Snake Pit is behind the motel (the organized buildings in the bottom, center). Many of the cottages where there in 1927 which is at least some evidence that William Randolph Hearst did build the original cottages in the Snake Pit. The Rodeo Grounds is the the rectangular area in the upper right. The creek is the snake-like line.
I believe the most probable location for the Spiral Staircase is at the “X”. It is at the end of a dirt road (Topanga Canyon Lane) and rather secluded. It stands on the edge of the creek and is no longer there in the 1971 photograph. Depending on who tells the story, The Spiral Staircase was either torn down after the January 1969 flood or was washed away during that flood.
This is what Dianne Lake had to say in her book.
>
LINDA KNEW OF A HOUSE ON TOPANGA LANE, IN A LITTLE VALLEY JUST below the Pacific Coast Highway and north of Topanga Boulevard, called the Spiral Staircase House. The name came from the fact that the wooden house had a spiral staircase on the outside, which was the only way to access its upper floor. There was no first floor to speak of because years of neglect had left it filled with sand. It was nestled into an area people dubbed the snake pit, probably because it was in a floodplain and had a lot of perfect hiding places for snakes. Up the road a bit was the Rancho Hotel, which had small bungalows where people would stay to have easy access to the beach. All you had to do was walk across the PCH and there you were. An infamous crash pad, the Spiral Staircase House appealed to drifters, drug users, musicians, and devil worshippers, and in one of its previous incarnations it had been a heroin den. That was almost certainly how Linda knew about it in the first place.
Ronald and Linda worked out a deal with the house's owner, a woman named Ginger, that we would clean it up in exchange for living there for a while. Ginger knew she was getting a better deal than from the other tenants, and she didn't seem to care about the place or if she collected any rent. Because my parents couldn't leave for the Grand Canyon until they sold the car, they worked with us to clean up the house, sleeping in the bread truck at night and sharing the space with us during the day.
We all rolled up our sleeves to clean up the Spiral Staircase House before any of us would be comfortable using the kitchen or bathroom. It was a wreck, but if my parents questioned letting their daughter stay in such a place, they didn't say anything to me about it. Linda, however, was quite vocal about how awful the addicts were to leave such a mess. To her, pot and LSD were sacraments. She now saw hard drugs as signs of inferior moral and mental decay. The syringes and drug paraphernalia strewn about confirmed my resolve that I would never shoot anything in my veins. The cleanup became a mission because we needed gloves, bleach, and buckets of hot water to remove the grime and filth left by the spaced-out heroin addicts and speed freaks chasing their next fix. The house might have been disgusting, but at least it had hot water, which was more than I could say for the bread truck.
Once the house was clean, I could see why people liked it there. The staircase entrance led right into one of two living rooms. The bathroom and small galley kitchen were just the right size. Surprisingly, all the plumbing worked and the fixtures were brought to a shine. The view from the kitchen window reminded me of a jungle, the trees and vines so overgrown that they created a natural barrier to the rest of the world. Even though the Pacific Coast Highway was a short walk away, this house was far back enough from the road to feel isolated.
Further on in her book:
The mechanic made sure we had sandwiches and soda pop for the return trip. Patty gave him a big hug and we each kissed him on his cheek. Patty and Mary took turns driving the bus for the eight or so hours due west it would take us to get back to Topanga and the Spiral Staircase House. I would have helped, but I didn't know how to drive. We all kept each other entertained with singing and warm by sitting close.
As we pulled up past the beach shacks and parked the bus in front of the house, Charlie came out to greet us. If he was surprised to see us, he didn't show it, climbing on board with us and lighting up a joint. He didn't say much. Patty told me later on that Charlie was really ticked off at Susan for taking off and leaving us behind. It occurred to me that maybe Charlie had left us for our own good to see who was going to be loyal and listen to his instructions.
And also:
As we all knew even before we returned from New Mexico, we were outgrowing the Spiral Staircase House. The longer we stayed the worse it got. There were too many visitors and not enough space, but more likely Charlie and the other girls were simply getting restless. This house was known to the locals, so they wouldn't always respect Charlie's need to control the traffic. He didn't want it to become a hippie crash pad unless he could benefit from the visitors. Though I liked being across the road from the beach, I didn't care much one way or another, so when Charlie found out about a seemingly abandoned house nearby on Fernwood Pacific Drive, we made that our next destination. The house on Fernwood Pacific Drive was still in Topanga, about ten to twelve minutes from the Spiral Staircase House, but it was on the opposite side, closer to the mountains. We rode through winding roads and made a hairpin turn back toward the ocean to reach the small two-story house that would become our next home. The first thing I noticed were the eucalyptus trees on the steep property, and then I saw that behind the house was a built-in pool filled not with water, but with trash.
According to this Manson arrest report from 1968 (thanks, Deb),
the address of the Spiral Staircase may have been 3924 Topanga Lane (or Topanga Canyon Lane).
That address no longer exists
(V) Blue Circle Area below is approximate former location of Spiral Staircase house as seen on Google Earth today
House with Spiral Staircase was destroyed in the Floods of January 16-22, 1969
www.surfwriter.net/beforethebulldozers.htm
messengermountainnews.com/topanga-yacht-harbor-planned-at-coopers-camp/
Topanga Beach in the old days.(Pre-1949) You'll notice that there are two bridges spanning Topanga Creek.
There are already several houses along the beachfront and quite a few across the PCH
in the Rodeo Grounds . The large structure on the beach in the center of the photo may be the old LA Athletic Club bathhouse
movies.stackexchange.com/questions/55958/was-muscle-beach-party-filmed-at-paradise-cove-or-topanga-beach
Muscle Beach Party Movie filmed at Topanga Beach in 1963
Topanga Beach after the bulldozers. As you can see, there were no houses left on the beach side of PCH, but at least some of the community survived on the canyon side.
To its eternal shame, The State obliterated what was left and dispersed the last of the community in 2006.
brasstackspress.blogspot.com/1999/12/
The Snake Pit -
House in same area as the original Spiral Staircase house - prior to demolishment in 1979
(Dates from the 1920's, was originally built by William Randolph Hearst and used by Tom Mix
www.mansonblog.com/2018_05_02_archive.html
Floods of Jan 18-22, 1969
pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1970/0601b/report.pdf
waterandpower.org/museum/Early_Views_of_the_San_Fernando_Valley_10_of_10.html
This is an excerpt from the book Topanga Beach: A History, 1820s-1920s. Author Pablo Capra is a former Lower Topanga resident, and continues to preserve the history of that neighborhood on his website, www.brasstackspress.com, and as a board member of the Topanga Historical Society, www.topangahistoricalsociety.org.
Posted by BRASS TACKS PRESS
LOS ANGELES TIMES 12-19-82
"Shanty Village at Topanga Creek Awaits Doom – Development"
County to Get Landlord's Plans for Homes, Commercial Areas
by Robert W. Stewart
Times Staff Writer
Only a makeshift fence, fashioned from cracked wooden doors and a discarded window, stands between Murf the Surf's ramshackle cottage and the high edge of Topanga Creek.
But for half a century the two-room dwelling that Murf, otherwise known as John Murphy, rents for $240 a month has somehow eluded the winter floods that sweep mud, houses and sometimes people down Topanga Canyon to the sea.
Despite that run of luck, Murphy knows that his rustic creekside home is doomed – not by nature but by the Los Angeles Athletic Club, the landlord that own the ragtag collection of homes, cabins and shacks that for more years than most people can remember has squatted in the delta at the mouth of Topanga Canyon, at the eastern edge of Malibu.
On Tuesday the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors will consider a set of plans that, if approved, will all but guarantee the destruction of what is left of the community at Topanga Creek, a funky, laid-back seaside shanty-town that sprang up after World War I, when flocks of Angelenos first began driving out the coast highway to escape the city for the weekend.
Homes, Shops, Channel
In place of the aging wooden cabins, weathered roadside businesses and the ever-changing creek channel, the plans would substitute sparkling new apartment buildings and condominiums, upscale shops and restaurants and a new multimillion-dollar channel to safely and permanently route Topanga Creek to the ocean.
According to one private estimate, the plans would allow the Athletic Club to construct between 700 and 800 residential dwellings in an area that now holds 80-odd homes, 10 businesses and an aging 24-cabin motor court.
Nearby, on the bluff east of Topanga Canyon Boulevard, north of Sunset Mesa, the Athletic Club has proposed development of a 20-lot housing subdivision, where lot buyers would spend perhaps $1 million to build their homes.
Attorneys for the Athletic Club insist that only the plans for the housing subdivision are definite. Specific development plans for the flood plain, where more than 80 cabins still stand, will come later. But it seems clear that it is only a matter of time before all the old structures are bulldozed and the community at the mouth of Topanga is just a memory.
80 Cottages Torn Down
The last remnants of the other half of the Topanga Creek community, on the beach side of Pacific Coast Highway, were obliterated in January, 1979, when the state of California completed demolition of 80 beach cottages once owned by the Athletic Club. The club sold the cottages and a 1.1-mile strip of Topanga Beach to the state in 1973 for $6 million.
"I think (the area) is going to get wiped out, no question about it," said Murphy, 36, who plays guitar in a band called Blue Juice and spins records for KBU, the Malibu cable radio station, when he's not riding the waves at Topanga Beach.
H. Randall Stoke, an attorney with Latham & Watkins, the law firm that represents the Athletic Club, put it another way: "I'm sure the club isn't looking forward to the perpetuation of that housing."
Understandably so. From its stately headquarters at 431 W. 7th St. in downtown Los Angeles, behind the beige brick, gilt-lettered doors and green and white awning, the Los Angeles Athletic Club manages a nationwide portfolio of top-shelf properties that hold little similarity to the shanties of Topanga.
Those properties include holdings on South Olive and South Figueroa streets in downtown Los Angeles, the Riviera Country Club in Pacific Palisades, the California Yacht Club in Marina del Rey, more than 900 acres in Amador County, more than 1,250 acres near Lake Buena Vista in Kern County and shopping centers in Arizona, Arkansas and New Mexico. That's in addition to the 1,657 acres the club owns in lower Topanga Canyon.
Residents of Topanga Creek said the club pays little attention to them or their dwellings, most of which are all but invisible from Pacific Coast Highway.
Community Marked by Mailboxes
The only clues to the community's existence are two collections of weathered mailboxes.
One set stands just off the coast highway, east of a surfboard shop, at the head of a dirt road known as Topanga Canyon Lane. The lane runs down an incline to a low-lying clearing surrounded by towering vegetation, then stops at the creek. Residents call the locale "the Snake Pit."
The other set of mailboxes is around the corner, on the west side of Topanga Canyon Boulevard, a few hundred feet north of the coast highway. A gravel and dirt road snakes down from the west side of the boulevard to the Rodeo Grounds, a larger residential area up the creek.
To get to the Rodeo Grounds, residents must drive across the creek bed. In bad weather, they leave their cars on the boulevard and walk home on a footbridge over the creek.
The village that nestles along the edges of Topanga Creek is as close to a fantasy as the real world usually gets. It has the feeling of a place where gnomes and trolls and dark-water creatures from another world might find a happy home.
"I call it Ghetto Malibu," said Diane Miller, a 33-year-old massage therapist who rents a modest size house on the Athletic Club property about a hundred yards south of Murphy's cottage on Old Malibu Road.
Road Shored Up After Flood
The road that leads into the Rodeo Grounds was shored up with gravel after the last big flood, in February, 1980, buried a dozen buildings in mud and debris. The water line to the area is now suspended above the road on poles, along with the telephone wires and electrical cables.
Despite those precautions, several cabins still crouch below the level of the roadbed, barely visible, surrounded by thick ferns and overgrown weeds, apparently oblivious to the threat of another flood.
Many of the homes are neatly maintained, but the paint on many others is peelings. Plywood additions and jury-rigged repairs appear to be the rule rather than the exception.
There is a reason for that. According to a half-dozen creek dwellers interviewed by The Times, their leases make it clear that the Athletic Club takes no responsibility for maintaining the houses that it owns.
"In our leases, it says, 'We (the club) are not responsible for items A through Z. You will pay for everything. Don't come to us for any problems, because you are on your own.'" Murphy said. "They're just in it for the money right now, and who can blame them?"
Month-to-Month Leases
Murphy was one of a handful of residents who would allow a reporter to quote them by name. Since all the leases on the club property are renewed on a month-to-month basis, several residents said they feared that their leases would be canceled if their comments angered club officials.
The fear of being thrown out of what is perhaps the cheapest housing in all of the area is also a reason that residents usually don't complain about health problems on their property, several said.
"When we moved into this house, it was a disaster," said one resident, who asked not to be named. "I got staph (infection) from removing the carpets off the floor."
In addition to removing the carpets, that creek dweller recalled repairing holes in the ceilings and the walls and flushing out a family of rodents. The problems didn't end there.
The pipes in the old house were so corroded that the water pumped through them was undrinkable, even though the county waterworks pump station is less than half a mile away.
"All this green junk and stuff comes out," one resident said. So the people who live in that house buy bottled water.
Aging septic systems are another health problem.
Drain Fields Back Up in Winter
"Everyone has a drain field," another resident said. "We're in a delta, and the end result is that in wintertime, when the ground gets saturated, the drain fields start to back up. The pumping guy can come out here and pump out your cesspool and it will fill up again in a week. Basically you just have to learn not to take 16 showers a day, not to flush the toilet 80 times. I mean you're just faced with that."
One woman recalled that following a particularly bad season, she and the man she lived with were forced to build a cesspool. Actually, she said, it was more like a ditch. It was never inspected by county health officials. "Nothing is," she said.
"I would suspect that none of the houses would pass health codes," Murphy said. "This is not a modern community."
The county Department of Health Services inspects single-family dwellings for health code violations only when someone makes a complaint, according to Calvin Z. Miller, a senior public health specialist with the department's rural sanitation section.
Annual inspections are made only of buildings that contain five or more dwelling units. None of the county inspection records are available to the public, Miller said.
Residents said they generally do not complain because they are happy to be left alone, both by the county and by the Athletic Club.
Even the creek dwellers acknowledge that their neighborhood does not have the best of reputations.
"I think that the Malibu people would like to see this place go," said the woman who will not drink her tap water. "They think it's (full of) degenerates and druggies, that it's an eyesore, that what this area represents is really a negative part of Malibu."
The community does have its darker side. Local legend, undocumented but officially undisputed, holds that Charles Manson and his band of followers briefly made the canyon bottom home during the spring of 1968, before the group moved the Spahn Movie Ranch in Chatsworth, at the northern end of Topanga Canyon Boulevard.
There is no doubt, however, that on the morning of August 10, 1969, just a few hours after participating in the murders of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles, Manson followers Linda Kasabian, Susan Atkins and Steve Grogan made their way to a shack on the Athletic Club property. They stopped to visit a friend of Susan Atkins, stayed perhaps an hour, smoked pot, then hitchhiked back to the Spahn Ranch. The incident was recounted in detail at the Manson murder trial.
"Because of its openness, it (the area) still seems to attract all the lost souls," Murphy said. "I don't known why it is, but they just seem to get off the bus at Topanga…. You see just about everything out here. It's a real slice of life."
Spirit of Community and Camaraderie
At the same time, Murphy said, there is a spirit of community and camaraderie in the neighborhood that is unequalled in more well-heeled districts.
"Not that many people come and go," he said. "A lot of people have been here for a long time. I have rich parents and I was born and raised in a rich community and I found it very cold. Here I get up and I walk to the store in the morning and the store's 200 yards away. And in the 200-yard walk there and back I must say hello to 20 people. It's a beautiful thing."
Blanche Gaskins and her husband Charles have lived in the Topanga Beach Motel since 1965 and managed it since 1974. Now they own the business. Like everyone else, they lease the buildings and the property they stand on from the Athletic Club.
"A lot of people think this is a bad neighborhood. But it isn't," the 67-year-old Gaskins said in a Midwestern accent acquired years ago in Dodge City, Kansas.
"The guys that run around, they have long hair, long wild hair. Most of the people around here, a lot of them are surfers. A lot of them don't work a lot. But most of them, they’re not bad people. They're just casual. They just don't like to work too hard."
Topanga Creek for more than 50 years has been a jumping-off place for people tired of working too hard. Originally part of a vast land grant, Rancho Boca de Santa Monica, that bordered the eastern edge of Frederick H. Rindge's Rancho Topanga Malibu Sequit, Topanga Creek by 1925 had become a weekend resort on the still-uncompleted coast highway to Oxnard.
A promotional booklet published that year by the company operating the Topanga and Las Flores Canyon stage coaches proclaimed, "Swimming is the leading diversion of Topanga Beach, though dancing claims its share of the popularity."
Topanga Beach Tent City and Bungalows, near the site of the present-day motel, advertised a dance floor for guests less than 100 feet from the ocean.
Nearby were a service station that sold Red Crown and Union gasoline "at city prices" and Marmont Studio, where tourists could buy original paintings as souvenirs of their visit to the canyon.
By that time the Los Angeles Athletic Club was already 45 years old. The club was founded in 1880 and reorganized in 1905 by Frank A. Garbutt, one of the founders of both Paramount Pictures and Union Oil Co..
A Guarantee of Financial Health
Garbutt, according to articles he later published in The Times, believed that real estate investments were one of the surest ways to guarantee the Athletic Club's continuing financial health.
In 1924 and 1925, as part of its acquisition program, the club bought a four-ninths interest in nearly 1,7000 acres in lower Topanga Canyon. The remaining interest reportedly was held by corporations under the control of William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper magnate. According to Athletic Club records, the acquisition was negotiated by Harry Chandler, publisher of The Times and a member of the club's board of directors.
The club acquired Hearst's remaining interest in the property in 1943.
During the late 1920s and 1930s the managers of the Topanga property, who answered to Hearst, began leasing out for periods of 90 days tents and cabin sites along the beach an in the delta.
Soon visitors began to build more permanent structures on the land they had leased. Cottages and cabins began to sprout. The cabins were used on weekends by harried city dwellers who longed for a day or two near the coast and the mountains.
In the years after World War II, as the housing shortage in Los Angeles County became critical, more and more leaseholders began using their cabins and cottages as permanent residences, according to the old-timers in the community. Other leaseholders in turn rented out their cabins to others, sometimes making a hefty profit.
In 1956 the Athletic Club sold a large section of land at the southeast corner of its Topanga property to a private developer, who built what became the Sunset Mesa housing development. About the same time, the club began converting its 90-day site leases into long-term leases, some for periods of up to 17 years.
By 1963 the Athletic Club was making plans to develop the rest of its Topanga holdings, according to its attorneys. A year later the state Senate passed a resolution asking the state Department of Parks and Recreation to study the possible acquisition of Topanga Beach as a state park. Club officials abandoned their development plans while they waited to see what would happen. The wait lasted 16 years.
After years of negotiation the state finally acquired about 30 acres of the club's beach property in 1973. That same year the last of the long-term leases expired, and the club took over ownership of all the cabins and cottages on the land that had not been turned over to the state.
The state began condemnation proceedings on almost all of the rest of the Topanga property in 1979, but gave up the effort a year later, apparently after running out of money for park acquisitions.
That's when the Athletic Club dusted off its development plans.
State's On-Again, Off-Again Efforts
A senior Athletic Club official, who agreed to speak with The Times only on condition that he not be quoted by name, said that the present condition of the property along the creek is the direct result of the state's on-again, off-again attempts to acquire the Athletic Club holdings.
"They did nothing but back us further and further in the corner," the official said. "If they hadn't started all this threat of condemnation back in the mid-'60s, we would have gone down there and developed the area into a modern commercial property."
The low rents charged by the club were based on the clear understanding that residents would perform their own maintenance, the official said. In recent years, county rent control regulations have prevent the club from raising the rents to levels that would allow major renovations, he added.
The club does spend thousands of dollars a year on brush clearance to protect the area from fire. "That's quite a burden," the official said.
Although the houses on the club property may not be to everyone's taste, they do provide housing near the Malibu beach for people of modest means, he added.
After several years of study, the Athletic Club in 1981 proposed construction of four residential developments on mesas in the four corners of its remaining property. None of those developments showed up on the interim plan for Malibu and the Santa Monica Mountains that was approved by the Board of Supervisors a year ago.
Proposed amendments to that plan, which are to be considered by the supervisors Tuesday, would allow the club to develop 30 one-house lots on about 60 acres, 40 of which are located directly north of the Sunset Mesa project.
According to county planners, that housing development would require moving perhaps 1 million cubic yards of earth and construction of a road up from Topanga Canyon Boulevard at a grade of about 20 degrees.
Development of the property north of Sunset Mesa is strongly opposed by residents of that development, who contend that it would create a stream of traffic from Topanga Canyon Boulevard through their neighborhood to Pacific Coast Highway.
Stoke, the Athletic Club attorney, dismissed that argument. Streets in the new development would be private, he said, and access through Sunset Mesa would be for emergencies only.
Plan Calls for 'Urban Center'
Less certain are development plans for the creek bed. A separate planning document that the supervisors will also consider Tuesday, the Malibu Local Coastal Program, calls for creation of an "urban center" at the mouth of Topanga Canyon.
About 10 acres at the mouth of the canyon, the plan says, are designated for commercial uses. "Hotels, motels, restaurants and other convenience commercial (facilities) could be located here to serve the visitors to the recently expanded Topanga State Beach."
Land adjacent to the commercial area is set aside for residential construction, with densities of up to 30 dwellings per acre.
Despite that, Stoke said Athletic Club officials have yet to decide exactly how to develop the creek mouth. Whatever they do will require construction of a flood control channel, at a cost of several million dollars, and filling in the low-lying areas that are now homes to some 150 creek dwellers.
That fill could come from the top of the 20-acre parcel on the west side of the property that the supervisors will be asked to designate for residential development, Stoke said.
Once the club has completed all its development plans, Stoke said, it may be willing to donate some of its property to the state for public use.
Aneta Dixon moved to the Topanga Beach Motel in 1951, when she was 34 years old. She has lived there ever since. Near the hulk of her 1946 Hudson, parked next to her cabin, she has cultivated a garden of bromeliads, begonias, palms, ferns and roses. She won't say how many animals share her tiny living space.
"I don't know how long the Athletic Club has owned this property," she said with a smile. "But I think they've had it damn near forever. Of course, I'd be in a terrible position if I have to move. I can't afford to buy a house. I'm 65 years old. In a way, it really makes you wonder."
Diane Miller is less troubled by the prospect of development.
"I feel that that kind of thing is inevitable with all the building that is going on," she said. "Hopefully, when they decide to do it I'll be on my way to another place, another life. I don't have any control over it. If it happens, it happens. You have to let go of things in life."
www.mansonblog.com/2011/05/more-on-spiral-staircase.html
www.mansonblog.com/2011/01/spiral-staircase-snake-pit.html
Former sites of Rodeo Grounds Spiral Staircase / Snake Pit
today
Posted by Matt at 7:30:00 PM
Labels: Manson Family Locations, The Snake Pit, The Spiral Staircase
8 comments:
Panamint Patty said...
Thank you Ken - I have not seen any good photos of the old Spiral Stairace site in my internet travels. Is that the foundation that is still visible through the weeds? I remember reading somewhere that a creek ran through the bottom half of the house. Hard to tell from the photos if there's still water.
January 23, 2011 at 10:37 PM
beauders said...
if anyone out there has any interesting tidbits of information about the spiral staircase house please let it be known. i have a feeling-no proof-that Jay Sebring may have met manson and atkins at this place. plus it is just plain interesting but there is not a lot of information out there. thanks.
January 24, 2011 at 5:05 AM
Ken619 said...
Patty - Those are stone retaining walls. There is a creek that runs through the lower Topanga area. It floods when the rains are heavy. This would explain why the house had slipped of it's foundation. It is said that the first floor was full of sand and it was the second story that was occupied.
beauders - I've spent a lot of time trying to find info on The Spiral Staircase. There isn't a whole lot. I have learned that some of the stuff that has been written on the Manson websites is false. There is stuff that has been written by people that lived in the lower Topanga area and right across the across the highway at Topanga Beach. One of these guys wrote that he lived there when he was four, across the street from the Manson Family.
In the early 1900's someone in the Hearst family (Hearst Castle) liked the area and built a two-story getaway home there. I believe this home may of been what became The Spiral Staircase. This Hearst person would have rodeos there. All the early Hollywood cowboys would come, Tom Mix and so on. This helped give the area it's first nickname which was "The Rodeo Grounds".
Topanga Beach is directly across the street from this area. At some point in time there were houses, bungalows and huts built right on the Topanga Beach. This could of been in the 40's and 50's. I'm sure some surfer huts were built later than this. They filmed surfer movies there in the early 60's like "Muscle Beach Party". Topanga Beach had became a pretty wild party beach in the later 60's. If the people that lived on the beach at this period actually owned the homes on the beach or were just squatting, I don't know. There were drifters, squatters, moochers, surfers, hippies, slippies, etc,etc...I'm sure this overflowed across the street into what had now become known as "The Snake Pit". The homes were torn down in the eighties.
I've read on some of the Manson websites that the house was called "The Snake Pit" prior to being called "The Spiral Staircase", this is false. The area that was known as "The Rodeo Grounds" is what became called "The Snake Pit". This was do to the fact that there were Rattle Snakes all over the place. I know that it is said that the name came from the type of people that lived there, but I don't think so. I read things that have been written by these guys that lived there and it seems they are trying to hold on to some kind of glory through it by applying it to themselves. The "legend in their own mind" kinda people. There is more to write but it's 1:30 am and I have to get up in 4 hrs.
I've got more pics of the Topanga area to send to Lovely Liz still. I'm going back up there this weekend and I'll have more next week. I'll also be getting good pics of the house where Zero killed himself in Venice.
January 26, 2011 at 4:24 AM
Panamint Patty said...
A Hearst connection! Wow. Thank you, Ken.
January 26, 2011 at 11:37 AM
beauders said...
thanks for the information ken
January 29, 2011 at 4:03 AM
ZamorasBD said...
thank you for these. ..on my way down there on the 14th. i also wanted to see the ardmore temple. found old pics on a bikers site irish rich..and pics of the condo there now. now i know what is left of the staircase house.
April 10, 2011 at 10:41 PM
eviliz said...
ZamorasBD- you are welcome.
April 11, 2011 at 1:19 PM
Unknown said...
I lived next door to this location in the early '70's Manson and his looney family terrorized
everyone who lived there. They were finally evicted by the sheriff's department after not paying rent for over a year.
They came back a month later and burned the house to the ground. They were all total scumbags who didn't belong in such a peaceful neighborhood.
Spiral Staircase
House (rare pic)
“When Manson and the group first arrived, they lived at a secluded house at the mouth of Topanga Canyon near the Pacific Coast Highway. The house was called the Spiral Staircase, after a spiral staircase at its entrance, and it had slid off its foundation and rested askew. Apparently its first floor had a creek flowing through it. The place was located behind the Raft Restaurant on Topanga Canyon Lane, and according to Manson there were windows that opened out onto the hill in back and some doors opening on a twenty-five-foot drop straight down into the creek.”
There are many legends regarding the Spiral Staircase. What is known is that it was located in an area in lower Topanga collectively known as The Rodeo Grounds. More specifically, the building stood in a part of the Rodeo Grounds known as The Snake Pit. The Snake Pit got its name from the number of rattlesnakes there and the unsavory types who gravitated to the cottages in the late 60's and after. Local legends claim that devil worshippers, motorcycle gangs and drug dealers once hid in the Snake Pit.
The Spiral Staircase stood somewhere behind what is today called the Topanga Ranch Motel.
Local legends also claim the Rodeo Grounds got its name from the fact that Tom Mix (a 1920’s cowboy actor) held actual rodeos there for the cowboys who worked the ranches in the region. In 2005 the state of California conducted a historical/archeological review of the area. Part of the objective was to identify any historically relevant buildings in the area before the state bulldozed the cottages down for a state park. That study was unable to confirm the Tom Mix connection.
The Motel in 1939
Another rumor claims that William Randolph Hearst (or more likely one of his companies) owned the property in the 1920’s and built an auto court there where his Hollywood buddies could come and spend the weekend. Hearst did not build the auto court (Topanga Ranch Motel) but may have built the cottages along Topanga Lane (in the Snake Pit) that included the Spiral Staircase. One rumor claims the Spiral Staircase was actually a dining hall, dance pavilion and ‘speak easy’. Fact or fiction? Again, the state study could not corroborate those claims.
The map at the top is from 1925. The one below that is from the web site, below. The 1925 map shows the then existing buildings. I marked the Snake Pit (lower circle) and the Rodeo Grounds.
messengermountainnews.com/topanga-yacht-harbor-planned-at-coopers-camp/
Topanga Yacht Harbor Planned at Cooper’s Camp
Here are a couple aerial photographs. The first is from 1927. The Snake Pit is behind the motel (the organized buildings in the bottom, center). Many of the cottages where there in 1927 which is at least some evidence that William Randolph Hearst did build the original cottages in the Snake Pit. The Rodeo Grounds is the the rectangular area in the upper right. The creek is the snake-like line.
I believe the most probable location for the Spiral Staircase is at the “X”. It is at the end of a dirt road (Topanga Canyon Lane) and rather secluded. It stands on the edge of the creek and is no longer there in the 1971 photograph. Depending on who tells the story, The Spiral Staircase was either torn down after the January 1969 flood or was washed away during that flood.
This is what Dianne Lake had to say in her book.
>
LINDA KNEW OF A HOUSE ON TOPANGA LANE, IN A LITTLE VALLEY JUST below the Pacific Coast Highway and north of Topanga Boulevard, called the Spiral Staircase House. The name came from the fact that the wooden house had a spiral staircase on the outside, which was the only way to access its upper floor. There was no first floor to speak of because years of neglect had left it filled with sand. It was nestled into an area people dubbed the snake pit, probably because it was in a floodplain and had a lot of perfect hiding places for snakes. Up the road a bit was the Rancho Hotel, which had small bungalows where people would stay to have easy access to the beach. All you had to do was walk across the PCH and there you were. An infamous crash pad, the Spiral Staircase House appealed to drifters, drug users, musicians, and devil worshippers, and in one of its previous incarnations it had been a heroin den. That was almost certainly how Linda knew about it in the first place.
Ronald and Linda worked out a deal with the house's owner, a woman named Ginger, that we would clean it up in exchange for living there for a while. Ginger knew she was getting a better deal than from the other tenants, and she didn't seem to care about the place or if she collected any rent. Because my parents couldn't leave for the Grand Canyon until they sold the car, they worked with us to clean up the house, sleeping in the bread truck at night and sharing the space with us during the day.
We all rolled up our sleeves to clean up the Spiral Staircase House before any of us would be comfortable using the kitchen or bathroom. It was a wreck, but if my parents questioned letting their daughter stay in such a place, they didn't say anything to me about it. Linda, however, was quite vocal about how awful the addicts were to leave such a mess. To her, pot and LSD were sacraments. She now saw hard drugs as signs of inferior moral and mental decay. The syringes and drug paraphernalia strewn about confirmed my resolve that I would never shoot anything in my veins. The cleanup became a mission because we needed gloves, bleach, and buckets of hot water to remove the grime and filth left by the spaced-out heroin addicts and speed freaks chasing their next fix. The house might have been disgusting, but at least it had hot water, which was more than I could say for the bread truck.
Once the house was clean, I could see why people liked it there. The staircase entrance led right into one of two living rooms. The bathroom and small galley kitchen were just the right size. Surprisingly, all the plumbing worked and the fixtures were brought to a shine. The view from the kitchen window reminded me of a jungle, the trees and vines so overgrown that they created a natural barrier to the rest of the world. Even though the Pacific Coast Highway was a short walk away, this house was far back enough from the road to feel isolated.
Further on in her book:
The mechanic made sure we had sandwiches and soda pop for the return trip. Patty gave him a big hug and we each kissed him on his cheek. Patty and Mary took turns driving the bus for the eight or so hours due west it would take us to get back to Topanga and the Spiral Staircase House. I would have helped, but I didn't know how to drive. We all kept each other entertained with singing and warm by sitting close.
As we pulled up past the beach shacks and parked the bus in front of the house, Charlie came out to greet us. If he was surprised to see us, he didn't show it, climbing on board with us and lighting up a joint. He didn't say much. Patty told me later on that Charlie was really ticked off at Susan for taking off and leaving us behind. It occurred to me that maybe Charlie had left us for our own good to see who was going to be loyal and listen to his instructions.
And also:
As we all knew even before we returned from New Mexico, we were outgrowing the Spiral Staircase House. The longer we stayed the worse it got. There were too many visitors and not enough space, but more likely Charlie and the other girls were simply getting restless. This house was known to the locals, so they wouldn't always respect Charlie's need to control the traffic. He didn't want it to become a hippie crash pad unless he could benefit from the visitors. Though I liked being across the road from the beach, I didn't care much one way or another, so when Charlie found out about a seemingly abandoned house nearby on Fernwood Pacific Drive, we made that our next destination. The house on Fernwood Pacific Drive was still in Topanga, about ten to twelve minutes from the Spiral Staircase House, but it was on the opposite side, closer to the mountains. We rode through winding roads and made a hairpin turn back toward the ocean to reach the small two-story house that would become our next home. The first thing I noticed were the eucalyptus trees on the steep property, and then I saw that behind the house was a built-in pool filled not with water, but with trash.
According to this Manson arrest report from 1968 (thanks, Deb),
the address of the Spiral Staircase may have been 3924 Topanga Lane (or Topanga Canyon Lane).
That address no longer exists
(V) Blue Circle Area below is approximate former location of Spiral Staircase house as seen on Google Earth today
House with Spiral Staircase was destroyed in the Floods of January 16-22, 1969
www.surfwriter.net/beforethebulldozers.htm
messengermountainnews.com/topanga-yacht-harbor-planned-at-coopers-camp/
Topanga Beach in the old days.(Pre-1949) You'll notice that there are two bridges spanning Topanga Creek.
There are already several houses along the beachfront and quite a few across the PCH
in the Rodeo Grounds . The large structure on the beach in the center of the photo may be the old LA Athletic Club bathhouse
movies.stackexchange.com/questions/55958/was-muscle-beach-party-filmed-at-paradise-cove-or-topanga-beach
Muscle Beach Party Movie filmed at Topanga Beach in 1963
Topanga Beach after the bulldozers. As you can see, there were no houses left on the beach side of PCH, but at least some of the community survived on the canyon side.
To its eternal shame, The State obliterated what was left and dispersed the last of the community in 2006.
brasstackspress.blogspot.com/1999/12/
The Snake Pit -
House in same area as the original Spiral Staircase house - prior to demolishment in 1979
(Dates from the 1920's, was originally built by William Randolph Hearst and used by Tom Mix
www.mansonblog.com/2018_05_02_archive.html
Floods of Jan 18-22, 1969
pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1970/0601b/report.pdf
waterandpower.org/museum/Early_Views_of_the_San_Fernando_Valley_10_of_10.html
This is an excerpt from the book Topanga Beach: A History, 1820s-1920s. Author Pablo Capra is a former Lower Topanga resident, and continues to preserve the history of that neighborhood on his website, www.brasstackspress.com, and as a board member of the Topanga Historical Society, www.topangahistoricalsociety.org.
Posted by BRASS TACKS PRESS
LOS ANGELES TIMES 12-19-82
"Shanty Village at Topanga Creek Awaits Doom – Development"
County to Get Landlord's Plans for Homes, Commercial Areas
by Robert W. Stewart
Times Staff Writer
Only a makeshift fence, fashioned from cracked wooden doors and a discarded window, stands between Murf the Surf's ramshackle cottage and the high edge of Topanga Creek.
But for half a century the two-room dwelling that Murf, otherwise known as John Murphy, rents for $240 a month has somehow eluded the winter floods that sweep mud, houses and sometimes people down Topanga Canyon to the sea.
Despite that run of luck, Murphy knows that his rustic creekside home is doomed – not by nature but by the Los Angeles Athletic Club, the landlord that own the ragtag collection of homes, cabins and shacks that for more years than most people can remember has squatted in the delta at the mouth of Topanga Canyon, at the eastern edge of Malibu.
On Tuesday the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors will consider a set of plans that, if approved, will all but guarantee the destruction of what is left of the community at Topanga Creek, a funky, laid-back seaside shanty-town that sprang up after World War I, when flocks of Angelenos first began driving out the coast highway to escape the city for the weekend.
Homes, Shops, Channel
In place of the aging wooden cabins, weathered roadside businesses and the ever-changing creek channel, the plans would substitute sparkling new apartment buildings and condominiums, upscale shops and restaurants and a new multimillion-dollar channel to safely and permanently route Topanga Creek to the ocean.
According to one private estimate, the plans would allow the Athletic Club to construct between 700 and 800 residential dwellings in an area that now holds 80-odd homes, 10 businesses and an aging 24-cabin motor court.
Nearby, on the bluff east of Topanga Canyon Boulevard, north of Sunset Mesa, the Athletic Club has proposed development of a 20-lot housing subdivision, where lot buyers would spend perhaps $1 million to build their homes.
Attorneys for the Athletic Club insist that only the plans for the housing subdivision are definite. Specific development plans for the flood plain, where more than 80 cabins still stand, will come later. But it seems clear that it is only a matter of time before all the old structures are bulldozed and the community at the mouth of Topanga is just a memory.
80 Cottages Torn Down
The last remnants of the other half of the Topanga Creek community, on the beach side of Pacific Coast Highway, were obliterated in January, 1979, when the state of California completed demolition of 80 beach cottages once owned by the Athletic Club. The club sold the cottages and a 1.1-mile strip of Topanga Beach to the state in 1973 for $6 million.
"I think (the area) is going to get wiped out, no question about it," said Murphy, 36, who plays guitar in a band called Blue Juice and spins records for KBU, the Malibu cable radio station, when he's not riding the waves at Topanga Beach.
H. Randall Stoke, an attorney with Latham & Watkins, the law firm that represents the Athletic Club, put it another way: "I'm sure the club isn't looking forward to the perpetuation of that housing."
Understandably so. From its stately headquarters at 431 W. 7th St. in downtown Los Angeles, behind the beige brick, gilt-lettered doors and green and white awning, the Los Angeles Athletic Club manages a nationwide portfolio of top-shelf properties that hold little similarity to the shanties of Topanga.
Those properties include holdings on South Olive and South Figueroa streets in downtown Los Angeles, the Riviera Country Club in Pacific Palisades, the California Yacht Club in Marina del Rey, more than 900 acres in Amador County, more than 1,250 acres near Lake Buena Vista in Kern County and shopping centers in Arizona, Arkansas and New Mexico. That's in addition to the 1,657 acres the club owns in lower Topanga Canyon.
Residents of Topanga Creek said the club pays little attention to them or their dwellings, most of which are all but invisible from Pacific Coast Highway.
Community Marked by Mailboxes
The only clues to the community's existence are two collections of weathered mailboxes.
One set stands just off the coast highway, east of a surfboard shop, at the head of a dirt road known as Topanga Canyon Lane. The lane runs down an incline to a low-lying clearing surrounded by towering vegetation, then stops at the creek. Residents call the locale "the Snake Pit."
The other set of mailboxes is around the corner, on the west side of Topanga Canyon Boulevard, a few hundred feet north of the coast highway. A gravel and dirt road snakes down from the west side of the boulevard to the Rodeo Grounds, a larger residential area up the creek.
To get to the Rodeo Grounds, residents must drive across the creek bed. In bad weather, they leave their cars on the boulevard and walk home on a footbridge over the creek.
The village that nestles along the edges of Topanga Creek is as close to a fantasy as the real world usually gets. It has the feeling of a place where gnomes and trolls and dark-water creatures from another world might find a happy home.
"I call it Ghetto Malibu," said Diane Miller, a 33-year-old massage therapist who rents a modest size house on the Athletic Club property about a hundred yards south of Murphy's cottage on Old Malibu Road.
Road Shored Up After Flood
The road that leads into the Rodeo Grounds was shored up with gravel after the last big flood, in February, 1980, buried a dozen buildings in mud and debris. The water line to the area is now suspended above the road on poles, along with the telephone wires and electrical cables.
Despite those precautions, several cabins still crouch below the level of the roadbed, barely visible, surrounded by thick ferns and overgrown weeds, apparently oblivious to the threat of another flood.
Many of the homes are neatly maintained, but the paint on many others is peelings. Plywood additions and jury-rigged repairs appear to be the rule rather than the exception.
There is a reason for that. According to a half-dozen creek dwellers interviewed by The Times, their leases make it clear that the Athletic Club takes no responsibility for maintaining the houses that it owns.
"In our leases, it says, 'We (the club) are not responsible for items A through Z. You will pay for everything. Don't come to us for any problems, because you are on your own.'" Murphy said. "They're just in it for the money right now, and who can blame them?"
Month-to-Month Leases
Murphy was one of a handful of residents who would allow a reporter to quote them by name. Since all the leases on the club property are renewed on a month-to-month basis, several residents said they feared that their leases would be canceled if their comments angered club officials.
The fear of being thrown out of what is perhaps the cheapest housing in all of the area is also a reason that residents usually don't complain about health problems on their property, several said.
"When we moved into this house, it was a disaster," said one resident, who asked not to be named. "I got staph (infection) from removing the carpets off the floor."
In addition to removing the carpets, that creek dweller recalled repairing holes in the ceilings and the walls and flushing out a family of rodents. The problems didn't end there.
The pipes in the old house were so corroded that the water pumped through them was undrinkable, even though the county waterworks pump station is less than half a mile away.
"All this green junk and stuff comes out," one resident said. So the people who live in that house buy bottled water.
Aging septic systems are another health problem.
Drain Fields Back Up in Winter
"Everyone has a drain field," another resident said. "We're in a delta, and the end result is that in wintertime, when the ground gets saturated, the drain fields start to back up. The pumping guy can come out here and pump out your cesspool and it will fill up again in a week. Basically you just have to learn not to take 16 showers a day, not to flush the toilet 80 times. I mean you're just faced with that."
One woman recalled that following a particularly bad season, she and the man she lived with were forced to build a cesspool. Actually, she said, it was more like a ditch. It was never inspected by county health officials. "Nothing is," she said.
"I would suspect that none of the houses would pass health codes," Murphy said. "This is not a modern community."
The county Department of Health Services inspects single-family dwellings for health code violations only when someone makes a complaint, according to Calvin Z. Miller, a senior public health specialist with the department's rural sanitation section.
Annual inspections are made only of buildings that contain five or more dwelling units. None of the county inspection records are available to the public, Miller said.
Residents said they generally do not complain because they are happy to be left alone, both by the county and by the Athletic Club.
Even the creek dwellers acknowledge that their neighborhood does not have the best of reputations.
"I think that the Malibu people would like to see this place go," said the woman who will not drink her tap water. "They think it's (full of) degenerates and druggies, that it's an eyesore, that what this area represents is really a negative part of Malibu."
The community does have its darker side. Local legend, undocumented but officially undisputed, holds that Charles Manson and his band of followers briefly made the canyon bottom home during the spring of 1968, before the group moved the Spahn Movie Ranch in Chatsworth, at the northern end of Topanga Canyon Boulevard.
There is no doubt, however, that on the morning of August 10, 1969, just a few hours after participating in the murders of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles, Manson followers Linda Kasabian, Susan Atkins and Steve Grogan made their way to a shack on the Athletic Club property. They stopped to visit a friend of Susan Atkins, stayed perhaps an hour, smoked pot, then hitchhiked back to the Spahn Ranch. The incident was recounted in detail at the Manson murder trial.
"Because of its openness, it (the area) still seems to attract all the lost souls," Murphy said. "I don't known why it is, but they just seem to get off the bus at Topanga…. You see just about everything out here. It's a real slice of life."
Spirit of Community and Camaraderie
At the same time, Murphy said, there is a spirit of community and camaraderie in the neighborhood that is unequalled in more well-heeled districts.
"Not that many people come and go," he said. "A lot of people have been here for a long time. I have rich parents and I was born and raised in a rich community and I found it very cold. Here I get up and I walk to the store in the morning and the store's 200 yards away. And in the 200-yard walk there and back I must say hello to 20 people. It's a beautiful thing."
Blanche Gaskins and her husband Charles have lived in the Topanga Beach Motel since 1965 and managed it since 1974. Now they own the business. Like everyone else, they lease the buildings and the property they stand on from the Athletic Club.
"A lot of people think this is a bad neighborhood. But it isn't," the 67-year-old Gaskins said in a Midwestern accent acquired years ago in Dodge City, Kansas.
"The guys that run around, they have long hair, long wild hair. Most of the people around here, a lot of them are surfers. A lot of them don't work a lot. But most of them, they’re not bad people. They're just casual. They just don't like to work too hard."
Topanga Creek for more than 50 years has been a jumping-off place for people tired of working too hard. Originally part of a vast land grant, Rancho Boca de Santa Monica, that bordered the eastern edge of Frederick H. Rindge's Rancho Topanga Malibu Sequit, Topanga Creek by 1925 had become a weekend resort on the still-uncompleted coast highway to Oxnard.
A promotional booklet published that year by the company operating the Topanga and Las Flores Canyon stage coaches proclaimed, "Swimming is the leading diversion of Topanga Beach, though dancing claims its share of the popularity."
Topanga Beach Tent City and Bungalows, near the site of the present-day motel, advertised a dance floor for guests less than 100 feet from the ocean.
Nearby were a service station that sold Red Crown and Union gasoline "at city prices" and Marmont Studio, where tourists could buy original paintings as souvenirs of their visit to the canyon.
By that time the Los Angeles Athletic Club was already 45 years old. The club was founded in 1880 and reorganized in 1905 by Frank A. Garbutt, one of the founders of both Paramount Pictures and Union Oil Co..
A Guarantee of Financial Health
Garbutt, according to articles he later published in The Times, believed that real estate investments were one of the surest ways to guarantee the Athletic Club's continuing financial health.
In 1924 and 1925, as part of its acquisition program, the club bought a four-ninths interest in nearly 1,7000 acres in lower Topanga Canyon. The remaining interest reportedly was held by corporations under the control of William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper magnate. According to Athletic Club records, the acquisition was negotiated by Harry Chandler, publisher of The Times and a member of the club's board of directors.
The club acquired Hearst's remaining interest in the property in 1943.
During the late 1920s and 1930s the managers of the Topanga property, who answered to Hearst, began leasing out for periods of 90 days tents and cabin sites along the beach an in the delta.
Soon visitors began to build more permanent structures on the land they had leased. Cottages and cabins began to sprout. The cabins were used on weekends by harried city dwellers who longed for a day or two near the coast and the mountains.
In the years after World War II, as the housing shortage in Los Angeles County became critical, more and more leaseholders began using their cabins and cottages as permanent residences, according to the old-timers in the community. Other leaseholders in turn rented out their cabins to others, sometimes making a hefty profit.
In 1956 the Athletic Club sold a large section of land at the southeast corner of its Topanga property to a private developer, who built what became the Sunset Mesa housing development. About the same time, the club began converting its 90-day site leases into long-term leases, some for periods of up to 17 years.
By 1963 the Athletic Club was making plans to develop the rest of its Topanga holdings, according to its attorneys. A year later the state Senate passed a resolution asking the state Department of Parks and Recreation to study the possible acquisition of Topanga Beach as a state park. Club officials abandoned their development plans while they waited to see what would happen. The wait lasted 16 years.
After years of negotiation the state finally acquired about 30 acres of the club's beach property in 1973. That same year the last of the long-term leases expired, and the club took over ownership of all the cabins and cottages on the land that had not been turned over to the state.
The state began condemnation proceedings on almost all of the rest of the Topanga property in 1979, but gave up the effort a year later, apparently after running out of money for park acquisitions.
That's when the Athletic Club dusted off its development plans.
State's On-Again, Off-Again Efforts
A senior Athletic Club official, who agreed to speak with The Times only on condition that he not be quoted by name, said that the present condition of the property along the creek is the direct result of the state's on-again, off-again attempts to acquire the Athletic Club holdings.
"They did nothing but back us further and further in the corner," the official said. "If they hadn't started all this threat of condemnation back in the mid-'60s, we would have gone down there and developed the area into a modern commercial property."
The low rents charged by the club were based on the clear understanding that residents would perform their own maintenance, the official said. In recent years, county rent control regulations have prevent the club from raising the rents to levels that would allow major renovations, he added.
The club does spend thousands of dollars a year on brush clearance to protect the area from fire. "That's quite a burden," the official said.
Although the houses on the club property may not be to everyone's taste, they do provide housing near the Malibu beach for people of modest means, he added.
After several years of study, the Athletic Club in 1981 proposed construction of four residential developments on mesas in the four corners of its remaining property. None of those developments showed up on the interim plan for Malibu and the Santa Monica Mountains that was approved by the Board of Supervisors a year ago.
Proposed amendments to that plan, which are to be considered by the supervisors Tuesday, would allow the club to develop 30 one-house lots on about 60 acres, 40 of which are located directly north of the Sunset Mesa project.
According to county planners, that housing development would require moving perhaps 1 million cubic yards of earth and construction of a road up from Topanga Canyon Boulevard at a grade of about 20 degrees.
Development of the property north of Sunset Mesa is strongly opposed by residents of that development, who contend that it would create a stream of traffic from Topanga Canyon Boulevard through their neighborhood to Pacific Coast Highway.
Stoke, the Athletic Club attorney, dismissed that argument. Streets in the new development would be private, he said, and access through Sunset Mesa would be for emergencies only.
Plan Calls for 'Urban Center'
Less certain are development plans for the creek bed. A separate planning document that the supervisors will also consider Tuesday, the Malibu Local Coastal Program, calls for creation of an "urban center" at the mouth of Topanga Canyon.
About 10 acres at the mouth of the canyon, the plan says, are designated for commercial uses. "Hotels, motels, restaurants and other convenience commercial (facilities) could be located here to serve the visitors to the recently expanded Topanga State Beach."
Land adjacent to the commercial area is set aside for residential construction, with densities of up to 30 dwellings per acre.
Despite that, Stoke said Athletic Club officials have yet to decide exactly how to develop the creek mouth. Whatever they do will require construction of a flood control channel, at a cost of several million dollars, and filling in the low-lying areas that are now homes to some 150 creek dwellers.
That fill could come from the top of the 20-acre parcel on the west side of the property that the supervisors will be asked to designate for residential development, Stoke said.
Once the club has completed all its development plans, Stoke said, it may be willing to donate some of its property to the state for public use.
Aneta Dixon moved to the Topanga Beach Motel in 1951, when she was 34 years old. She has lived there ever since. Near the hulk of her 1946 Hudson, parked next to her cabin, she has cultivated a garden of bromeliads, begonias, palms, ferns and roses. She won't say how many animals share her tiny living space.
"I don't know how long the Athletic Club has owned this property," she said with a smile. "But I think they've had it damn near forever. Of course, I'd be in a terrible position if I have to move. I can't afford to buy a house. I'm 65 years old. In a way, it really makes you wonder."
Diane Miller is less troubled by the prospect of development.
"I feel that that kind of thing is inevitable with all the building that is going on," she said. "Hopefully, when they decide to do it I'll be on my way to another place, another life. I don't have any control over it. If it happens, it happens. You have to let go of things in life."
www.mansonblog.com/2011/05/more-on-spiral-staircase.html
www.mansonblog.com/2011/01/spiral-staircase-snake-pit.html
Former sites of Rodeo Grounds Spiral Staircase / Snake Pit
today
Posted by Matt at 7:30:00 PM
Labels: Manson Family Locations, The Snake Pit, The Spiral Staircase
8 comments:
Panamint Patty said...
Thank you Ken - I have not seen any good photos of the old Spiral Stairace site in my internet travels. Is that the foundation that is still visible through the weeds? I remember reading somewhere that a creek ran through the bottom half of the house. Hard to tell from the photos if there's still water.
January 23, 2011 at 10:37 PM
beauders said...
if anyone out there has any interesting tidbits of information about the spiral staircase house please let it be known. i have a feeling-no proof-that Jay Sebring may have met manson and atkins at this place. plus it is just plain interesting but there is not a lot of information out there. thanks.
January 24, 2011 at 5:05 AM
Ken619 said...
Patty - Those are stone retaining walls. There is a creek that runs through the lower Topanga area. It floods when the rains are heavy. This would explain why the house had slipped of it's foundation. It is said that the first floor was full of sand and it was the second story that was occupied.
beauders - I've spent a lot of time trying to find info on The Spiral Staircase. There isn't a whole lot. I have learned that some of the stuff that has been written on the Manson websites is false. There is stuff that has been written by people that lived in the lower Topanga area and right across the across the highway at Topanga Beach. One of these guys wrote that he lived there when he was four, across the street from the Manson Family.
In the early 1900's someone in the Hearst family (Hearst Castle) liked the area and built a two-story getaway home there. I believe this home may of been what became The Spiral Staircase. This Hearst person would have rodeos there. All the early Hollywood cowboys would come, Tom Mix and so on. This helped give the area it's first nickname which was "The Rodeo Grounds".
Topanga Beach is directly across the street from this area. At some point in time there were houses, bungalows and huts built right on the Topanga Beach. This could of been in the 40's and 50's. I'm sure some surfer huts were built later than this. They filmed surfer movies there in the early 60's like "Muscle Beach Party". Topanga Beach had became a pretty wild party beach in the later 60's. If the people that lived on the beach at this period actually owned the homes on the beach or were just squatting, I don't know. There were drifters, squatters, moochers, surfers, hippies, slippies, etc,etc...I'm sure this overflowed across the street into what had now become known as "The Snake Pit". The homes were torn down in the eighties.
I've read on some of the Manson websites that the house was called "The Snake Pit" prior to being called "The Spiral Staircase", this is false. The area that was known as "The Rodeo Grounds" is what became called "The Snake Pit". This was do to the fact that there were Rattle Snakes all over the place. I know that it is said that the name came from the type of people that lived there, but I don't think so. I read things that have been written by these guys that lived there and it seems they are trying to hold on to some kind of glory through it by applying it to themselves. The "legend in their own mind" kinda people. There is more to write but it's 1:30 am and I have to get up in 4 hrs.
I've got more pics of the Topanga area to send to Lovely Liz still. I'm going back up there this weekend and I'll have more next week. I'll also be getting good pics of the house where Zero killed himself in Venice.
January 26, 2011 at 4:24 AM
Panamint Patty said...
A Hearst connection! Wow. Thank you, Ken.
January 26, 2011 at 11:37 AM
beauders said...
thanks for the information ken
January 29, 2011 at 4:03 AM
ZamorasBD said...
thank you for these. ..on my way down there on the 14th. i also wanted to see the ardmore temple. found old pics on a bikers site irish rich..and pics of the condo there now. now i know what is left of the staircase house.
April 10, 2011 at 10:41 PM
eviliz said...
ZamorasBD- you are welcome.
April 11, 2011 at 1:19 PM
Unknown said...
I lived next door to this location in the early '70's Manson and his looney family terrorized
everyone who lived there. They were finally evicted by the sheriff's department after not paying rent for over a year.
They came back a month later and burned the house to the ground. They were all total scumbags who didn't belong in such a peaceful neighborhood.
