Harbor & breakwater

Start at the water, with the masts clinking behind you and the breakwater curving out into the surf. This is the Santa Barbara Harbor, and it's the perfect place to begin — because it's the *newest* thing on this whole waterfront, and from here we're going to walk backwards in time.

Here's the story this harbor tells. In the nineteen-twenties, a very rich man — Max Fleischmann, the yeast heir — offered the town a small fortune, around two hundred thousand dollars, if the city would match it, to build a breakwater. The town said yes. The breakwater was finished in nineteen twenty-eight, its shore arm two years later, in nineteen thirty. And why did Fleischmann want it? Because he had a two-hundred-foot yacht, the Haida, and he wanted somewhere safe to keep it. A harbor built, more or less, around one man's boat.

But the ocean had an opinion. Sand drifts along this coast from west to east, and a breakwater sitting in its path acts like a dam — the sand piles up, the harbor mouth silts closed. So ever since, dredges have worked here almost without stopping, pumping the sand back out. The cheque bought the harbor; the town has been paying to keep it open ever since. Money bought this place, and money keeps buying it.

Around you it's still a working harbor — urchin and lobster boats go out from here — and that building is the Maritime Museum, opened in two thousand inside an old wartime Naval Reserve hall.

When you're ready, walk out along the breakwater if you like, then head east along the beachfront path — toward a grand hotel that isn't there anymore.