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Unexpected, delightful La Jolla - tourism in California

Sunset, Sept, 2000 by Peter Jensen

Step beyond the shopping temptations to find a beachside resort town still full of beauty, serenity and surprise

It's very peculiar today," says underwater photographer Judith Garfield as she digs her toes into hard-packed sand near La Jolla's famous Marine Room restaurant and squints at the heaving blue sea. "You rarely see waves breaking this big at this time of year."

I watch a suffer catch a right-breaking curl over the very spot where Garfield and I are scheduled to do a little snorkeling this morning. We opt for coffee instead.

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On a normal day, the shallow, placid waters off the south end of La Jolla Shores beach offer snorkelers a good chance to see shy leopard sharks in 5- to 10-foot waters over a sandy bottom. Last year a local news helicopter crew happened to spot dozens of 2- to 5-foot shadowy sharks cruising the clear waters about 30 yards from the restaurant. The startling news of a shark "invasion" broke at 5.

Divers, of course, have known since the 1940s about the harmless, beautifully mottled sharks that can be seen year-round here, but the media hoopla only added to the mystique of above- and below-water La Jolla.

In this "town with the funny name," as La Jolla resident Max Miller called his 1948 memoir, secrets and amusing little delights crop up in unexpected ways--if you know where to look.

Sometimes, that's harder than it sounds. Set beside a glorious bay and the point that shelters it, La Jolla is 11 miles north of downtown San Diego. The area is so well known for its pricey shops, pricier dining, and priceless (judging by how hard they are to find) parking spaces that most Southern Californians assume it's a resort town. Actually, La Jolla is a San Diego neighborhood, and while your first impression as you drive down Prospect Street is of a glitzy mall, La Jolla is also a genuine, functioning neighborhood with longtime residents, beautiful beaches, and plenty to do besides shop.

One local institution is the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, where I meet director Hugh Davies for a tour. Redesigned in 1996 by Robert Venturi, the museum stretches along Prospect Street in a series of white arches and courtyards. Inside, Davies shows me numerous Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera works housed in galleries overlooking pounding surf, then he guides me through a lushly landscaped sculpture garden (often overlooked because of its secluded location but worth seeking out).

"We want the museum to be a blend of both Latin American and U.S. cultures, just as this garden is a blend of art and botany," says Davies, who has broadened the cultural focus of the institution in recent years.

On the way to lunch at Brockton Villa, a historic bungalow turned restaurant, we stroll northward along Coast Boulevard's cliff-edge sidewalk. Passing the children's pool, actually a cove and tiny beach enclosed with a breakwater in 1931 to be a place where children can swim safely, we find it also being used by a few dozen basking, belching harbor seals.

Promenading along the neighborhood's coastline parks and beaches has been La Jolla's most popular activity since the early 1900s. Sidewalk improvements in the past year, including new sitting areas and walls topped with seashells, have made it all the more pleasant. At lunch overlooking La Jolla Cove, Davies calls the town "an idyllic satellite with easy access to both San Diego and Los Angeles." One key to its vitality is the University of California at San Diego, he says. "It raises the intellectual tenor of all that goes on here."

Over several days, a visitor can explore La Jolla's cultural and scientific landscape by attending a play at La Jolla Playhouse, touring the architecture of Louis Kahn's famous Salk Institute for Biological Studies, viewing UCSD's Stuart Collection of outdoor sculpture throughout the campus, studying sea life at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography's aquarium, and more.

Most of all, however, the ocean calls: after all the shopping and dining along well-known streets such as Prospect, Girard, Fay, and Pearl; after all the gallery-hopping; even after a dip in La Valencia Hotel's pool, which glimmers beneath a pink tower. Swimming at La Jolla Cove remains one of the finest snorkeling experiences in the West--an underwater preserve of emerald grasses, skulking moray eels, and brilliant orange Garibaldi fish. Over at La Jolla Shores, the swimming is fine but quite different: The beach is long and wide, the waves well-suited for bodysurfing around Scripps Pier.

A few days after my failed snorkel attempt with Garfield, I return alone to the beach in front of the Marine Room, reaching the sea via a narrow alley at the building's south side. Like those at La Jolla Cove, these waters are rich in marine life. Another wellknown San Diego diver-photographer, Richard Herrmann, once called this "the best place in San Diego to introduce a child to sea life. You can stand in waist-deep water and just look."

I fin out into the undulant, pellucid sea to "just look." Within minutes I see them: several spotted sharks gliding amid shafts of sunlight, familiar in their frightening shape, but obviously gentle and shy.

Unexpected, delightful La Jolla - tourism in California

Sunset, Sept, 2000 by Peter Jensen

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