The iron fence has been redone since the last time I was here, when my partner and I squeezed between bars that had been bent back by someone’s heavy equipment. San Pedro councilmembers and the Department of Parks and Recreation are always finding ways to keep people out of Sunken City; San Pedrans are always finding ways to get everyone back in.
Whichever local Robin Hood of the smithies made the original opening, they have not yet returned with their band of merry tools to disable a few bars in the new fence and avenge us poor wayfarers against the authorities. Normally, I’d have no problem going right to the edge of the new fence and swinging myself around it, but this is my first time crossing over with my stepdaughter, who happens to be 6.
I don’t remember Sunken City being dangerous during all my other explorations — there are many such activities, begun when one is a teenager without the same sense of consequence, and repeated until inured to said consequence. But there’s nothing like being responsible for a kid to entirely shift your perspective on danger.
The fence between Sunken City and tidy, manicured Point Fermin Park extends to the end of a somewhat dramatic cliff, 100 feet above the crashing surf below. I go first, plant my feet, and hold the fence while gripping my stepdaughter’s arm with the force of a kraken; my partner holds her from the back; my stepdaughter rolls her eyes at our abundance of caution—in another few months she’s going to be 7, after all.
The point is not to take this 6, almost 7-year-old trespassing for the thrill alone, or for the view. The real treat is to walk among ruins, a rare opportunity in California, a land of constant development. Sunken City is a neighborhood that fell into the ocean over a couple of decades, starting in 1929. A hotel was demolished, and the bungalows that could be saved were moved to other plots of land. Left behind were cracked foundations and a collapsed road, split and slumped and suspended along various precarious perches above the tidepools.
There are really two parts to Sunken City: the upper flat perch, about the size of a Pop Warner football field, that gives a sense of what the whole area used to be like, and is of minimal interest to anyone; and then the sunken and interesting part, the folds of 40,000 square feet of crumbled land and debris that is also about the size of a Pop Warner football field, only shaped more like the grandstands than a field. On a good day at Sunken City, the game to watch would be the dolphins riding the surf or the seals scooting over the rocks, or in spring, if you’re lucky, you might catch the gray whale migration back up the coast.
Despite the (technical) danger in a region of constant land movement, a small contingent of writers and explorers on YouTube wax poetic about Sunken City’s evocations of a local Atlantis. But for me, walking among the ruins shrugging toward the Pacific, concrete and rocks painted over with murals, means claiming an otherwise unclaimable portion of land. The cliffside plot was supposed to be private, but nature had other plans.
Sunken City has become the place to assert something primal in Californians, in Angelenos, in San Pedrans. In the face of destruction, natural and political, all the chaos of millennia and plate tectonics, being in these folds of earth marked up by art is our own thumbtack in history, our own declaration that even the smallest of us can be part of this bigger story.
I have a need to share the magic of this space with my stepdaughter; I want to give her things of mine. I was born and raised in San Pedro, and learning my town was home to a place called Sunken City might as well have been proof myths and fairy tales were real. For years, I could only glimpse it from the park on the other side of the fence, or from the road. Whenever I brought up wanting to go to my parents, the journey was dismissed as too unsafe (my mom), not worth the effort since nothing was there anymore (also my mom, who doesn’t like heights or hiking), and unnecessary (my dad) since he and I could take our paddleboards out from Cabrillo Beach and get a “better view” of Sunken City from the water (not the point). Sunken City meant treasure and mystery throughout my childhood.
When I finally visited with friends in high school, sandwiches from the local corner market in our backpacks, I knew I wouldn’t find real treasure among the ruins. Instead, I learned that the treasure was having a space that required exploration, that didn’t care what kind of day you were having, what flavor of angst and misery. A place that might be a little dangerous, but you could still navigate if you were sure-footed. For a teenager, that’s the magic. For an adult, it’s a reminder of the magic we used to believe in.
My stepdaughter is my only kid, the one I’d pick out of a lineup of every possible kid to have, and since I can’t give her any of my genetics (not necessarily a bad thing), I want to pour into her whatever I can that I think would be of use. I want my geography to be her geography. I want her to find the same magic we felt.
The precariousness of the spot and the dangers of landslide, I will admit, are part of that magic. About six and a half miles north of Sunken City, Lloyd Wright’s beloved landmark, the Wayfarers Chapel, opened in 1951 and dismantled in summer 2024, is only the latest of the ruins on the Southern California coast’s ancient history of landslides. The nearby neighborhood is facing gas and power shut-offs and evacuations from homes which may themselves become future ruins. In November 2011, over 400 feet of Paseo del Mar—the main road along the coast in San Pedro, which passes Sunken City — fell into the ocean in the White Point Landslide.
These landslides work in conjunction with the Palos Verdes Fault Zone, which looks like a series of chicken scratches shredding the crust from Santa Monica down through the Los Angeles Harbor and into the Catalina Channel, ending offshore near Dana Point. It’s a timebomb we live with, and I’d take it over tornadoes and hurricanes any day.
I explain geology, plate tectonics, landslides, and earthquake safety to my stepdaughter, we talk about Pangaea, and she can see it in play all around her. She marvels at the graffiti art, the murals and slogans and wishes and warnings left behind by generations of adventurers. She asks questions about the homes that are now nothing but foundations. (How many fell into the ocean? Two. What happened to the other houses? They were moved someplace else.)
Standing on this loose rock that belched up from the center of the earth and is on its way back also means wondering what all that history really means when it can be changed both by geological forces and human artistry. It’s no longer the Peck bungalows or the Ocean View Inn, it’s the sum total of all our imaginings, our dreams and wishes, the anger and despair written on the slabs and even the trees, the feeling that there are still pockets of mystery in a world that is otherwise known, where information is broadcast into our handheld computers and beamed into our psyches.
My stepdaughter turns to me, puts her head on my arm. “I like this place,” she says. “I want to come back.”
Sunken City belongs to everyone who claims it. And now, it belongs to my stepdaughter.
Jennifer Carr is a born and raised San Pedran who writes about life in the Los Angeles Harbor town, most recently in the anthology Writing the Golden State: The New Literary Terrain of California. She teaches creative writing at Chapman University. This was written for Zócalo Public Square, an ASU Media Enterprise publication.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Opinion: Finding Meaning in the Ruins of a Los Angeles Neighborhood That Fell into the Sea )
Also on site :