It is one abandoned street after another, carving up what is now called the “LAX Dunes Preserve.” There are no homes, no cars, no signs of life, though the occasional lamppost and fire hydrant or driveway survives here and there among the scrub brush and butterflies and cliff buckwheat that have reclaimed the dunes. The entire area has been fenced off due to security concerns at LAX after 9/11. In a city and region desperate for housing and in love with its world-famous beaches, why are these 300 acres vacant? And what was there before?

The story of Surfridge, the doomed residential community that occupied the land in previous generations, is a colorful and curious tale — and one with several connections to the founding and history of LMU.

From Bean Fields to Boomtown

Though Los Angeles’ population boom began in the 1880s, most of what is now the “South Bay” was undeveloped until the 1920s and later. The Pacific Electric Railway Company (the “Red Cars” of lore) had trolley lines running down from the Westside of Los Angeles along the coast all the way down to Hermosa Beach (some of the tracks cutting across the Ballona Wetlands from Culver City to Playa Del Rey still exist), with a stop at the base of the Del Rey bluffs where Culver Boulevard hits Vista del Mar today, but most of the area south and east of it was occupied by ranches, bean fields, and hog farms.

Coastal areas like much of present-day Playa Del Rey were marked on maps as “sand dunes — impassible.” The major thoroughfares that would eventually bring automobile traffic to the area, including Jefferson Boulevard, Culver Boulevard, Manchester Avenue and Century Boulevard — were still unpaved.

Los Angeles’ astronomical growth — the city went from just over 11,000 residents in 1880 to over a million in 40 years — was accompanied by rampant real estate speculation, with its attendant booms and busts. By 1920, real estate speculators were a significant driver of the region’s economy, and the prized jewel was the real estate for which Southern California has long been famous: its beaches.

Among the many companies rushing to Los Angeles to join in the craze was a Minneapolis-based concern, Dickinson & Gillespie. Its star salesman in 1921 was a 22-year-old dynamo by the name of Fritz B. Burns, and it was soon selling plots in subdivisions all over the Los Angeles area, including Glendale, Burbank, Pasadena, Alhambra, Huntington Park, and Hollywood. Every new subdivision had a name more fanciful than the last, with “Orange Blossom Manor,” “Poppyfields” and “Hollywood Laurelgrove” among the most colorful.

Burns would later become a pioneer in mass-produced suburban housing. In fact, if you went to LMU, you likely know what a Burns house looks like, as a significant part of the housing stock of Westchester and Playa Del Rey began as two- and three-bedroom Burns homes in the 1940s and 1950s (originally for war workers, later for returning veterans). Like similar Burns projects in Westside Village, Burbank, Panorama City, and Toluca Lake, his Westchester and Playa Del Rey developments sold completed homes, ready to occupy at sale.

The housing market in the 1920s in Los Angeles was a different creature altogether: Buyers purchased the lot only. Many real estate companies provided nothing more than streets and promised connections to utilities. Landowners then contracted with small private builders to build the actual homes, with many buyers simply snapping up parcels and building nothing, counting on the ever-spiraling real estate market to produce a handsome return on their investment.

Palisades Del Rey and Surfridge

Dickinson & Gillespie moved their entire real estate operation to Los Angeles in 1924, setting up their headquarters at the end of Culver Boulevard. (The building is still there; Tanner’s Coffee occupies its ground floor.) They snapped up several miles worth of land parcels along the coast south of their headquarters and began advertising sales in “Palisades Del Rey,” what Dickinson & Gillespie promotional materials called “The Last of the Beaches.” Another brochure trumpeted that “A City Is Being Built Where A City Belongs!”

They built a small resort on the sand near the office, the “Del Rey Beach Club.” Burns himself built a home on one of the highest points in Palisades Del Rey, featuring a 1,000-square-feet ballroom and 270-degree views of the California coastline. It’s still there today, at 200 Waterview Street.

In 1925, the company held a contest to name the southern extension of the development: A prize of $1,000 was awarded to the local who submitted the winning name: “Surfridge.” Promotions to draw prospective buyers to Palisades Del Rey and Surfridge ranged from the quixotic to the fantastical, including the promise of a free ride in a Dickinson & Gillespie airplane that Burns had purchased from the U.S. Army Air Force. Burns had his sales force of 100-plus men doing calisthenics on the beach every morning; treasure hunts were held on the sand; Dickinson & Gillespie even offered to pick up Angelenos and drive them all the way out to Palisades Del Rey, free of charge. Promotional materials claimed that residents included “Hopalong” Cassidy, Douglas Fairbanks, Louis B. Mayer, and other celebrities and movie moguls.

Burns and his partners also offered far more substantial improvements to the land than were standard at the time; oftentimes developers would do little more than install primitive gravel roads and spray them with oil. At Surfridge, buyers were promised sewers, curbs, sidewalks, gas lines, and more. Buyers were also offered discounts if they actually built homes on their property instead of holding them as speculative investments.

Burns and fellow Los Angeles developer Harry Culver (yes, the city is named after him) also donated two 99-acre parcels of land east and west of Lincoln Boulevard for two universities, one Catholic and one Lutheran. The Society of Jesus, which already ran Loyola University in mid-city Los Angeles, became proprietors of what was imagined to be a Gothic-style campus and moved their operations to what was then a very, very empty “Del Rey.” The 1928 groundbreaking included Fritz Burns riding about on a horse amid some of Los Angeles’ most noted dignitaries and business moguls.

Burns would serve for many years as a trustee and benefactor of LMU and Loyola Law School, and buildings on both campuses bear his name. He died in 1979. One of Loyola University’s students at its Westchester campus in the 1930s, William H. Hannon, would later become one of Burns’ top colleagues and a major benefactor to LMU in his own right: The LMU library, which opened in 2009, is named in his honor.

In other words, for Burns and his colleagues, the words of one of his promotional brochures really did seem to be coming true: “The Eyes of the World Are Turning Toward Del Rey.”

A year later, it all came crashing down. Amid the financial chaos of the Great Depression, almost all the owners in Surfridge and Palisades del Rey defaulted on their mortgages. Burns himself faced destitution and was forced to give up his mansion. Not until wildcat drillers discovered oil on his property in the Del Rey Hills in 1934 was Burns able to start to rebuild his fortune.

The Golden Years

For a number of years during and after the Great Depression, Surfridge remained sparsely populated, with 1920s mansions dotted among empty lots. But the enormous military and industrial buildup during and after World War II — and the advent of the modern aerospace industry — brought with them new prosperity to the region.

On the winding road up the cliff, a billboard advertises the “Palisades del Rey” dream of a house by the beach. In 1921 the Minneapolis-based firm of Dickinson & Gillespie billed this stretch of coastline as “The Last of the Beaches.”

In 1928, the city of Los Angeles had leased a dirt runway inland from Surfridge, Mines Field, for a new airport. The facility was not popular at first — the fledgling air carriers at the time preferred established airports north of Los Angeles in Burbank and Glendale — but there was room to grow. During World War II, the U.S. military began stationing fighter planes at the field and built gun batteries in Surfridge to protect against any Japanese incursion; the airport began to play a larger role in the region’s economic fortunes.

After the war, returning veterans qualifying for federally guaranteed mortgages under the G.I. Bill as well as workers in the many defense plants around the airport accounted for some of the newcomers to Surfridge, which soon grew to 800 homes and a population of over 10,000. During the 1960s, the Jesuit community at LMU owned a house on Gillis Street. The neighborhood took on more of a suburban feel than the “Hollywood by the Sea” resort that Fritz Burns had sold original buyers on in the 1920s.

A 1955 Thunderbird convertible cruises down a Surfridge street with homes that were later demolished.

The Pacific Red Cars stopped running to the beach cities in the 1940s and were gone completely by 1961, and the car was king in Los Angeles. But Surfridge was a small, walkable community with easy access to Gillis Beach and Toes Beach (both technically part of Dockweiler State Beach today); in historical accounts, former residents speak of a closely-knit community and a thriving surfing and beach volleyball culture, including the Gillis Volleyball Tournament, which started in 1971 and continues on Toes Beach to this day.

The Airport—and the End

Residents of Surfridge certainly had to contend with airplane noise from the nearby airport in the 1950s and 1960s, but it was a minor annoyance compared to what was to come. Development of Mines Field was halting and slow until the Second World War. Four years after the war’s conclusion, the airport was renamed Los Angeles International Airport, and the hub began to expand in earnest.

In the 1970s, LAX swallowed up huge swaths of Westchester through eminent-domain condemnations of many streets dotted with suburban housing north and east of the runways; the community lost 3,500 homes, almost a third of its housing stock. The arrival in 1993 of Westchester Parkway, a six-lane road connecting Pershing Drive to Sepulveda Boulevard, created a further buffer between the airport and its northern neighbors.

For the residents of Surfridge, the beginning of the end came in 1959, when American Airlines began flying Boeing’s first jetliner, the 707, on the Los Angeles to New York route. The plane was vastly louder than the prop planes or small jets that had previously made up most of the airport’s traffic and required a westerly takeoff that took departing flights directly over Surfridge. “If you lived in Surfridge prior to the late 1950s, you had to raise your voice a bit when having a conversation,” local historian Duke Dukesherer told the Los Angeles Times in 1993. “After the jets came, you had to literally stop talking when they took off.”

Fritz Burns’ home, known as “Waterview,” is at 200 Waterloo St. (later named Waterview St.) in Playa del Rey.

Eleven years later, an even larger and noisier jumbo jet began roaring over the development: the Boeing 747. Four years earlier, two thirds of Surfridge’s homeowners had voted to be bought out by the airport authority, a process that took a decade and cost an estimated $60 million, with the federal government paying the lion’s share of the costs. One of the first homes to go was a huge Moroccan-style mansion dating back to the days of Dickinson & Gillespie and known to locals as “The Castle.” Between l965 and l975, more than 800 homes were condemned and demolished in Surfridge.

Surfridge Today

For many years after the last house in Surfridge was torn down, the area remained more or less accessible to visitors. As recently as 1999, it was still possible to roam around in Surfridge. Sandpiper Street, connecting Pershing Boulevard and Vista del Mar, was still open to traffic. It was a great spot to watch a sunset (and long rumored to be a haunt of the proprietors of somewhat seedier hobbies), but even better for planespotting; on foggy nights, many flights would circle around and land at LAX from the westward side, so you could experience 747s bursting out of the mist with a terrific roar, seemingly mere feet overhead.

Volunteer groups occasionally gain access to the old neighborhood for eradication efforts aimed at combatting the incursion of invasive species of plants and animals, and over the years some of the streets have been removed or broken up. Time and nature itself, via erosion and the slow growth of vegetation, are also slowly eliminating the traces of human habitation in this “Last of the Beaches.”

James T. Keane ’96, a frequent contributor to LMU Magazine, is the literary editor of America magazine and the author of “Reading Culture Through Catholic Eyes: 50 Writers, Thinkers & Firebrands Who Challenge & Change Us.” His essay on exorcism (“Hunting Demons”) appeared in the winter 2023 issue of LMU Magazine.