Palos Verdes Estates

This map took me longer than I care to mention to put together. It's of the Palos Verdes Peninsula, in the 60s I believe, when there were only two cities incorporated on the hill; Palos Verdes Estates and Rolling Hills. The map was provided to my grandmother back in the day by the PV Estates Chamber of Commerce, and there are still to this day some cool shops where that star is. 

PV Estates was incorporated back in 1930, a completely planned community designed to invoke ranch life within driving distance of downtown Los Angeles. You can see ALT. 101 at the top right of the map, that's what PCH used be called, now it's Highway 1. That top right is where you go down off the hill to Lomita and Torrance. 

Back in the day, PV was serviced by the Rolling Hills telephone exchange, which used the call FRontier 7, which I think is pretty cool. FRontier 1-7 covers much of what Redondo and Hermosa Beach can touch. If you live by the beach on that South Bay curve and your house has a 37x number, you have one of the original phone numbers. 

St. John Fisher, the catholic church up there, 377. The catholic churches are a good landmark because there's one in every city down in LA, and they're old, and they don't change a lot.  

Anyhow, back to the map, there's a lot of cool little details. You got Marineland down on Portuguese Bend, Marineland was the first aquarium to ever capture a Pacific Orca. That Orca died two days in captivity, but Marineland's best success was Corky. She was able to give birth to the first Orca calf born in captivity. Corky was later moved to SeaWorld after the park bought Marineland and now performers under the stage name....oh what is it? Oh yeah, SHAMU.

All the streets in PV Estates are Via something, the planers works hard to give it that little Spanish village feel that the lawyers go crazy for. you can see that it's largely undeveloped. That's another one of the features of PV. Even today, there are horse tracks next to most of the roads, hardly any streetlights, and many residents keeps horses, goats, chickens, and all sorts of wildlife on their property.