Palos Verdes: Eight Thousand Years and an Olmsted Plan

The Tongva people lived on this clifftop peninsula for thousands of years before the Spanish mission system dismantled their communities in the late seventeen hundreds. The Bixby ranching family ran cattle across the peninsula through the eighteen hundreds. In nineteen thirteen, New York financier Frank Vanderlip bought the whole headland and commissioned the Olmsted Brothers to design a residential community worthy of the setting.

Frederick Law Olmsted Junior and Charles Cheney spent years on the plan, setting aside roughly half the land for common use, including roads and parks, following the contours of the ocean cliffs with gently winding roads. Palos Verdes Estates incorporated in nineteen thirty-nine, the finished product of one of the most ambitious landscape-architecture commissions in American history. The peninsula that Tongva fishermen had worked for thousands of years had become, with meticulous care, a suburb.