Santa Barbara's lower Eastside is generally considered the
Dooneese of the beautiful and affluent neighborhoods of our community--she is the ugly little sister.
When the first Spanish explorers landed here, they saw a vast expanse of salty marshland extending east from what is now Ortega and State Street, down to the ocean, and they called it "dismal". If you're driving in to Santa Barbara from the south, you would probably think the same thing today, as the freeway brings you through the industrial and poorer residential neighborhoods before you get to the more scenic and tourist-friendly areas.
The minority population of Santa Barbara has gravitated to the lower Eastside since the 1920's, when the Mexican lemon packers at the huge Johnston Fruit Company Packing Plant built homes for their families nearby. Today it is still home to a large Latino population, and it also houses the town dump and much of Santa Barbara's commercial industry, including my office. On my drive to work, I pass machine shops, warehouses, auto wreckers and lumber yards.
It can be gritty, but it's cheap (used here in the relative sense). Home prices for the lower Eastside hover around the $400,000 range, while nobody seems to have told the rest of Santa Barbara about the housing crisis. As I've explored the neighborhood, I've started to realize how cool it is. Many of the homes are meticulously cared for with bright paint jobs and beautiful gardens.There are some great business that have cropped up in the past few years-- wineries, breweries, thrift and vintage stores. Obviously the taquerias are delicious and ample. The lower Eastside is what I imagine San Francisco's Mission District was like 15 years ago. It's still in that edgy state where it could go either way-- total hipness, or a slow slide into more poverty and gang violence.
I frequently catch myself thinking that I know every nook and cranny of Santa Barbara, and lament living in a small town. I think to myself "man, if I were in a city, I could still be surprised, I could still explore." I have a real bad case of grass-is-greeneritus, which is of course why I started this blog, so I went out exploring the neighborhoods east of Milpas yesterday.
Here is what I found.
I met a lady architect named
Gale who said everyone on her street knows each other and they all look out for one another. She asked me from across the street, "what are you doing?" She was fun and friendly and has a Saab like I used to have.
I don't know if it was the rain clouds or the energy I felt exploring a new place, but I was overwhelmed by the beauty I found, even among the things that are typically considered unsightly. I kept thinking about Ricky Fitts in American Beauty when he said
"sometimes there's so much beauty in the world I feel like I can't take it, like my heart's going to cave in".
All historical knowledge of this neighborhood was taken from Walter A. Tompkin's book The Yankee Barbareños
