Decisions on Oil Paved Way for Tale of 2 Cities: Ventura and Santa Barbara

Ventura. An oil outpost. A Hell’s Angels hangout. A sleepy surfer town whose day has yet to come.

Santa Barbara. Sophisticated. Spanish. Self-conscious. A palm-studded playground for the rich and famous. A maxed-out string of excesses.

These are the sort of contrasts some Santa Barbarans draw, most recently in a newspaper column celebrating those differences--and slamming neighboring Ventura.

“Santa Barbara and Ventura are like two sisters who took opposite roads in life,” columnist Barney Brantingham began. “One turned out plain--ugly some might say--while the other became rich, beautiful and world famous, treated like a queen.”

He went on from there in a Santa Barbara News-Press column that has angered Ventura residents, city officials and historians alike.

But the column was not just off-the-cuff comments. It was based on a three-year study by Harvey Molotch, a University of Santa Barbara sociologist who worked with two assistants to trace the oil industry in the two cities.

With funding from the U.S. Department of Interior, the academics interviewed about 100 people and plowed through local archives and media reports. They contend that the different decisions the two cities made about the oil industry influenced issues such as land use, beachfront development and routing of the 101 Freeway.

Those decisions, in turn, played a central role in defining what each city ultimately became.

Their conclusions: Ventura embraced oil and look at the city today. Santa Barbara fought it, and became a beauteous, architecturally harmonious paradise.

Or, as Brantingham put it: “Ventura went to bed with the oil industry, while Santa Barbara donned a chastity belt.”

Ventura boosters dispute many of the study’s key contentions--namely that the oil industry has much of a lingering influence here or that the city’s developing downtown does not have its own beach town charm.

They point out that Ventura is at a turning point as it prepares to begin construction on a 10-screen theater downtown.

“The good old boys have been in control of the city,” said former Ventura Mayor Greg Carson, who helped wage the political battle to revitalize downtown. “But the more progressive business community has seen the opportunity in Ventura and is seizing control.”

Word of the June 1 column--and the study behind it--continues to spark indignation in Ventura.

“Don’t you think it demands a reply?” asks Don Shorts, a member of the San Buenaventura Historic Alliance, who drafted a four-page, single-spaced letter to the newspaper. “I felt a little outraged that Santa Barbarans know so little about Ventura. I know their attitude. I lived there once. The most they know about it is driving through on the freeway. “

Richard Senate, Ventura’s unofficial historian, picks up on the columnist’s metaphor.

“Sure, they are like two sisters,” he says. “One became a good, strong, proud working-class woman, who raised her family with strong moral values. That’s Ventura. The other became a trollop, who took up with rich men and their fine yachts. You know who that is.”

Molotch--who for the record lives in the Santa Barbara County community of Montecito--said he chose the two cities for his study because they are so similar.

They share the same mountains, the same ocean, the same stretch of beach.

Both are the government seats and historic centers of their counties. Both have ideal climates--a year round average high of 72 degrees in Santa Barbara, and 70 degrees in Ventura. Both have low humidity and a lot of sunny days--an average 308 annually in Santa Barbara and 252 in Ventura.

Both are mission towns that began as Yankee settlements in the late 19th century. Both, according to Molotch’s report, began as cattle ranches and citrus groves. And the economies of both cities have been bound up with the oil industry.

But, Molotch contends, oil came to Santa Barbara 25 years later. And that made all the difference.

In Ventura, oil firm owners and employees played a prominent role in civic life, oil companies sponsored symphony concerts and Little League teams, and a local paper ran an Oil Progress Week supplement.

In Santa Barbara, though, there was a tension. “The hardware of oil, so visible in Ventura, would simply not exist in areas valued on other grounds,” Molotch wrote.

When the freeway came down the coast, Ventura offered little resistance, Molotch said, and ended up with a concrete canyon splitting downtown from the sea.

Santa Barbara fought the freeway for four decades, only letting it through the middle of town in 1993.

Then there is beachfront development. In Ventura, philanthropist E.P. Foster donated 80 acres to the city to build Seaside Park, which he envisioned as a miniature Golden Gate Park. Gradually, the Ventura County Fairground took over the park. Now, there’s 2,500 parking spaces, and an off-track betting facility there, Molotch noted. Farther down the beach, a hotel and parking structure went up, blocking some hillside views.

Not so in Santa Barbara, said Molotch.

Santa Barbara philanthropist Thomas Storke and others worked to remove unsightly industrial facilities and replace them with bathhouses, a harbor and other amenities.

“Oil was the first move in an event chain, including the abolition of a park, that discouraged the kind of social and organizational forces that might have established an amenity-focused oceanfront,” Molotch wrote of Ventura.

Many Venturans take issue with much of what the columnist and professor say.

“They still see Ventura as we were maybe 40 years ago,” Senate, the historian, said. “Maybe someone should tell them the oil industry isn’t here anymore.”

Senate considers the study flawed. He points out that Santa Barbara was a spa town before it was an oil town. It is the core of wealthy people who lived there from the outset that made the difference, not the oil.

Senate also contends that Santa Barbara has made its name and reputation out of “fake history.”

Ventura is revitalizing its old downtown, adding the 10-screen theater to its eclectic mix of thrift shops and bookstores.

After an earthquake demolished downtown Santa Barbara in 1925, the city passed an ordinance that said everything had to look like Spain, and rebuilt itself as a sterile, fabricated community, Senate said.

“They created what I call the ‘Zorro-fication’ of Santa Barbara,” he said. “Essentially, after seeing the popularity of movies, and shows like Zorro, they created a set, like CityWalk at Universal Studios, a place that didn’t exist.”

Molotch would agree. But he would see it as a strength.

“The discourse here has this quality to it that there is something precious here that has to be preserved, shined, buffed,” he said.

Some Ventura residents question the assumption that their city would ever aspire to the pretensions of Santa Barbara.

“I got to choose where I live. And I chose Ventura,” said Ed Summers, president of the Ventura Chamber Music Festival Assn.

Renee Kelleher, a merchant on Santa Barbara’s State Street, has made her selection too.

“I don’t know Ventura well, but maybe that’s by choice,” she said. “It’s nobody’s destination place. I know that.”