Highway Snobbery

VENTURA — Ventura. An oil outpost. A Hells Angels hangout. A sleepy surfer town whose day is 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 tart-tongued newspaper column celebrating those differences and slamming Ventura.

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

He goes on from there. And it only gets worse.

Word of Brantingham’s column has spread quickly. Some copies have found their way into the hands of Ventura historians and city officials.

The snooty tone of the column has Ventura residents up in arms--and on the warpath to defend Ventura’s honor against what some see as this slanderer.

“Don’t you think it demands a reply?” asks an indignant Don Shorts, a member of the San Buenaventura Historic Alliance, who has drafted a four-page, single-spaced letter to the editor of the Santa Barbara News-Press. “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 sister metaphor that Brantingham began--and adds his own acerbic twist.

“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.”

But Brantingham’s column is not just off-the-cuff bluster. It is based on a three-year study conducted by Harvey Molotch, a UC Santa Barbara sociologist. Molotch and two assistants trace the advent of the oil industry in the two cities.

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

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

Their conclusion?

Ventura embraced oil, and look at it now. Santa Barbara fought it, and became the beauteous, architecturally harmonious paradise it is today.

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 or that the city’s developing downtown does not have its own beach town charm.

They also point out that Ventura is at a turning point as it prepares to begin construction of a multiplex theater downtown.

“The good old boys have been in control of the city,” says former 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.”

Cappuccino and Chilled Pumpkin Soup

In a shadowed corner of the Arts and Letters Cafe in downtown Santa Barbara, Molotch holds forth.

He gestures to the tomes in the upscale bookstore out front, the tasteful art adorning the walls, the menu of baby green salads, cappuccino and chilled pumpkin soup.

This, he says over the soft tinkle of the courtyard fountain, is the kind of ambience that characterizes Santa Barbara. The kind of thing you would never find in Ventura.

“There are good reasons the two cities have ended up the way they have,” he says. “There is a path that has been traveled. Once you are on that path there is a great inertia that keeps you on that path. Your institutions are geared that way.”

Molotch chose the two cities, because in many ways they are strikingly similar.

They share the same mountains, the same ocean, and 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 became 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, argues Molotch, 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 the 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 writes.

Molotch acknowledges that a line of offshore oil platforms is more visible from Santa Barbara’s coast than Ventura’s. But he said the city had no control over those platforms and fought their construction.

When the Ventura Freeway came down the coast, Ventura offered little resistance, Molotch said, and ended up with a concrete canyon that split the 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. Local philanthropist E.P. Foster donated 80 acres to the city to build Seaside Park--a spot he envisioned as a miniature Golden Gate Park. But gradually the Ventura County Fairgrounds took over the park. Now, Ventura has 2,500 parking spaces and an off-track betting facility there, Molotch says.

Farther down the beach, a generic Holiday Inn and parking structure went up, blocking some hillside views.

Not so in Santa Barbara, Molotch said.

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

Molotch writes of Ventura: “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.”

And now the two cities are stuck with history, tradition and their respective characters.

And there isn’t much Ventura can do about it now, Molotch concludes.

Graduate student Krista Paulsen, a co-author of the study who specialized in Ventura, jumps in: “I mean, you’ve got that freeway right next to the beach. There are limitations on what you can do.”

“But maybe it will come down in the next earthquake,” Molotch says. “And you will be able to redesign it.”

Striding along some of the pedestrian walkways that crisscross Santa Barbara--pointing out the city’s design choices, the spectacular views from City Hall to the art museum, the uninterrupted flow of lines between the old and new sections of the city library--Molotch runs into Brantingham, the columnist.

“Ventura is agitated about your column,” Molotch says, greeting him warmly.

“And your study,” Brantingham responds cheerfully.

“I think you got it right,” Molotch says.

Challenging the Study

Ventura residents take issue with much of what Brantingham and Molotch say. And, in particular, with the column’s tone.

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

Many Venturans think Molotch’s study is an unfair comparison.

“True Santa Barbara has many attributes, including the magnificent Santa Ynez Mountains as a background to the city and, yes, we in Ventura have made some mistakes,” Shorts writes in his lengthy letter to the editor. “But comparing the two cities is like comparing apples and oranges.”

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

Senate also argues that sterile, picture-perfect Santa Barbara has made its name and reputation out of “fake history.” Ventura’s history is real.

Ventura is in the midst of revitalizing its old downtown, adding a multiplex movie theater to its funky mix of thrift shops and bookstores.

After an earthquake demolished downtown Santa Barbara in 1925, the city enacted 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 says. “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 won’t argue with that. But he sees 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 says.

In addition, affronted Ventura residents question the smug Santa Barbaran assumption that Ventura would ever aspire to the pretensions of Santa Barbara.

“The biggest flaw, the leap of faith, is the assumption that we would have wanted to be like them to begin with,” says Ed Summers, president of the Ventura Chamber Music Festival Assn. “I got to choose where I live. And I chose Ventura.”

Still, the criticism smarts.

And, say many Ventura residents, the thing that hurts the most is that a lot of what both Brantingham and Molotch write is true.

“You know, what I was shocked about was how many people agree with that column,” says Shorts, who carries the June 1 column almost everywhere he goes. “I think our own Ventura people have a little bit of an inferiority complex.”

Not Dolores Fisher.

“I felt angry,” she says. “Not anger like I am going to go out and do anything. But anger that they could actually be putting that down in a column for everyone to read. They don’t even know Ventura.”

That’s probably true for many Santa Barbarans.

“I don’t know Ventura well, but maybe that’s by choice,” said Renee Kelleher, who who sells linens at Montana Mercantile off Santa Barbara’s State Street. “It’s nobody’s destination place. I know that.”

Philip Cummings says he goes to Ventura frequently to surf and buy auto parts.

“Ventura is a quaint, behind-the-times small town clashing with modern-day problems,” he says.

Brantingham himself can’t remember the last time he went to Ventura, but believes it was in the past five years. He remains unabashed about his comments.

“That’s my job, to stimulate debate on issues,” he says. “It wasn’t intended as a dig.”

Oh, really?

Shorts considers the column the first salvo in a war between the two cities.

“We here in Ventura resent Santa Barbara’s superior attitude,” Shorts writes at the end of his letter. “We Venturans are just as proud of our city as you are of yours. Venturans Unite to defend our Fair City.”