From our “Catalina History That Never Was” Department comes a little-known and nearly unthinkable (these days) episode in Island lore.
As you may have surmised, this particular thread follows projects and developments throughout Catalina’s history that would have markedly changed the face of the Island, but never came to be.
From our “Catalina History That Never Was” Department comes a little-known and nearly unthinkable (these days) episode in Island lore.
As you may have surmised, this particular thread follows projects and developments throughout Catalina’s history that would have markedly changed the face of the Island, but never came to be.
The failure of most of these ambitious plans was a good thing, I would say, such as the building of a nuclear power plant on the East End near the quarry and the plethora of extreme makeovers of Avalon that have popped up over the years.
On more than one occasion, the town of Avalon came frighteningly close to becoming one giant, tidy, neo-modern strip mall and plans were made as recently as the 1970s to morph the entire Isthmus into a residential development for 60,000 people! The entirety of Cat Harbor, for example, was to be converted into a cement-lined marina sporting thousands of condos and homes and…oh, I can’t go on.
With the recent discovery by quantum physicists at UC Santa Barbara of the existence of multiple universes (that’s right, look it up), some of these projects may have actually become reality in the Catalina Islands of alternate universes. But in our numinous niche of the nether realm, they died on the drawing board.
One of the most ambitious plans to be laid before the Island’s powers-that-be came in the form of the idea to cut a shipping canal straight across the Isthmus, presumably to relieve yachtsman of the burden of making the arduous passage around the West End to get to Cat Harbor.
The idea was formally proposed in early 1963 and studies were commissioned to determine, first of all, if such a project was physically possible and, barring that, whether a marine railroad could be built instead to haul yachts the half-mile distance between Isthmus Harbor and Cat Harbor.
The Island Company enlisted the help of University of Southern California Oceanographer Dr. Richard R. Tibby for the environmental concerns. For the engineering side of the equation, the Island Company went to William Pereira & Associates—the “go-to” boys for many an Island Company project over the years.
Besides studying the feasibility of the project, these studies were to decide such things as what impact the canal would have on tidal movement, sand patterns and, conversely, what impact the differences in tidal height between the windward and leeward sides of the Island would have on the canal itself.
Not surprisingly for the day, the potential impact on marine life and the co-mingling of incompatible species was apparently never even considered.
The various reports eventually came to the conclusion that such a canal was indeed possible. But the principal players in favor of the plan were fortunately few and far between, including an engineer for the State of California who boisterously advocated the outright appropriation of the entire West End by the State of California.
Most of the Islanders involved, including Doug Bombard, who at that time managed the Catalina Cove and Camp Agency at Two Harbors, and Island Company Vice President Malcolm Renton were uneasy with the idea, principally for the simple reason that it would destroy the natural beauty of the area and, in any case, seemed to have little value.
In an interview with the Catalina Islander at the time, Mr. Renton felt such a plan was playing with fire and said astutely, “…we may consider the risk, remote perhaps, that Mother Nature may demonstrate to us a destructive disadvantage that none of us has yet contemplated.”
The plan was eventually scuttled with even the pro-canal side agreeing that both the canal and the railway projects had very few advantages and many, many disadvantages.
With the formation of the Catalina Island Conservancy in 1972, fantasies such as cross-Isthmus canals largely became a thing of the past.
The sounds of gulls and shrikes, wave-lapped hulls and slapping halyards won out over the sounds of puffing diesels and grinding gears.
Jim Watson is the author of “Mysterious Island: Catalina,” available on Amazon, Kindle and in stores all over Avalon.
