Santa Catalina
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
an island off the coast of California. It is one of the Santa Barbara Islands. It is separated from the mainland by a channel. The island is twenty five miles long and about four miles wide. It is hilly, well wooded, and is a noted summer resort. The floor of the sea surrounding the land supports a submarine forest of kelp, the ribbon-like leaves of which rise and fold and unfold in the water, affording an abiding place for countless animals of the sea. The kelp viewed in the sunlight forms a beautiful picture of olive and amber in the blue turquoise of the water. Tourists are taken about by guides in glass-bottomed boats. As the boat moves slowly over the kelp beds the passenger is able to study the sea like an aquarium. The glass bottom magnifies like the lens of a microscope. The kelp waves its long ribbons and the giant California starfish, the sea-cucumber, the octopus feeling about with its tentacles, the angel-fish of livid red, the phosphorescent jellyfish with tentacles fifteen feet long, crabs, squids, and fishes, black, red, yellow, and white, swim about in kaleidoscopic combinations of color as naturally and unconcernedly as goldfish in a parlor globe. It is said that $100,000 is invested in these boats. They range in size from skiffs to side-wheeled steamers valued at $3,000. Tourists go by car from Los Angeles to the seashore. As passengers step from the train they are greeted, not by, "Cab, sir; this way for all parts of the city," but by, "Here you are! Marine Jimmie's boat, only fifty cents." "Take the Cleopatra!" "Right away for the Marine Gardens!" Santa Claus. See Nicholas ; Saint
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's 1910 note on the glass-bottomed boats of Avalon is still good advice: the boats run today, and the kelp forests they float over are protected within a state marine reserve. What Aiton could not know was that in 1919 the chewing-gum magnate William Wrigley Jr. bought a controlling interest in the island, built the round Casino at Avalon in 1929, and brought the Chicago Cubs there for spring training from 1921 to 1951; a herd of bison left behind after 1920s filming still roams the interior. Since 1972 the Catalina Island Conservancy has held about 88 per cent of the island as protected land, so the hilly interior remains largely undeveloped while Avalon holds most of the roughly 4,000 residents. Modern figures make the island about 22 miles long and up to eight miles wide, a little broader than Aiton's "about four miles."
Written for this edition, 2026.