This weekend, we went to Santa Barbara for our friends’ wedding. What a relaxing weekend of wine tasting and eating and putting the “being” in human being. This place doesn’t feel like reality. Maybe it’s not. I tried to get to the bottom of things.
Sometimes the benefit of living in a particular city isn’t that which resides in the city at all – it’s that which is in close proximity. If you live in New York, you go to The Hamptons (or so I’m told). If you live in San Francisco, you go to Napa Valley. If you live in Las Vegas, you go to Southern California.
Southern California is Las Vegas’s backyard – Las Vegans’ playground. If you live in Las Vegas, you go to Disneyland in Los Angeles (even though Disney World is way better). You ski in Big Bear. You attend Coachella’s music festival. You do whatever it is people do in San Diego.
It happens to be an arrangement that works perfectly, because us Las Vegans don’t really care to live there – the cost of living is absurdly high, the traffic is some of the worst in the country, and the people are a bit too proud for my taste.
Las Vegas is molly – just stop caring so much and have a great time. Los Angeles is cocaine. That guy at the party that thinks he can walk through walls; thinks he’s the coolest guy there. But in reality, he just looks like he’s on cocaine. But he’s too cocky to see that. Because he’s on cocaine. Meanwhile, he voted for Arnold Schwarzenegger for President and tried to make gays illegal.
Santa Barbara is just 90 minutes away by car, but a world away by philosophy. It’s a sleepy one-horse town just up the coast from Entourage, The City.
But let me back up for a minute.
This area of the California coastline started being ‘Santa Barbara‘ 400 years ago when the Spanish general Sebastián Vizcaíno was on an expedition to find some safe harbours for Spanish trade ships.
He arrived on the eve of Saint Barbara day in particularly nasty storm. He almost didn’t make it. Thus, he named the area for that challenging, momentous day.
As far as Spanish influence in Santa Barbara goes, that was basically it for like 200 years.
Then in the late 1700’s, the first real Spanish Franciscans settled and built a rather beautiful mission and fort (presidio) that still stands today. (The Spanish were building a lot of these things up and down the California coast at the time.)
The purpose of the presidio was to establish this coastline for Spain and keep out all those other pesky Europeans, and the purpose of the mission was to do what Christians do best – convert the natives to Christianity.
Just about anyone could benefit from a makeover.
So the city definitely has this spanish influence. But ironically, that’s not where and when most of the Spanish buildings throughout Santa Barbara proper were built. Not by early Spanish settlers, and not hundreds of years ago.
There was an earthquake in 1925 that brought almost the entire city to rubble – 75 years after California became part of the United States. In its aftermath, the city planners decided to double-down on the Spanish theme, and do so consistently and pervasively. They laid it out just how they wanted it. White stucco. Red-tile roofs. Ornamental iron work. You know, Spanish shit.
So it’s a city that’s a tribute to itself, in a way.
Santa Barbara isn’t alone in benefiting from a do-over. Some of the world’s greatest cities are great because they had a second chance. The great redesign of Paris in the 1800’s by Louis III and Baron Haussmann. The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 and subsequent rebuilding. Even the Danish-styled architecture of nearby Solvang, just 30 miles from Santa Barbara is a big fake.
I guess just about anyone could benefit from a makeover. Whenever we’re given an opportunity to reassess and rebuild, we typically do it.
I remember looking at my own life transitions that way, like from high school to college, or when I moved out to Las Vegas. I consciously thought about who I was, because it was this super rare opportunity to carry with me everything that I liked and shed everything I didn’t; to become the best version of myself, and no one that I would meet would have any idea! It’s an opportunity to be anything or anyone. It’s sort of a lie, in a way. But sort of not, also. Right?
Modern day Santa Barbara doesn’t just benefit from its 1925 do-over. It gets to benefit from it’s south-facing coastline. It’s cool climate makes it a proud grower of pinot grapes. It’s close proximity to LA gives it healthy tourism while letting it remain secluded, which help prop up delightful little restaurants, bars, shops, art galleries, and tasting rooms.
The sum of all of this is a town that just feels good. Maybe a little too good. I felt a bit like Ewan McGregor in Spectre.
There’s still some hispanic influence in Santa Barbara today. But it’s just as much influenced by its peoples’ desire for a laid back, wine-driven lifestyle. Tourism and wine are arguably their largest industries, comprising ~15% of their workforce (compared to Las Vegas’s maybe 30%). And it shows.
But how all these people got there is a little baffling. Tourism isn’t the greatest source of super high incomes, but cost of living in Santa Barbara is quite high. Median home values are 7x the median income in Santa Barbara.
So how do they afford it? Maybe fewer people buy homes? More renters? Not really – ownership is in the 50%’s vs. 60%’s nationwide. Are they just an older crowd? Nope, not there either.
Conversations with locals brought me to the hypothesis that most arrive at money before moving here, and came here after. Of course, they either made enough money in their lifetime, or it’s that special multi-generational kind of money. (e.g. “Thanks, Dad.”)
So maybe that’s the kind of place Santa Barbara is. It’s the cash-in-your-chips kind of town. It’s a true destination town, in the sense that you don’t come to vacation for a week – you come to vacation for the rest of your life. That’s really the ultimate vacation – the one that lasts forever!
And why not? The weather’s great (albeit a little cold for my taste). There’s great restaurants and retail, thanks to their tourism industry. There’s plenty of places for me to park my yacht. There’s wine, lots of wine, nearby in every direction. LA just arms-length enough away. There’s the super dog-friendly Funk Zone.
It’s ironic. Santa Barbara was named for that vicious storm that made this place so hard to get to for a Spanish explorer so many hundreds of years ago. And here we are today, and it’s still “hard to get to.” Not physically. Economically.
Regardless of who you are and where you’re at in life, you can always visit. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
Definitely check out Milk & Honey – it was amazing, both food and service (thanks Julia!). You should probably go to the pier.
And please have a drink at The Good Lion on State Street. They’re open late (for SB, anyway) and every drink is one of those takes-five-minutes-to-make kind of drinks.
We also went to Los Olivos, which is probably one of many ways to enjoy a just-main-street kind of town for wine tasting in the heart of Santa Barbara’s wine country. We visited Barbieri, who is a wine maker that used to be a Master Somm for Wynn, and checked out from all the hustle of Las Vegas to live the dream with his wife.
Definitely take some time to beer and wine in the Funk Zone. Here’s my one-paragraph Funk Zone story:
The artists moved in because the area was cheap – old abandoned buildings and things. It quickly became famous for its art studios, which eventually drove up popularity among the younger, hipper crowd. That drove trendy restaurants, bars, and tasting rooms, which in turn drove up prices and drove OUT the artists. And that sounds about right, doesn’t it! The urban cycle.
