By MARY ROURKE Special to the Palisadian-Post Who founded the city of Santa Monica? History buffs might look for the answer in the public library or on the Internet. But this fall there are more than books to peruse for the answer. The Santa Monica History Museum opened inside the main branch of the Santa Monica Public library in late October. Highlights of the collection are on display in a 5,000 square-foot space near the Seventh Street entrance, offering a fresh mix of vintage photographs and memorabilia with interactive computer displays.   Louise Gabriel, president of the new museum, conceived the idea soon after she helped to found the Santa Monica Historical Society in 1975. This year, she assisted in overseeing the move from its former location on Euclid Street near Colorado Avenue to the library. The museum will remain independent of the library and lease space from the city for $1 per year.   Gabriel’s interest in preserving keepsakes and valuables dates back to her childhood when a fire destroyed her family home. She was eight at the time.    ‘All of my mother’s memorabilia was lost, all of her baby pictures, and I realized how important history is,’ she says.   Gabriel first imagined a history museum for Santa Monica when she helped to plan and coordinate the city’s centennial celebration in 1975. She was impressed by the items that long-time Santa Monica residents loaned for the centennial exhibit.    ‘I knew that most of the things would be lost if someone didn’t find a place to protect and preserve them,’ she says.   Gabriel and other like-minded people began collecting memorabilia. She was determined to find a permanent home for the growing collection.   ’I’ve never been afraid to take on a big task and make it a success,’ she says. ‘I had a goal and worked until I achieved it.’   The new museum’s exhibitions will rotate to allow more of the collection to be seen over time. There are more than 600,000 historical photographs, maps, land deeds and other documents in the archive.   The opening exhibit covers major developments in the city’s history, starting with its founding. Two men get credit for the rise of a commercial district: Colonel Robert S. Baker and John P. Jones, who was a U.S. senator from Nevada at the time.   Baker came to Los Angeles from San Francisco, where he sold supplies to gold-rush miners. In 1872 he purchased some 32,000 acres of the Rancho San Vicente y Santa Monica from the heirs of Francisco Sepulveda, who held the land-grant deed. Baker paid $55,000 for the property that extended south from what is now Topanga Canyon to Pico Boulevard and west from the Pacific Ocean to Sepulveda Boulevard.   He also acquired a small portion of Rancho Boca de Santa Monica for which he paid $6,000. He ultimately consolidated his holdings. While the Marquez and Reyes families thrived as ranchers on their land grants in Santa Monica Canyon and opened small businesses to accommodate vacationing campers, Baker dreamed of an important commercial harbor and a railroad to link Santa Monica with the Los Angeles & Independent line that traveled east.   Jones provided the infusion of cash. In 1874 he purchased three-quarters of Baker’s land holdings for $162,500 and began to turn seaside ranch land into a commercial town.   Jones and Baker planned for hotels, restaurants and other businesses, and held a land auction in 1875, the year now claimed as the official beginning of the city.   A portrait of Jones’ wife, Georgina, on view at the History Museum shows her dressed in finery that suggests her comfortable life. The couple lived in a three-story house with 17 bedrooms, on property that is now the Miramar Hotel at the corner of Wilshire and Ocean Avenue.   The Santa Monica Evening Outlook printed its first edition in 1876. The History Museum owns the complete archive that shows how the newspaper’s name changed several times before its last issue was published in 1998. By then it was known as ‘The Outlook.’ A mural that hung in the newspaper’s lobby is now on display at the museum. The artist, Hugo Ballin, was one of the foremost muralists of the early 20th century and a longtime resident of Pacific Palisades.   Baker married Arcadia Bandini de Sterns, a widow who was a good businesswoman. He sold her his property in 1879 and from then on she handled their real estate development business.   Two of Arcadia’s embroidered fans are on display at the History Museum, along with a photograph of her taken in the early 1900s. She is a widow by then, and sits on the veranda at her Ocean Avenue home gazing across the road at a bluff of land overlooking the bay. She owned it, with Senator Jones, and before she died in 1912 they donated the land to the state. Their gift is now called ‘Palisades Park.’   A model of the park’s Chinese-inspired pergola is on view in the History Museum. It was made for the museum by Miniatures West, a local company that specializes in small-scale reproductions. Other contributions to the museum include stonework for the foyer and the restrooms as well as a granite wall listing major donors donated by Bourget Brothers Foundry in Santa Monica and a financial gift by Morley Builders, another local business, to support the museum’s library, which includes many out-of-print books.   Before the turn of the 19th century, vacation hotels, a beer garden at Third Street and Utah (now Broadway) and an opera house helped establish Santa Monica as a resort city. But families were encouraged to settle in the area, too. The first school operated by the county was established in 1876. The town that Baker and Jones put in place continued to grow. Visitors to the History Museum can learn more about the decades of the 1920s through the 1960s, when the Douglas Aircraft Company thrived on property that is now the Santa Monica airport. There is a replica of a Douglas DC3 plane on view, with a photograph of the cockpit.   ’Douglas was a major employer and played a big part of the city’s growth,’ says Gabriel. During World War II the company employed 160,000 workers.   The city’s amusement parks, ‘pleasure piers’ as Gabriel calls them, are also included in the current exhibit. Visitors can take a computer-simulated ride on the Whirlwind Dipper, a roller coaster on the Santa Monica Pier in the 1920s. On a separate wall, a giant scaled seahorse that once stood at the entrance to Pacific Ocean Park on Pier Avenue fills the space. The park, with its nautical theme, closed in 1967. The Santa Monica Pier celebrated its centennial in 2010.   Ho Nguyen designed the exhibit installation that is an artful balance of artifacts, information boards and open space. The city’s history in 3-D is home at last. For more information, contact (310) 395-2290 or visit santamonicahistory.org.

Pacific Palisades resident Sasha Engelmann, who at 22 has already achieved remarkable academic success, has been selected a Marshall Scholar, one of only 40 college students chosen nationwide, and will attend a graduate program at Oxford University next fall. She plans to pursue a master of philosophy degree in geography and environment. Engelmann has continued her interest in environmental science she developed in high school, no doubt encouraged by her father, Steven, who teaches AP Environmental Science at Palisades High School. At Stanford, she served as the president of the Climate Initiatives Group, part of Students for a Sustainable Stanford. While he brother, Elliott, a junior at Tufts University, is also studying environmental science, their mother, Diana, is an English professor at Santa Monica College. The Marshall Scholarships, founded in 1953, commemorate the humane ideas of the Marshall Plan and are funded by Her Majesty’s Government. Scholars from any American university are free to choose their course of study at any institution in the United Kingdom and are given two-year terms, allowing for total immersion in one field. Engelmann, a PaliHi graduate and currently a senior at Stanford, is majoring in earth systems (biosphere track) and English and French literature. Although a seemingly schizophrenic academic track, Engelmann’s discipline choice finds its logic. She is particularly interested in the environment and man’s relationship to it, both physically and philosophically.   ’I am fascinated by the way people perceive wilderness and climate change,’ Englemann told the Palisadian-Post. ‘The challenges today contrast to those of the 1980s. Then, people connected environmental changes to specific places, such as deforestation and pollution. I see our environment dilemma today as how people perceive space. It is hard to visualize through our everyday actions that we are creating carbon dioxide emissions. Is it air? How big is it? How does my car-use transform the landscape worldwide? Can we cognitively perceive how everyday actions connect to the atmosphere or biosphere?’ This science is comprehensible, but the connection with art is more subtle and really what fascinates Engelmann. Her interest was piqued by a visit to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2008 to see the work of Icelandic installation artist Olafur Eliasson, which ‘blew me away,’ and prompted an interest in combining science with art. As a sophomore, she won a Chappell Lougee Scholarship, designed for students pursuing in-depth projects in the humanities, creative arts and qualitative social studies, and with that, she traveled to Berlin to study Eliasson’s site-specific artworks. ‘Eliasson is environmentally conscious,’ Engelmann said. ‘He experiments with how people perceive space, looking to make space tangible. In the ‘Manhattan Waterfall Project’ of 2008, he erected five massive waterfalls in the East River between Manhattan and Brooklyn. He placed the waterfalls against that huge skyline, thereby changing our culturally engrained impression. You became more aware of the relationship between buildings and the river; you could feel more a part of that space and in turn take more responsibility for that space.’   In her honors thesis, which Engelmann is currently writing, she is comparing the work of Eliasson and contemporary American novelist Mark Danielewsky, who experiments with text by going beyond conventional words on a page.   ’In ‘House of Leaves,’ for instance, he created pages that are sometimes upside-down, and introduced a character who is based on a Federico Fellini character, so one had to see the movie in order to understand the book,’ Engelmann said. ‘He is concerned with the sovereignty of print text and how it functions in the context of other media.’   Engelmann will graduate this spring and expects to take it easy’in her fashion’this summer. ‘I am playing with the idea of a scholarship at the Museum of Modern Art in New York or working with a group on urban ecology,’ she said. ‘I would like to experience New York; I’m not too attached to L.A.’

Pacific Palisades artist Mary Cohen won first place in the photography category for ‘Bike Path, Santa Monica Beach’ in the Pacific Palisades Art Association’s November Juried Show, on display at the Palisades Branch Library, 861 Alma Real. Cohen, whose artistic curiosity runs from drawing, painting, sculpting and comics, has yet to take a formal photo class. Her photographic investigations often take place on long walks around her neighborhood or at the beach. She studied animation at Cal Arts and is currently working on a graphic novel and assembling her work in a series of small art books that will be published.

  Cries of ‘Merry Christmas,’ nonstop caroling and general merriment contrast with the feelings of many people at this time of year. For those who suffer or have suffered from the death of a loved one, the pain of divorce, or a struggle with sickness, the holiday season can be isolating and difficult.   This year, St. Matthew’s Episcopal church is offering a ‘Blue Christmas’ service’a service of solace on the longest night of the year, December 21, at 7 p.m. in the sanctuary, 1031 Bienveneda.   ’The service will have a quiet, candle-lit, comforting feel as we welcome together the coming of Christ into the world with music of the season, a homily and a celebration of the Eucharist,’ The Reverend Betsy Anderson said. She will be assisted by The Reverend Brian Palmer.   St. Matthew’s Music Director Tom Neenan has prepared a program of traditional music, accompanied by a soloist.   Anderson invites all members of the local community to join the service and the reception that follows.   Contacts: Brian Palmer (310) 573-7787, ext. 117) or Betsy Anderson (310) 573-7787, ext. 122).