About the Foundation

What this is

The Abalone Cove Foundation is a small nonprofit documentation project serving the Abalone Cove area of Rancho Palos Verdes, California. The Foundation does three things: (a) collects, transcribes, and maintains primary sources relevant to the coastal strip around Abalone Cove; (b) writes factual narrative around those sources, cited and dated; and (c) occasionally publishes a position paper when the Foundation believes a public record is owed on a specific question.

I say "I" once in this paragraph because the dispatch that produced the rest of this site asked for the narrative sections to be written in the third person, and I'd rather keep that promise on the other pages. Here, the first person is appropriate: I am an HOA board member in the West Portuguese Bend Community Association (81 lots, Tract 14649), and I started this project to make sense of what my community was facing. The Foundation is the result of that work. It is registered as a California nonprofit.

The Foundation does not represent any party in any litigation. It does not take a position on the merits of SB 9 or SB 330. It does not oppose the development of the Palos Verdes Peninsula. It does believe, specifically, that a 24-inch line of unknown maintenance status sitting inside an active landslide is the sort of thing the public record should eventually close the loop on — and that the closing of that loop should be done through documented investigation rather than inference.

What is on this site

The site has several top-level pages, plus supporting material:

• Home — landing page with a ten-card story index and a consolidated box score of every documented development attempt on the cove.
• The Story — ten eras, from the Tongva village at Chowigna through the current litigation, each with a box-score table and a narrative.
• Position — the 24-inch line position paper, a downloadable PDF, and the anonymous contribute form.
• Evidence Room — primary sources by category (Declarations, Litigation, Shore Club, Geological, Tract Maps, Chain of Title).
• Map — Leaflet map with historical and current layers.
• Timeline — single-column chronology.
• Gallery — 186 indexed images, EXIF- and filename-tagged.
• Sign — the signatory page.

All primary-source PDFs are indexed at the Evidence Room; originals live under /docs/originals/ in the repository. Transcriptions sit next to their originals where OCR was practical.

How this site is built

This is a static GitHub Pages site. No tracking. No cookies. No analytics. No third-party scripts on any page — not on the story pages, not on the position paper, and especially not on the contribute form. The only JavaScript on the site is a small reading-progress bar on long pages, a tag filter on the gallery, and the stub handler on the contribute form.

The research under every page was assembled with extensive use of Anthropic's Claude (the AI assistant) — primary-source transcription, cross-referencing, and synthesis of a large archive into the narrative form you see here. Claude is a tool; the editorial decisions, the citations, and the public accountability are the Foundation's. Where a claim in the narrative is not sourced, we have marked it as such and added it to the list of things we are still looking for.

We welcome corrections. The contribute page accepts eyewitness observations, document pointers, media uploads, and long-form historical knowledge. The how-it-works page describes the review process: two editors, no IP logs, encrypted at rest, rebuttal offered to any named party before publication.

What we are looking for

Specific gaps we would like contributors to help close:

• A clean copy of Declaration 100, Book 9436 page 155 — the property-description page. The LA County Recorder microfilm is illegible. We have tried the Palos Verdes Library District, the Huntington Library, and the Columbia University Vanderlip papers.
• Any record of the pre-1956 Palos Verdes Coast Road right-of-way at Book 6059 page 178, including the date and manner of its abandonment (if it was abandoned), and the disposition of any infrastructure within it.
• Any document referencing a 24-inch line on or adjoining APN 7573-006-024 or APN 7573-007-900, including inspection logs, asbuilts, dye-trace or CCTV reports, or correspondence between LA County Sanitation Districts and the City of Rancho Palos Verdes.
• Any eyewitness memory of the corridor from the 1950s through the 1980s — former residents, contractors, County or City staff, ACLAD engineers.

CPRA request templates for the first two are ready to send. Email the Foundation through the contribute form if you have standing to file and want to pick one up.

Contact

The Foundation's editor email is published on the contribute page once the backend is deployed. Until then, correspondence should go through the sign page.

All correspondence is archived. Named parties receive a reply within 10 business days. Rebuttals to anything published on this site are treated as priority.