Abalone CoveEra 7 of 10 · The Story
The Shore Club fight
1929 to 1972
Box score
| Year | Actor | Event | Parcel / APN | Outcome | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1929 | Abalone Shore Club | Operations begin | — | Ray Wallace (Disney Imagineer) illustrated pamphlet | Shore Club archives |
| ~1950s | Edna M. Hall | Wrote "Cottages by the Sea" | — | Community document | community record |
| 1971 | Filiorum Corp / Abalone Shore Club | Lease documentation | Filiorum / Shore Club parcels | Preceded the 1972 proposal | 1971 lease |
| June 1972 | Karl Rodi (Beverly Hills attorney) | Proposal: 138-170 condominiums at Portuguese Point | — | Developer initiative | Karshner file |
| June 1972 | Dick Fitzgerald (LA County Dept of Beaches) | Counter-proposal: shoreline park | — | Park alternative | 1972 fact sheet |
| June 1972 | Dick Karshner (Abalone Shore Club President) | Organized community vote | — | Community chose park, not condos | WPBCA vote letter |
| 1972 | Community / LA County | Abalone Cove Shoreline Park created | Shoreline Park parcels (coastal) | Park outcome | County Parks record |
The Shore Club
The Abalone Shore Club, operating from 1929, was a members' beach club set among the coastal cottages and farms of what was not yet Rancho Palos Verdes. Ray Wallace — a Disney Imagineer — illustrated its pamphlet. Edna M. Hall's "Cottages by the Sea" captured the community the Shore Club served. The Club held a recorded lease from the Filiorum Corporation on coastal parcels that trace, by chain of title, to the same 1930 Filiorum grant deed that incorporated Declarations 100 and 101. The surviving corporate archive pages, the 1971-72 board documents, the Karshner Proposal itself, and the fact sheet the community prepared are in the /evidence/#shore-club folder.
The proposal
In June 1972, Beverly Hills attorney Karl Rodi came to the community with a proposal to build between 138 and 170 condominiums on Portuguese Point. Dick Fitzgerald, then at the Los Angeles County Department of Beaches, proposed, in parallel, that the coastal strip at Abalone Cove be preserved as a shoreline park. The two proposals were incompatible. The Shore Club's president, Dick Karshner, organized a community vote to choose between them.
The community chose the park.
The chain of documents in the shore-club folder — the WPBCA condos-vs-park letter in five pages, the 1971-72 board docs, the Filiorum lease — records what that organizing looked like. A hand-counted vote in a small coastal community, supported by a county parks official who had been paying attention, turned what is now Abalone Cove Shoreline Park into public open space instead of a condominium tower. The Abalone Cove Ecological Reserve, added later in partnership with California Fish & Game, sits on the same parcels.
Why this era matters now
Fifty-four years later, in April 2024, the City of Rancho Palos Verdes adopted a Housing Element that rezoned a vacant 1.56-acre lot at 0 Clipper Road from RS-4 to RM-22 — capacity for approximately 16 units on what was, in the 1978 Coastal Specific Plan, a habitat area "worthy of preserving." Forty-three speakers addressed the City Council at the April 16, 2024 adoption meeting.
The 1972 fight was not about 16 units. It was about 138 to 170. The community won by a wide margin. The 2024 proposal is smaller, the rezoning is legally different, and the statutory landscape has changed (SB 9, SB 330, the Builder's Remedy). But the question on the table is the same one the community answered in June 1972: are the high-density alternatives to what this coast already is better than what this coast already is?
The answer in 1972 was on record. Era 9 is the question being asked again.