Living the California Dream by Alison Rose Jefferson

Author:Alison Rose Jefferson [Jefferson, Alison Rose]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC001000 Social Science / Ethnic Studies / African American Studies, HIS036140 History / United States / State & Local / West (ak, Ca, Co, Hi, Id, Mt, Nv, Ut, Wy)
Publisher: Nebraska

Parkridge Country Club and Its Public Memory

The Parkridge Country Club project finally went into bankruptcy, with creditors taking charge of the property to protect their interests in early 1929. In a meeting at the Parkridge clubhouse in July 1929, the receiver presented a plan the bankruptcy court approved, whereby the facilities would “revert back to the original and new members of the club, should they wish to consider it.” As an Independent article about the meeting made clear, the original and new members being offered this opportunity were “those of the ‘caucasian race’ [as] explicitly . . . set forth in the original bylaws of the club.” Eventually the property was sold to satisfy the creditors’ claims, after remaining in receivership into the 1930s. The boom of the 1920s was fading fast, and one of the most dramatic economic downturns in American history was beginning. Many country clubs around the nation were hit hard by the Great Depression, with this industry only beginning to recover in the post–World War II years.86

For the next thirty-five years, until it was demolished in 1964/65, the club property’s ownership changed hands several times. Alongside twists and turns of the Parkridge’s occupancy and use, contestation and financial difficulties continued into the 1930s and later. The building also faced periods of vacancy and neglect. Mostly trespassers inhabited the clubhouse, and a speakeasy took over the building, serving a white clientele until Prohibition’s end in 1933. The site was considered for a California state prison for first-time offenders in the early 1930s, and in 1931 the property was acquired from receivership to transform the building and grounds into an elite military academy. The school was named Pershing Military Academy in honor of U.S. Army General John J. Pershing (1860–1948), but this venture was unsuccessful.87

After 1937 the clubhouse became a sanitarium on and off until it finally closed in 1961. The once-lavish leisure palace was empty and deteriorating when its new owner, the Parkridge Development Company, took it over in 1964. Renaming the area Cresta Verde, the new owners built 522 homes and a new 18-hole golf course on 252 acres of the site. As part of the new subdivision, a new clubhouse was built to replace the original structure. The new owners determined it more cost-effective to build a new structure, instead of repairing the older Parkridge Country Club building.88

As historian Lawrence B. DeGraaf notes in a 1970 article on black Angelenos, the Parkridge and other similar leisure destinations, mostly in beach areas, were places where African Americans attempted “to join the urbanization of outlying areas” for “new housing and long range opportunities for residential expansion and race enterprise.” According to DeGraaf, the endeavors of African Americans to join the 1920s housing boom in suburban areas was thoroughly rebuffed. In that conclusion he includes the Parkridge, not by name, but as a white country club in Corona, between Riverside and Los Angeles, taken over by blacks in 1928 as an interracial recreation area that failed for lack of patronage.

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