Unlocking Our Beach

Though lounging on the beach is one of the primary associations people have with Southern California, along with surfing, skateboarding, and sky-scraping palm trees, not all of the coast is publicly accessible. The Environmental Center of San Diego, an environmental nonprofit founded in 2015, is doing its part to change that. Their current big project lies in La Jolla, where a small cliff-lined pocket beach at the end of Princess Street sits abandoned — at least for now.

The beach wasn’t always this quiet. A Native Kumeyaay trail ran across the bluff and the public could access this cobble-strewn swath lying between La Jolla Cove and La Jolla Shores Beach starting in 1932, according to Melinda Merryweather, a well-known local advocate for beach access.

That ended in the late 1970s. Beach-goers would have to cross a property on Princess Street, and the owner blocked off the trail while expanding a Mediterranean-style home. This was in contravention to the permit for the expansion, which required beach access be maintained. The California Coastal Commission voted to find the owner in violation of the terms of the permit, but California’s attorney general did not take action. The house passed through different owners’ hands, but no progress was made on securing public access to the beach.

That changed in 2016, when Ure Kretowicz, a major San Diego real estate developer, and his wife, Dianne, the current owners of the Princess Street property, exhausted their court appeals to modify the public access terms of the permit and were forced to allow foot traffic through their land to the beach.

The Environmental Center of San Diego arrived somewhat late to the battle for access on Princess Street, but the center ended up with a critical responsibility: building and maintaining a trail to the beach. Pam Heatherington, co-founder and board member of the center, explains that many environmental organizations like the Surfrider Foundation and San Diego Coastkeeper “don’t have provisions to own property. We do … to protect public access where feasible. … There was nobody willing to take it up, the City of San Diego apparently wasn’t interested, so we came in and we took on the project.”

Pam has a lot of experience in environmental activism and nonprofit administration, but most of it in San Luis Obispo, where she lived for years. Once she returned to her hometown of San Diego, she resolved to start an environmental advocacy organization to serve the city. “There’s always the case … that not every organization can pick up every effort that needs to be addressed,” she says. “I reached out to a lot of activists that I’ve worked with over the years, got their input, and they felt, like I did, that some things fall between the cracks that other organizations can’t pick up.” While the center is involved in a variety of projects, for this one Pam utilized her knowledge of environmental law to raise awareness of the illegal blockage of public coastal land. In California, all land below the mean high tide line is public land and must be publicly accessible.

Preparing for construction of the trail began in 2019, and the necessary work of getting permits, conducting studies, and finalizing design is finally wrapping up. “We’re going to be entering Phase Three, which is the construction phase of the Princess Street Coastal Access Trail, hopefully by the end of the year, beginning of 2025, and hopefully have the trail open by 2026.” The trail will include ship’s ladder stairs, which according to Pam, were designed to be as unobtrusive as possible and to avoid blocking the view.

Once the beach is open, it’ll be another means for beachgoers to access waters of the Matlahuayl State Marine Reserve, a popular area noted for its high biodiversity. “I’m standing on the shoulders of many activists that made this happen,” Pam says. “It was a huge community effort, over time, to get to this point.”