Life and Relationship Coaching near Santa Monica, CA

On Dec. 31, 2028, the Santa Monica Airport will close for good. The next day, the large 227-acre property that’s served as an iconic airport along the West Coast for over a century will officially be redesignated — not as private property, but as park space.

It’s taken a lot to get to this point. For nearly half the time the airport (one of the oldest in the country) has been operational, the city and some local residents have fought to shut it down. Now, after about 50 years of discussions, litigation and a ballot measure, a vision for the site’s future is finally taking shape.

The city of Santa Monica received a $499,149 grant from the Los Angeles County Regional Park and Open Space District this week to fund the planning and design process for the first 20 acres of park space at the Santa Monica Airport site. The grant is part of a broader chunk of over $78 million issued to cities, nonprofits and public agencies across the county to improve parks and other open spaces. The grant money, the largest in the park district’s history, stems from Measure A, a property tax for parks and open space passed by Los Angeles County voters in 2016.

In park-poor greater Los Angeles, the shift is significant. Currently, the airport has no commercial service and is primarily used by small, privately-owned planes. In 2023, the airport saw 49,000 flight operations, with most of those (41,886) coming from small propeller planes. More than 2,000 jet flights also used the airport that year.

The strip of land along the city’s eastern border was first used as an airport back in 1919, although there are some reports of it being used as a landing strip even earlier. It was formally named Clover Field in 1923, and three years later, the city purchased the airport land from Los Angeles and renamed it the Santa Monica Airport. The Douglas Aircraft Company opened alongside the airport and was a major defense contractor during World War II.

The airport and Douglas Aircraft Company played a key role in the city’s development, leading to a housing boom as families moved to the area for the roughly 44,000 jobs at Douglas. The company even built the historic Aero Theatre so employees would have a place to watch movies at odd hours after work.

But the airport’s role in transforming Santa Monica into a suburban-feeling community ultimately contributed to its downfall. Aerial photos of the city in 1924 show an airport landing strip mostly surrounded by open land dotted with homes, with the more built-out city of Los Angeles in the distance. Today, the airport is surrounded by residential neighborhoods, and the land has become tremendously valuable. Per Zillow, the average home value for the city of Santa Monica is now nearly $1.7 million, whereas neighboring Los Angeles’ average home value is under $950,000.

In 1958, the city declined Douglas’ request to extend the airport’s runway, citing concerns from local residents. Douglas moved its operations to Long Beach, but the airport continued, with growing concerns from residents regarding the noise and whether an airport should be operating in such close proximity to homes. Just down the beach, the former community of Surfridge is now a gated ghost town at the edge of Los Angeles International Airport, bulldozed simply for being too close to the runway. Regulations to restrict airport operations began in the 1970s and 1980s and ramped up after Los Angeles residents sued Santa Monica in the 1990s over “adverse health impacts and nuisance” from the airport, according to the city.

In 2014, residents voted 60% in favor of a ballot measure that would prohibit new development on airport land except for parks and open space, “until the voters approve limits on the uses and development that may occur on the land.” The ballot measure also affirmed the city’s authority to close the airport.

Three years later, the city reached a settlement with the Federal Aviation Administration to close the airport effective Dec. 31, 2028.

That means a huge piece of land (nearly 3.5% of Santa Monica’s entire area) will become a clean slate for planning all at once, a rare opportunity for a Southern California city. There’s also a campaign to use some of the site for much-needed affordable housing in addition to the park.

Earlier this month, the city released a new draft framework for the conversion project, informed by over 80 public meetings and thousands of online survey responses. The framework proposes splitting the site into eight districts, each with its own theme and purpose. Examples include an “immersive nature” district, described as “a calm ecological landscape on the western portion of the site prioritizing native habitat and biodiversity,” and an “urban edge,” described as “a connected district along the north side of the site that extends the park into the surrounding neighborhood through adaptive reuse of existing structures.” Other districts focus on arts and culture, active sports and a central lawn area.

The city is soliciting public feedback on the plans through April 26.

In more ways than one, this is a love story, and it begins in 1970.

Paul Cummins, headmaster of a Santa Monica elementary school called St. Augustine-by-the-Sea, was in the market for a music teacher and a colleague suggested he call a Rustic Canyon pianist named Mary Ann.

Mary Ann wasn’t interested in the job but agreed to host a get-together at her home and introduce Cummins to two teachers. But Cummins didn’t want the other two. He wanted Mary Ann.

“I’ve just seen the best teacher I’ve ever seen in my life,” he told a friend after visiting Mary Ann and hearing about her teaching techniques.

Cummins talked Mary Ann into taking the job, and before long, she joined the faculty of a brand-new middle school Cummins co-founded by the name of Crossroads.

That was in 1971.

But 1972 was a year of new beginnings, too. That was the year Paul and Mary Ann got married.

Fifty-five years later, Mr. and Mrs. Cummins live together in the house where they met. And Mary Ann is still teaching at Crossroads, among other places.

“She’s 93 and she’s got the energy of a teenager,” Paul Cummins, 88, said of his wife. “She’s kind of a freak of nature.”

I can attest to that after spending several hours with her on Tuesday, hustling to keep up as she taught at two schools and then hurried home to greet her private students.

At St. Anne School in Santa Monica, I watched Cummins harness the squirmy energy of second-graders wielding xylophone mallets. She’s been using the Orff Schulwerk Approach for decades, in which students create music in something of a percussion-driven jamboree of singing, dancing and moving.

“Two, three, four,” Cummins counted down, and her eager little ensemble broke into song: “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.”

When the session was done, Cummins, who bakes more cookies than Famous Amos, sent each of her students out the door with a treat.

Next stop, Crossroads School, where the level of musicianship rose several notches. A high school keyboard class came first, followed by a music theory class, and Cummins handled both like a conductor leading an orchestra, showering her students with “bravos.”

And then I followed Cummins home to watch her give lessons to two of her 18 or so private students. One, a 7-year-old girl named Birdie, was accompanied by her mother, who sat at the same piano stool a generation ago as a student.

“Look, there is something genetically askew,” said Emily Cummins Polk, the youngest of Mary Ann Cummins’ four daughters. “She has incredible genes, but you can’t discount the fact that she’s up at 6 and going to yoga. She’s active seven days a week … and I don’t think she has any intention of slowing down.”

I told Polk her mother seemed equally adept working with second-graders and high school students, and that her age does not appear to be something anyone is conscious of, including the teacher. That’s partly because — especially with the advanced classical musicians — teacher and students are speaking the same language. But there’s more to it than that.

“I think it’s because she has so many passions … and still approaches the world with the curiosity of a child,” Polk said. “If she sees something in pop culture that the kids relate to, she has to understand it. She’s in every world, whether it’s politics, movies, yoga, gourmet cooking, the Dodgers. … She just has a crazy lust for life.”

Polk said that when she was a child, her parents were plugged into a pipeline of international musicians who needed a place to stay while studying in the U.S. They opened their home, for months at a time and sometimes longer, Polk said, creating a vast extended family that has kept close ties.

Anna Cummins, another of the four daughters, said music was a tool her mother used to teach “life lessons, way beyond piano or music theory.”

“She weaves in literature and philosophy and emphasizes the point that music should make you a more whole person,” Anna said. “It’s not about being a concert pianist. It’s about ... connecting to something spiritual that’s bigger than yourself.”

When she was a young violinist, Anna said, her mother taught her that to keep improving, she’d have to set her ego aside and accept mistakes as part of the bargain. Anna’s daughter, now 13, takes lessons from her grandmother.

It should be noted that Paul Cummins is no slacker himself. The longtime teacher, headmaster and arts advocate is still involved with schools he helped launch after Crossroads, including Camino Nuevo Charter and the Tree Academy. And he’s the founder of P.S. Arts, a nonprofit funded initially by musician Herb Alpert to help fill the gap in arts education for thousands of public school students.

A published poet, Cummins writes daily, and as he describes it, that means he is sometimes “wallowing in nostalgia” or “angsting over the future.” But the shape of time is different for a musician, he said, and he once wrote a poem that captured the essence of his wife’s ageless grace.

“I find myself staring across the studio, for forty-three years now: her focus, always, in the moment, riveted upon her students.”

Gina Coletti, director of the Elizabeth Mandel Music Institute at Crossroads, told me many of those students graduated to elite music schools and went on to professional careers, even as Mary Ann Cummins shifted her focus to the next generation, and the next, and the next. Teaching is “like an elixir of youth” for Cummins, said Coletti, who wasn’t surprised to hear that it took a bit of arm-twisting for Cummins to open her door to me.

“I think it’s rare to find somebody who does the work without their ego involved,” Coletti said. “And I think that’s what Mary Ann does. It’s about the music. It’s always about the students.”

Two years ago, Cummins was named to the Steinway & Sons Teacher Hall of Fame. Later this year, a new performing arts center will open at Crossroads, and the recital hall will be called The Mary Ann.

When the music theory class came to a close Tuesday at Crossroads, a senior named Lola Goetz asked me if she could say something about Cummins.

“I wouldn’t be … the person I am, the musician I am, without Mary Ann,” said Goetz, a classical and jazz musician and composer who began taking lessons with Cummins in first grade.

“Would you say that if I weren’t in the room?” Cummins asked.

“Yes,” said Goetz, who has several college options in front of her. “She’s so modest, but I want you … to know that she’s like the best, literally.”

Polk told me she’s often asked if her mother ever slows down.

“And the way I see it,” said Polk, “is that she just doesn’t have time to slow down.”

Music, Mary Ann Cummins told me, is language “that reaches deeper into you than other languages. It gets to places in you.” In the theory class, she and her students took turns at the keyboard, trying to break down the language of Chopin’s music.

It seemed to me that in asking what Chopin was thinking 200 years ago in a particular composition, she was indirectly asking her students what they’re thinking now. About themselves, about the infinite expanse of creativity, about the power of music to cross borders, outlast wars, span centuries and still inspire.

Cummins was in the moment, time suspended, her focus riveted on her students.

“It feeds me,” she says. “Music is my life, and I can’t not do it.”

steve.lopez@latimes.com

Health officials have warned people in Southern California about unsafe swimming conditions at Los Angeles-area beaches as the region grapples with scorching and dangerous temperatures.

The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health issued warnings advising beachgoers to avoid swimming, surfing, and playing in the ocean waters stretching from Malibu, California, to Santa Monica, California, due to high bacteria levels.

Recent water samples taken at several beaches found bacteria exceeding health standards, the department said March 16 in a notice on its website and on social media. Excessive bacteria in water can increase the risk of illness.

Bacteria levels can increase due to rainstorm runoff, which carries contaminants to the ocean, the department's warning said.

Which Southern California area beaches are affected?

The warnings issued by the L.A. County Health Department apply primarily to areas near creeks, storm drains, and runoff outlets, where bacteria levels tend to spike. Current ocean water use warnings apply to these locations:

The warnings have been in effect at some beaches for more than three weeks.

Several previously affected areas, including inner Cabrillo Beach in San Pedro, California, and the Herondo Street storm drain area in Hermosa Beach, California, have been cleared after new samples showed bacteria levels back within state standards, The Desert Sun, part of the USA TODAY Network, reported earlier this month.

Health officials are concerned about the public entering water over the coming days as Southern California faces a major-to-extreme heat risk through March 19, with warm overnight temperatures offering little relief. The Los Angeles County Public Health Department has issued extreme heat warnings through Friday, March 20.

Much of southwest California broke temperature records on Tuesday, March 17, and there are "no significant changes in the forecast the rest of the week," the National Weather Service said.

When could the beach warnings be lifted?

Health agencies monitor coastal ocean water quality year-round, and the L.A. County Health Department will lift warnings when follow‑up testing confirms bacteria levels have dropped back within California safety standards.

Contributing: James Ward, The Desert Sun

Mike Snider is a national trending news reporter for USA TODAY. You can follow him on Threads, Bluesky, X and email him at & & & msnider@usatoday.com.