Community Corner

May K. Rindge, a Fighter to the End

A mural on the wall of the Levi's store goes back to a time when the Rindge Dynasty ruled.

Tremendous increase in the value of land has taken place on the Malibu, which once changed hands because of the failure of its second owner to pay a grocery bill of less than $1,000. The price of $10 an acre paid by Frederick Hastings Rindge in 1890 was thought ridiculously high. Now $5,000 an acre, or nearly $100,000,000 for the entire rancho, is held to be a conservative estimate of its worth.

—LA Times,  April 8, 1928

The newLevi's store at Malibu Village, next to and a few doors down from , has a pleasant surprise on the back wall. Painted in living color and in fine detail at about 10 feet by 20 feet is an illustrated map/mural of the Santa Monica Bay from Palos Verdes to , and Venice to the mountains.

This map was copied from a fancy sales brochure called "Rancho Malibu: An Historic Offering.” It was produced by May K. Rindge’s Marblehead Land Co. sometime between the 1923 Supreme Court decision to allow the Roosevelt Highway (eventual Pacific Coast Highway) to go through Mrs. Rindge's private Rancho Malibu property and her bankruptcy declaration in 1935.

There is a very long story behind that map, and it would make a good movie with the likes of Minnie Driver, Julia Roberts or Helena Bonham-Carter portraying the 40-something Mrs. Rindge.

A schoolteacher from Michigan, Mrs. Rindge came to California with her Boston Brahmin husband Frederick Hastings Rindge in the 1880s. She inherited the entire estate when her husband died unexpectedly of a diabetic coma in 1905.

Mrs. Rindge could have cashed out the $22 million Rancho Malibu estate, and lived like a Sultaness anywhere she wanted, but she didn’t. She remained where she was, and took over the business while raising three children on her own.

Beginning in 1907, Mrs. Rindge fought a long string of court battles against the cities of Santa Monica and Venice, the county of Los Angeles and the state of California to maintain her private property and block access to federal homesteaders, squatters, hunters, beachcombers and a county road—then a state highway. Mrs. Rindge wasn’t going to win, but she wasn’t going to quit.

There is an entire chapter of the history of the Los Angeles law firm O’Melveny and Myers dedicated to Mrs. Rindge and the endless checks she wrote to the firm to fight those endless lawsuits.

The battle went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which made a landmark eminent-domain decision in 1923—Rindge Co. v. L.A. County—that allowed the county, and later the state, to roll 21 miles of highway across the Rancho Malibu.

The Supreme Court essentially said, “Yes, it’s your private property. No, no one really has the right to build a road through there. But tough beans, there is a greater public good.”

So that was that. Once the highest court in the land gives you the thumbs down, there isn’t anywhere else to go.

By 1925, Mrs. Rindge hadn’t conceded to the inevitable, as she was still in court, appealing every decision made by any court on any level. In 1925, Mrs. Rindge refused to accept a check for $98,623 ($1.15 million in today's dollars) as a county payment for a strip of land 80 feet wide and 19 miles long that Superior Court Judge Frederick Valentine ordered condemned for the state highway.

As the state moved forward with plans to build the highway through the Rancho Malibu, Mrs. Rindge continued with her husband’s plans to develop the property into the American Riviera.

TheLA Timesreported on July 29, 1925 that Mrs. Rindge hired Mark Daniels: “… former assistant Secretary of the Interior and architect who landscaped Yosemite and other national parks has been retained to zone and subdivide the Malibu rancho, according to an announcement made yesterday by Mrs. May K. Rindge, president of the Marblehead Land Company.”

Construction of the two-lane paved highway through Malibu began the next year. The Malibu Pier was extended also in 1926 to accommodate a pleasure yacht—the 99-foot Malibu—purchased by the Rindges and the Adamsons. A Ted Geary yacht in the late 1920s was the equivalent of the Lurssen yachts that Larry Ellison sometimes parks off Malibu these days. This was the symbol of a family that was stratospherically wealthy.

The LA Times in 1928 estimated the value of the Rancho Malibu at $100 million. The online Inflation Calculator returns a value of $12.41 as the modern equivalent of one dollar in 1928, which means that the Rancho Malibu fully developed was worth the equivalent of $1.24 billion. That’s quite a jump in value for a property Frederick Hastings Rindge had paid $330,000 for less than 40 years earlier.

But reading theLA Times, you get the feeling that Mrs. Rindge gladly would have written off that tremendous wealth to retain the sanctity of the Rancho Malibu. Frederick Rindge came to southern California in the 1880s with about $3 million to invest, and he invested wisely in Union Oil, Southern California Edison and property from northern California to Colombia.

The Rancho Malibu was the Rindge’s hobby farm and their home. They wanted to keep it that way, but Manifest Destiny was against them. There is no date on the Marblehead Land Co. sales brochure for the Rancho Malibu, but there is a fair bit of attitude, and salesmanship, within. The history part of the brochure ends with some of that attitude.

“With the courage of a pioneer, she maintained the longest, bitterest and most dramatic contest of its kind in all California history to prevent dismemberment of her estate," the brochure states. "The State of California, finally obtained a right-of-way to construct the present Roosevelt State Highway through the Malibu Ranch, which was the first intrusion into the domain."

The brochure continues, "Upon completion of this modern highway, the public was at last privileged to drive through this beautiful Rancho. Soon after followed the beginning of the world-famous Malibu Beach Colony where stars of the screen, producers and directors have constructed their homes on the strand in the so-called moving picture colony, and so the Rancho Malibu’s traditional isolation came to an end.”

The historic offering included everything from “city lots” to “640-acre estates.” The brochure lists vital statistics like temperature and distance from important points, and includes photos of Amalfi, Sorrento and other famous Mediterranean coastal cities as it makes a bold statement: “With its twenty two miles of ocean frontage and magnificent building sites, the Rancho Malibu is immediately classified with the grandeur of famous European watering places.”

That map/mural is on the wall of the Levi's store due to the efforts of Nate White, the store’s design director.

“I found the image while researching Malibu In the archives,” White said. “It was an obvious choice to include in a Levi's community store. Its amazing coloring and nod to the history of Malibu has been an amazing conversation starter, and we are proud to have it in our store.”

Two LA-based artists, Ruben Huante and Al Evans, did the reproduction on the wall of the Levi’s store.

In the end, the best-laid plans of Mrs. Rindge were turned to dust by the Black Friday stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression it triggered. Somehow, all the land, stocks, businesses and other assets Mrs. Rindge controlled in the Rindge Estate and the Marblehead Land Co, crumbled to nothing, and by 1935 she was bankrupt.

On March 12, 1941 TheLA Times reported the death of Mrs. Rindge, and the abruptness of her will.

Written entirely by hand, Mrs. Rindge's will states, “In the name of God, Amen, I May K. Rindge, being of sound mind, wish to dispose of my property in the following manner, if I have anything left. To my daughter Rhoda Rindge Adamson and my grandson Frederick H. Rindge II, who has lived with me since before he was 2 years old and is like a son to me, I bequeath all I have share and share alike. And to all others who would lay claim to my property I give one dollar.”