May Rindge held onto Malibu as long as she could. 

The widow of Frederick Hastings Rindge, who purchased thousands of acres in the Santa Monica Mountains in 1892, May eventually became known as the “Queen of Malibu” for her fierce opposition to anything that would bring more people to her coastal empire, including railroads, roads and homesteaders. In short, she wanted to keep the pristine coastline and the chaparral hillsides to herself. 

But all of her legal fights cost money, and Rindge started selling land to family members and renting out beachfront lots to celebrities. In the end, even that wasn’t enough. Rindge declared bankruptcy in 1936, several years after losing a legal battle that allowed the Pacific Coast Highway to cut through Malibu, providing some of the first public access to the area. 

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As Rindge’s grip on the land loosened, all hell broke loose. Suddenly, vast tracts of untouched land were available to developers, just as the state’s burgeoning highway system seemingly made it possible to bulldoze through anywhere (mountain ranges included) to further development. In response, a decadeslong effort began to protect the Santa Monica Mountains as a national park, rather than see it carved into a series of freeways and housing tracts.

A general view from Inspiration Loop at Will Rogers State Historic Park in Pacific Palisades, Calif., on Nov. 20, 2025.

FILE: The bridge at Paramount Ranch in Calabasas, Calif., on March 5, 2024.

Proposals to turn the Santa Monica Mountains into a national park (or, at the least, a national forest) were floated as early as the 1920s, including by May Rindge herself as a method to prevent anyone else from moving in nearby. But it wasn’t until the 1960s and 1970s that these efforts really gained momentum, motivated in part by other mountain-dwelling homeowners, leading to the proposal of legislation that would have formally created Toyon National Park in the Santa Monica Mountains.

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By then, the state park system had begun acquiring and conserving some chunks of Malibu (like Will Rogers State Park, deeded to the state by the actor’s widow in the 1940s). But there just weren’t enough resources available for state and local sources to snap up pieces of land for conservation before developers. By 1972, an estimated 90% of vacant land in the portion of the Santa Monica Mountains in the city of Los Angeles was owned by 10 individuals or corporations, and “prospects for a large regional park there are dim,” according to an LA Times article from the time. 

The state, meanwhile, owned more than 16,000 acres of the mountains’ open space, “an investment that bureaucrats point at with pride........

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