Bruce's Beach

Willa and Charles Bruce bought this lot in February 1912 for $1,225 and built a resort for Black families, who were turned away from every other beach on this coast. It had a lodge, a dining hall, a dance floor, changing rooms and showers. By 1916 it was thriving, and other Black families were buying nearby.

Manhattan Beach answered. A local real estate agent proposed using the 1909 Park and Playground Act to condemn the land for a park, and in 1924 the city's board of trustees voted to take thirty lots by eminent domain. Five of those lots carried homes, and all five belonged to Black owners. The Bruces spent most of what the resort had earned fighting it, and lost. The city paid them $14,500 in 1932, a year after Charles died. Willa died in 1934. The park the condemnation was supposedly for was not built until the 1960s.

The land came back. The park was renamed in 2007, the state cleared the legal obstruction in 2021, and on July 20, 2022 Los Angeles County handed the deed to the Bruces' great-grandsons, widely described as the first return of its kind by an American government. The terms let the family require the county to buy it back at market value, and they did. That sale closed on January 30, 2023, for nearly twenty million dollars.