Home / Neighborhoods / Ocean Park
Santa Monica's southern beach district, between downtown and the Venice line, built on bungalows and organized around Main Street.
About the Neighborhood
Ocean Park occupies the southern end of Santa Monica, running from roughly Pico Boulevard down to the Los Angeles city line at the Venice edge and inland to Lincoln Boulevard. It began as farmland that W. D. Vawter started converting to housing after arriving in 1875; Abbot Kinney and Francis G. Ryan then acquired the beachfront in the early 1890s and named it Ocean Park, though accounts differ on the exact year. The institutions followed quickly — a post office in July 1889, a fire company in February 1900, a bank organized in March 1902. Buyers searching Ocean Park Santa Monica homes for sale are shopping the oldest continuously residential quarter of the city.
The housing stock is why people come. The California bungalow is the district's base layer, and the Third Street Neighborhood Historic District — designated on July 1, 1990 as Santa Monica's first historic district — preserves the clearest surviving stretch of it: thirty-eight contributing buildings between Ocean Park Boulevard and Hill Street on Second, Third and Beach Streets, built between 1875 and 1930. Twenty-seven of them are bungalows from 1903 to 1915, four date to the late 1800s, and Spanish Colonial Revival bungalow courts from the mid-1920s and early 1930s fill out the group. The 1893 Hostetter House stands among them.
Zoning in Ocean Park is unusually fine-grained, and it matters more here than in most Santa Monica neighborhoods. The municipal code gives the district its own chapter and five separate designations: OP1 for single-unit blocks, OPD for the duplex fabric including the Copeland Court walk street, and OP2, OP3 and OP4 stepping up through roughly two thousand, fifteen hundred and high-density parcel-area-per-unit standards, with OP4 permitting three to four stories at thirty-five feet. Transition rules cut heights and require landscaped buffers where a denser district abuts a quieter one. Two lots on the same block can carry very different rights.
The amusement era shaped the district and then left it. The Ocean Park Pier ran from 1926 to 1956 and was rebuilt as Pacific Ocean Park, a twenty-eight-acre nautical amusement park opened on July 28, 1958 by CBS and Santa Anita Park to compete with Disneyland; it drew 1,190,000 visitors by early January 1959 and closed on October 6, 1967, undone in part by a 1965 urban renewal program that demolished blocks and closed streets leading to it. The derelict pier became the surf break behind Dogtown before demolition between October 1974 and February 1975. Only pilings remain.
Daily life now runs on Main Street, which extends from Pico Boulevard to Rose Avenue three blocks from the sand, with restaurants, cafés, boutiques, a Sunday farmers market south of Ocean Park Boulevard and Frank Gehry's Edgemar complex. The California Heritage Museum occupies the first Roy Jones House, an early Sumner P. Hunt design moved to Main Street in 1977 and landmarked in 1979. Ocean Park Boulevard itself was rebuilt as a complete green street from Lincoln Boulevard to Neilson Way, with more than a hundred new trees, bio-swales, wider sidewalks, new medians and bike lanes.
Life Here
Pico Boulevard to Rose Avenue, three blocks off the sand: restaurants, cafés, boutiques, a Sunday farmers market south of Ocean Park Boulevard, and Frank Gehry's Edgemar. The district's errand street and its social spine.
Santa Monica's first historic district, designated July 1, 1990: thirty-eight contributing buildings from 1875 to 1930, including twenty-seven bungalows built between 1903 and 1915 and Spanish Colonial Revival bungalow courts.
OP1, OPD, OP2, OP3 and OP4 divide the neighborhood block by block, from single-unit streets and the Copeland Court walk street up to three- and four-story multi-unit development, with transition rules where they meet.
Education
SMMUSD boundaries in Ocean Park have moved recently: John Muir Elementary students were dispersed in 2022 after mold and water damage closed the 6th Street campus, SMASH relocated to the Obama Center, and the modernized campus reopens as Ocean Park School House for the 2026–27 year. Confirm current assignment, campus location and any district permit policy with SMMUSD before relying on it.
Common Questions
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Ocean Park rewards knowing the block and the zoning district. Tell me what you want — a bungalow, a duplex, a walk street — and I will show you what actually trades there.
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