by Laura Garber
The Hermosa Beach Museum’s newest exhibit, “Beaches, Boundaries, and Belonging in the South Bay,” explores how the beach city redefined itself from the 1920s through the 1970s.
The exhibit traces the city’s evolving narrative through Chamber of Commerce pamphlets, local newspaper clippings and oral histories. The exhibit also identifies narratives that Hermosa didn’t follow.
“It was never set in stone that Hermosa would become the way it is today,” said Ryan Basford, the museum’s program and education manager.
When Hermosa became a city in 1907 there were varying efforts to define it. Would it be a middle-class residential? Upper-class? Or would it be a carnivalesque tourist town like neighboring Redondo Beach with their historic Lightning Racer rollercoaster on the pier.
The California Eagle, a Black newspaper in the exhibit carries a real estate ad promoting California as a health and recreation utopia. The exhibit shares the oral history of a Japanese-American woman from Hermosa who was sent to an internment camp during World War II.
“She talks about having a fairly typical, positive, childhood in Hermosa and Redondo, then goes into the horrors of internment during World War II, and her experience of coming back, finding that things had been stolen from her house and how she slowly started to rebuild, as many Japanese-American families did,” Basford said. “If [internment camps] didn’t happen, we might see a more diverse Hermosa and a more diverse South Bay.”
The exhibit rounds out the story of Hermosa Beach with the current work of Culture Club South Bay, founded by Allison Hales in 2020. It promotes diversity and inclusion in beach activities, mainly in Manhattan Beach. The organization has plans to expand to Hermosa Beach in 2026.
The museum’s opening reception will be held Thursday, October 23, from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. The exhibit runs through January, 2026. ER
