Pacific Beach Club

Pacific Beach Club was a planned resort in Orange County, California for African Americans. The beachfront clubhouse, bathhouse, and pavilion were planned in 1925 and construction nearing completion the next year when the property burned down under mysterious circumstances. The resort was located outside Huntington Beach.

The Pacific Beach Club was intended to be the "grandest of escapes" and to fulfill the dream of a resort where black people who were restricted from most of the California's beaches "could enjoy the sand and surf". Because of segregation black people in Los Angeles and Orange County were limited to the "Ink Well" in Santa Monica and Bruce's Beach in Manhattan Beach (until the property was seized in an eminent domain after protest from the growing white community surrounding it).

Board members for the resort included "a Who's Who of black business and civic leaders in Los Angeles at the time" including Joseph B. Bass, editor of the California Eagle; Frederick Roberts, the first black state legislator in California; and E. Burton Ceruti, a founder of the Los Angeles branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People as well as a legal adviser to the group.

The isolated location for the club could be reached by driving the Pacific Coast Highway, "or riding the Pacific Electric railway from Los Angeles to Huntington Beach and walking a mile". Membership was initially advertised at $50 for an associate membership and $75 for a life membership. A white attorney from Los Angeles, Hal R. Clark, bought the land and leased it to the club.

Assistant archivist Chris Jepsen at the Orange County Archives (part of the clerk-recorder's office) and a Fresno State history professor, Daniel Cady, have been researching the property's history. Advertisements for the membership-only resort "promised a bathhouse serving 2,000 people, a clubhouse with "an atmosphere of ease and sociality," a recreational hall, an amusement zone "with all the concessions you will find on any beach" and more than 200 tent houses." "The California Eagle, a pioneering black-owned Los Angeles newspaper of the time", described it as "the beginning of the very foremost step of progress that the colored people have ever attempted," and its opening was scheduled for February 12, 1926 to mark Abraham Lincoln's birthday.

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