A story I wanted to write, but poet Dana Goodyear beat me to it, for the New Yorker..
The gray-shingled house belongs to the entertainment mogul David Geffen. In 2005, after losing a long legal fight, he opened the path to the public, and last Sunday the Los Angeles Urban Rangers
convened some thirty people there for a beach tour. The rangers wore
Army-green shorts and badges decorated with a highway clover and a palm
tree, and some had binoculars around their necks. One of them, an
art-history graduate student at U.C.L.A., had been a National Parks
Service Ranger for ten years.
The safari, as the rangers called it, was an idea based on the work of Jenny Price, who writes a guide to Malibu beaches on L.A. Observed.
Public-private beaches are difficult to navigate; the private-property
and public-easement lines are invisible, and the legal boundaries of
the public lands change every hour. “It’s in the California
constitution that the public owns the tidal lands,” Price said,
explaining that this essentially means the public is allowed on the wet
sand. By this point, the group had successfully avoided trespassing on
the ten feet of private sand directly in front of Geffen’s house and
was standing on dry sand that was technically Geffen’s but was
accessible by public easement. Price recommends that day-trippers bring
a copy of the state constitution, a tape measure, and an easement map.
Kit Stolz 