The Rise and Fall of America's Most Glamorous Island Getaway: Catalina Island, California

The Rise and Fall of America's Most Glamorous Island Getaway: Catalina Island, California. In the 1930s, if you wanted to see Hollywood's biggest stars up close, you took a steamship twenty-two miles off the coast of Los Angeles to an island owned almost entirely by a chewing gum billionaire. William Wrigley Jr. built a ballroom there bigger than any in the world. He brought the Chicago Cubs to train on its shores every spring for thirty straight years. Clark Gable danced there. Big bands played to crowds of thousands. This is the full story of how Catalina Island became America's most glamorous getaway — and what happened after the glamour left. Long before any of that, this was Pimu, home to the Tongva people for over seven thousand years. It became a modest resort under the Banning brothers, then a chewing-gum fortune's personal monument under Wrigley. It hosted more than five hundred films, a Best Picture winner, and a teenage Norma Jeane Baker years before she became Marilyn Monroe. Then Hollywood's attention moved on, a devastating 2007 wildfire reshaped how the world saw the island, and a genuine water crisis became its newest, quietest challenge. 🔔 Subscribe for more deep dives into the American places that keep becoming something new, long after everyone assumed their story was finished. . . . . . . . . #CatalinaIsland #Avalon #CaliforniaHistory #americancities