Marineland of the Pacific
— — the oceanarium the tide finally took.
Not only on a wall.
“The original West Coast oceanarium, opened in 1954 on a cliff above the Pacific south of Los Angeles. For thirty-three years it was the place a California family went to see a killer whale up close. It closed in 1987; the tanks were dismantled and the orca Corky moved south to San Diego. Today the Terranea Resort sits on the bluff. The memory belongs to a particular generation of postcards.
Marineland of the Pacific, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Marineland of the Pacific opened on 28 August 1954 on a 90-acre site at the southern tip of the Palos Verdes Peninsula, about thirty miles south of downtown Los Angeles. For its first decade it was the largest oceanarium in the world and a regular stop on the Southern California family circuit alongside Disneyland and Knott's Berry Farm. The park closed in February 1987; the property became the Terranea Resort in 2009. The bluff itself still juts out toward Catalina Island, twenty-six miles offshore.
Across thirty-three operating years the park trained a series of well-known marine mammals, the killer whales Orky and Corky among them, and served as the West Coast counterpart to Florida's Marineland Studios. It also doubled as a location set for the television series Sea Hunt and for episodes of The Lucy Show. Attendance peaked in the early seventies and slid through the eighties; new ownership transferred the animals to SeaWorld San Diego in the closing weeks, and the gates locked for the last time in February 1987.
The bluff sits on the south-facing edge of Palos Verdes, where the cold California Current curls around the peninsula and meets warmer water pushed up from the Channel Islands. The mix made the cove unusually rich and a natural choice for the early oceanarium's filtered seawater intake. From the cliff edge the water reads a deep indigo with kelp-forest darks, the same palette divers still find sixty feet below the surface today.