Near the beach, downtown Santa Monica abounds with lively dining and retail. A fun bit of trivia: Historic Route 66 officially ends its 2,450-mile meander from Chicago right by the pier, at Lincoln and Olympic boulevards. There's an aquarium, carousel, arcade, and the Pacific Park Amusement Park, too. Despite the crowds and occasionally schlocky amusements, Santa Monica's pier and oceanfront make for a good stroll. The Santa Monica Pier and the small stretch of Broadway a few blocks east are lined with arcades, gift shops, and colorful-if touristy-diversions. And with the influx in recent years of stellar restaurants and design-driven hotels, Santa Monica has steadily become a favorite gay getaway for couples, beachgoers, and those wanting a more relaxed Los Angeles vacation. This is still a quite welcoming, liberal community, though, and with a longstanding feminist scene, too. Gay residents are still most definitely a presence in Santa Monica, but with nowhere near the presence they have in West Hollywood, Silver Lake, and some other parts of Los Angeles. With encroaching gentrification and police crackdowns, the area lost much of its vogue among queers by the '60s. Just off the beach a huge gay bar, the Tropical Village, drew everybody from navy men to closeted celebrities to resident authors Christopher Isherwood and Stephen Spender.
Today, you'd never know that this primarily straight, white, and professional area was an early bastion of gay society, a land of bathhouses, cruising, and nude sunbathing. From the '30s until the '50s, the section of Santa Monica just south of where Wilshire Boulevard hits Pacific Coast Highway was known as Queer Alley.