Ole Hanson was the visionary who master-planned San Clemente more than 96 years ago in the 1920s. He and his partners planned and developed the new town in the empty rolling hills halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego.

His plan was to provide this new “Spanish Village by the Sea” everything that was needed to thrive as a town. He built many of the important community structures that we use today.

Ole’s team not only laid out the future city with curved streets and neighborhoods, but it also planned and built everything that a new town would need, including the community center, the community pool, the pier, Max Berg Park, Las Palmas School, horse trails and stables, the downtown hotel and a water system to provide drinking water and electricity.

Most of the community buildings were gifted to the city for $1 after they were completed.

He also built his sales office at the top of Avenida Del Mar and El Camino Real. The office building was open to the public who came to look at the possibility of buying an empty lot in this isolated little town so far from Los Angeles and San Diego.

One of his plans that never happened was an oceanfront resort.

The original map of San Clemente shows a 12-acre parcel of land just above where T-Street is today. Ole Hanson was sure that the hotel would be built even after the stock market crash in 1929 that led to The Great Depression.

He had an architect draw up the design. It would have been a two-story, 100-room Spanish Colonial Revival-style resort surrounded by 12 cottages.

Two grand wide avenues with greenbelts, Esplanade and Avenida Valencia would lead all the way down to the beach and to the resort location.

All of the buildings that Ole Hanson built helped give San Clemente everything that it needed to be a town, but the one missing item that a small oceanfront town might have was a beachside resort that would attract vacationers from around the world.

Ironically, Dana Point also had plans for a resort hotel on the bluffs. The Great Depression ended those plans as well. The hotel began construction but was never finished.

Today, there is an arched concrete ruin that has been preserved, but no hotel was ever completed.

Several other California towns during the same era had large beachfront resorts. Hotel Del Coronado in Coronado was an example of a resort built in 1896, which still stands today and has brought millions of visitors to Coronado.