The Santa Monica Looff Hippodrome (AKA carousel) is a National Historic Landmark. It sits on the world-famous Santa Monica Pier first built in 1909. The La Monica Ballroom on the pier was once the largest ballroom in the US, and the source for many New Year's Eve national network broadcasts.
The Santa Monica Civic Auditorium was an important music venue for several decades and hosted the Academy Awards in the 1960s. McCabe's Guitar Shop is still a leading acoustic performance space. The Cheetah was a famous nightclub. Bergamot Station is a city-owned art gallery compound which includes the Santa Monica Museum of Art. The city is also home to the Santa Monica Heritage Museum. The Santa Monica Promenade alone supports more than a dozen movie screens.
Founded in 1929 with an enrollment of 153, Santa Monica College enrolls 30,000 students annually. The 2-year college is the leading source of transfers to the University of California system. Rolling Stone magazine rated it among the top ten community colleges in the nation in 1998. Notable SMC alumni and dropouts include: James Dean, Dustin Hoffman, Rickie Lee Jones, Arnold Schwarzenegger,and former Microsoft chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold. It is the host for KCRW, an innovative and popular National Public Radio affiliate.
The Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District provides public education at the elementary and secondary levels. Santa Monica High School, informally known as Samohi, changed location several times in its early years before settling into its present campus. Until the 1980's, students from Malibu were required to bus into Santa Monica for grades 10-12. Notable alumni include: Gloria Stuart, Glenn Ford, John Ehrlichman, dancer Gene Nelson, Emilio Estevez, Charlie Sheen, Sean Penn, Rob Lowe, Robert Downey Jr., Art Alexakis, Dean Cain, Maya Rudolph, and Carson Daly. The site was used as a location for the movie Rebel Without a Cause.
Private schools in the city include the Crossroads School.
The City of Santa Monica runs its own bus line, the Big Blue Bus, which also serves much of the Westside and UCLA. It is generally considered to be one of the best run bus lines in California, as evidenced by the fact that it did not raise its regular fare above 50 cents until 2002. In contrast, most public bus lines in California were charging fares of a dollar or higher well before the year 2000.
A Big Blue Bus was featured prominently in the motion picture Speed.
The city is also served by the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority's bus lines. It currently has no rail service but Metro is currently working on bringing light rail to Santa Monica in the form of the Exposition Line.