The Mission Beach Women's Club Turns 100 This Week, and Its Bayside Cottage Still Pays for the Neighborhood

"We're proud of that little cottage on the bay. It's a little gem," club member Cordelia Mendoza told Times of San Diego last month.

If you walk Bayside Walk, you've passed it. The Mission Beach Women's Club clubhouse sits at the corner of Bayside Walk and Santa Clara Place and looks out over the bay. The club was organized on November 4, 1926, so it turned 100 yesterday. The club pays for its work through the cottage itself. The cottage gets rented out for weddings and celebrations, and the club gives that money back to the neighborhood. Some of what it paid for is in places you walk past every week.

A Building With Two Birth Certificates

The club's own history and the newspaper's version of the clubhouse don't match.

The club's website calls the cottage "The Shirley House." It says the house was built in 1918 and bought by the club in the early 1930s. The club's homepage calls it one of the first buildings in Mission Beach. A 2018 profile in the San Diego Union-Tribune gives a different account. It says the Shirley House went up in the mid-1920s on land the Mission Beach Land Company donated for community use. It says the YWCA used the house through the late 1920s and 1930s, and that the club bought it in 1939 for $3,200 and paid off the loan the next year.

Under the Union-Tribune's account, the YWCA years were a beach getaway. Women and girls could stay for $1 a day, and that included three meals. Both versions agree that the members didn't start out with a building. Founder Olive Van Dorsten brought together ten women, most of them Navy wives, and they met in one another's homes until the club took over the cottage. A photo of the original roster from the club's archives includes a young girl the Union-Tribune identifies as an honorary lifetime member of the club.

Once the club had its own building, its projects started appearing all over the neighborhood around it.

What the Club Has Already Paid For Around You

The club's history page lists what it has funded or fought for. Read as a list, it maps the bay side of Mission Beach and the services that cover it:

• The palm trees along Bayside Walk, which the club arranged to have planted
• The first "Tot Lot" playground at the Santa Clara Recreation Center
• Lobbying for trash pickup in Mission Beach's alleys
• Extra lighting for beach-area parking lots
• A portable lifeguard tower for Mission Beach
• New equipment for the San Diego Junior Lifeguard Program
• A thermal imaging camera for Fire Station 21
• Musical instruments for Mission Bay High School

The biggest single gift on that page went to Pacific Beach's Fire Station 21. In spring 2014 the club gave the station $31,000 for equipment it needed. The club also marked a milestone for the neighborhood that year. When Mission Beach turned 100 in 2014, the club and the Mission Beach Town Council took on the community's centennial celebration, and the club donated a plaque near the seawall south of Belmont Park.

The club's centennial comes twelve years after the neighborhood's, and both are marked within a few blocks of each other along the same stretch of water.

How a Saturday Wedding Becomes a Grant

The club funds all of this by renting out the cottage. The club says it gives away $25,000 to $50,000 a year from the income the clubhouse earns from private events and parties. Its posted rates are $2,500 for a Saturday, $2,000 for a Friday or Sunday and $1,200 for Monday through Thursday. On top of that come a $250 security deposit and a $175 cleaning fee.

Recent giving fits that range. According to Times of San Diego, the club has awarded more than $100,000 through its annual philanthropy grant program over the past two years. Across its 100 years, it has given more than $1 million to local nonprofits. The club's history page lists total giving of about $42,200 for 2016, so recent years have been running above that.

Schools and nonprofits can use the clubhouse for their events at no cost. Every week, the club also hires unsheltered people from Shoreline Community Services' Community Care Crew in Pacific Beach to maintain the clubhouse and grounds. The club has more than 100 members, and it holds regular food drives and donates toys, computers and clothing to children in need.

The grant cycle has a set schedule. According to the club's funding request page, the 2026–27 application window ran from August 1 to October 31, 2026. It was open to San Diego County nonprofits and schools that hold 501(c)(3) status and have operated in the county for at least three years. That window has now closed, so the local organizations funded in this cycle have already applied.

The club also looks after the shoreline next to the cottage. Through I Love A Clean San Diego, it has adopted the Santa Clara Point beach and park areas. It runs three cleanups a year, in April, July and September. The July cleanup is for members, and the April and September dates fall on statewide beach-cleanup days.

The Centennial Falls in the Club's Busiest Month

November was already a big month for the club before the centennial. Each November, its SOS campaign ships hundreds of care packages to servicewomen aboard ships and overseas, timed to arrive by Veterans Day. On its website, the club calls this year's drive the 17th annual campaign for Support Our Service Members. Veterans Day is next Wednesday, so those packages are probably on their way already.

The club was founded mostly by Navy wives, and a century later it still ships care packages to women serving at sea.

The centennial open house is this Saturday:

• When: Saturday, November 7, 2026, 2 to 6 p.m.
• Where: 840 Santa Clara Place, at Bayside Walk
• Cost: Free and open to the public
• What's planned: Tours of the clubhouse, the club's history and current philanthropy, and a chance to meet the members who run it

The club's homepage still tells visitors to "stay tuned" for celebration details. Check mbwc.org before you head over in case the program has been updated. President Mary Bradstreet told Times of San Diego the event is "a renewal of our promise to keep giving back for the next 100 years." She invited "everyone who has ever been touched by this club's work" to come.

Making an Afternoon of Santa Clara Point

The cottage sits on Santa Clara Point, close to two of the club's longest-running connections. The Santa Clara Recreation Center, where the club sponsored the first Tot Lot, is on the water in Mission Bay Park. The city says the center was dedicated in 1952. It has tot lots, picnic areas, a softball field, outdoor courts, a weight room and two rooms you can rent. The Mission Bay Aquatic Center, a public watersports school run by Associated Students of San Diego State University and UCSD Recreation, is also on the point.

A walk from the open house along Bayside Walk passes the palms the club arranged to have planted, the playground area it helped start and the beach it cleans three times a year. All of it is within a short walk of the cottage.

At The Kaiser Team, we're always glad to find the people and places behind the Mission Beach you see every day, and the Mission Beach Women's Club is a big part of that. If you go Saturday and want to know more about the history of your own block or the cottages around Santa Clara Point, book a consultation with us. We love talking about Mission Beach history.