The SS Monte Carlo was built in 1921 as an oil tanker. By 1932, she had been converted into something more profitable: a floating casino anchored three miles off the Southern California coast, just far enough from shore to put her beyond the reach of California gambling law.
She billed herself as "the world's greatest pleasure ship" and ferried guests by water taxi to an evening of dining, orchestras, gambling, and whatever a ship operating beyond the three-mile limit might offer that shore establishments could not. For five years she was enormously successful. Her anchored position shifted over time; in 1936 she relocated to an anchorage off Coronado Beach.
On New Year's Day 1937, a Pacific storm broke her anchor chain and drove her hull onto Coronado Beach. She grounded hard, listed to one side, and began to break up in the surf. No one was killed. No one was seriously injured. The crew evacuated.
And then no one claimed her.
The Monte Carlo had operated by exploiting legal ambiguity. Her owners had structured the enterprise specifically to avoid leaving a paper trail connecting them to an illegal gambling operation. Claiming the ship — insuring it, paying for salvage, asserting ownership — would require admitting that connection. The owners declined to do so. The ship sat on the beach and continued to break apart.
The Monte Carlo's bones are still in the sand at Coronado Beach. The hull buried itself in the beach over the decades and is not visible under normal conditions, but it surfaces at extreme low tides. Portions of the steel hull have appeared, bent and corroded, when winter storms shift the sand. Coins and gambling chips have turned up at the site; treasure hunters dug at the wreck for years after she grounded.
There is no marker on the beach identifying the site. The hotel and the beach and the Coronado city blocks built above it have no obvious sign of what lies underneath. From the water, looking at Coronado Beach from JADA's deck, the sand looks like any other California beach. Somewhere below the surface, the tanker-turned-casino is still there, dissolved into her original elements, returned to the sediment she was built to carry.
Sources: Wikipedia, "SS Monte Carlo (1921)"; San Diego History Center archives.
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