Gift to Institute : Dana Point Building Will Go to Harbor

The building that housed the first--and probably the only--manufacturing business operated in Dana Point will be rolled early next week from atop the community’s ocean cliffs down to Dana Point Harbor. There it will begin a new life as the administrative office of the Orange County Marine Institute down in Dana Point Harbor.

“My brother, Ed, and I built that building in 1960 for my father-in-law, Ray Tadd, and he produced glass shower doors until he retired in about 1972,” said Charles Smyth, who with his brother, was developer of the Lantern Bay project of luxury homes, condominiums, restaurants and shops on the bluffs overlooking the harbor.

“Now we’re donating it to the Marine Institute, and I’m glad it isn’t going to be torn down. I feel a little bit sentimental about that place.”

Staff Now Split

Stanley Cummings, director of the Marine Institute, said the 1,200-square-foot building, which has most recently housed the Lantern Bay Realty Co., will provide storage space and offices for his staff, which now is split between a trailer on the institute site in the west end of the harbor and a building in downtown Dana Point.

The one-story, $25,000 structure now stands on an 11,000 square-foot lot at the corner of Street of the Golden Lantern and San Juan Avenue, just south of Coast Highway.

On Wednesday, work crews jacked it up and placed dollies under its 25-ton bulk. They plan to tow it approximately a mile to its new site, probably late Monday night.

Cummings said a concrete pad is being prepared to receive it. Once in place, the building’s stucco walls will be replaced with wooden siding, and the roof-line will be changed to conform to the institute’s architecture.

Future Changes

“It’ll be located so that it will not interfere with the first two of three future expansion phases of the institute,” he said. “When it’s time for the third phase, the little building can be removed, but all that is in the rather distant future.”

Meanwhile he said, the rents now paid for the trailer and the other office spaces will amortize the move and the improvements in a year and a half.

“We hope to have it ready in about two weeks,” Cummings said. “It’ll certainly be an improvement over the trailer. We’re on our third trailer, incidentally. One of them blew over in a storm, with desks and filing cabinets and all spilled. All of the trailers leaked and were impossible to heat.”

Charles Smyth, whose wife, Letty, daughter of the manufacturer of shower doors, visited the site Wednesday, said the property being vacated will be used to develop a $1.5-million two-story plaza of shops and offices.

Both Smyth brothers and Cummings, who also is a member of the Dana Point Chamber of Commerce, said as far as they could determine, the shower door operation was the only true manufacturing business ever conducted in the Dana Point seaside community.