Fletcher Cove Top Choice : Panel Shuts Lid on Pillbox as Name of Beach

After hours of careful consideration, a Solana Beach City Council committee said no to Pillbox Beach.

Officially, Pillbox Beach never existed, so it’s not as if the City Council will be getting rid of something tangible on Monday when it decides what to rename Solana Beach Park.

The committee that reviewed suggestions of what to call the mile-long stretch at the end of Lomas Santa Fe Drive has decided that it won’t recommend the longstanding nickname Pillbox--after its bunkerlike appearance due to the concrete seawall up its back--as the official name of the park.

Some worried that the name Pillbox would connote the use or selling of drugs, and others didn’t think that their beach should be named after a military term.

“It’s just not a very dignified name,” said 77-year-old Clinton Prowse, a longtime Solana Beach resident who spearheaded the movement to rename the beach after he saw it referred to as Pillbox in a local newspaper. “I think (naming it) in honor of the man who constructed the beach would be a more substantial name.”

That would be Col. Ed Fletcher, who in the 1920s paid a worker to spend three months hosing away part of the bluff that made it difficult to get down to the beach. He also donated much of the land that provides access to the beach.

The beach committee’s top choice, then, is “Fletcher Cove.” The original suggestion was to call it “Ed Fletcher Cove,” Prowse said, but they dropped the “Ed” to jazz it up a little.

Prowse said it’s fine with him if youngsters continue to refer to the cove as Pillbox, but he noted that three teen-agers who were on the rename-the-beach committee “went along with Fletcher Cove after they realized he developed the park and there wouldn’t have been a cut-down of the bluff if it weren’t for him.”

Council member Celine Olson, who chaired the committee, said the youngsters on the committee came into the meeting supporting Pillbox, but “they really switched sides, for sure, and they became very enthusiastic for Fletcher Cove.”

So even though a couple of the several dozen name suggestions promoted Pillbox, Fletcher Cove is the top suggestion. The two other nominees are Playa del Sol and Cliffside Beach.

The nickname Pillbox dates back long before the beach became a place where illegal drugs were readily available, so the double-entendre wasn’t intentional. In fact, the name originated when a seawall was constructed to support the main lifeguard tower and protect the eroding bluffs, giving the beach the appearance of a military pillbox. The seawall has since crumbled.

One reason the committee rejected Pillbox is that “we didn’t want to name a park after anything military or something pertaining to war,” said Andrew O’Leary, Solana Beach director of marine safety.

O’Leary, who was on the committee to rename the beach, said all three final nominations are “fine suggestions.”