Marking Time : Crystal Cove Residents Maintain ‘30s Life Style Even as Tides of Development Rush Their Way

It’s no wonder the community clock at Crystal Cove caught fire a few years ago. Time passes strangely here, and the poor thing probably died of confusion, trying in vain to stay accurate.

No wonder, either, that nobody bothered to fix it or replace it after the flames were doused. “We just pulled the plug,” says Doug Falzetti,

whose home faces the former general store on which the rusted clock still hangs.

By the clock a faded sign proclaims:”Crystal Cove Standard Time. Please set your clocks back to 1930.”

People here don’t care much about the time--what minute, what hour, what year. Oh, sure, there’s the beach jogger who pauses now and then to ask bikini-clad sunbathers for the time, but he has other motives. Otherwise, he’d simply glance at that deluxe sports chronometer on his wrist and keep running.

Mostly though, for this tiny community of 46 oceanfront cottages nestled roughly halfway between Corona del Mar and Laguna Beach, time is an enemy, threatening to destroy the vestiges of a simpler, slower era.

Typical of the many funky little beach burgs that once dotted the Southern California coast, Crystal Cove alone survives, “the last intact example of vernacular beach architecture,” according to the National Register of Historic Places.

For now, that is. The future of both the colorful, idiosyncratic dwellings and the anachronistic way of life here is precarious. But then, precariousness is as much a part of Crystal Cove as the salt air. The community was built on shaky foundations in more ways than one.

The cove’s early residents threw together shacks that evolved into houses, knowing all the while that the ground underneath wasn’t theirs. Those who came later bought leases to the houses with the same understanding.

“We’ve been on month-to-month tenancy for decades,” Falzetti says.

Crystal Cove is at the core of Orange County’s last undeveloped stretch of coastline. The secluded hamlet is part of Crystal Cove State Park, a 2,791-acre parcel sold to the state in 1979 by the Irvine Co.

In 1982, the state announced that residents, some going back several decades and generations, would be evicted over a 2-year period. Plans called for the cottages to be converted to short-term rentals, concessions and other uses. There was also the possibility of cottages being destroyed to make room for a parking lot.

Some Sacramento legislators insist that because taxpayers paid $32.6 million for the place--more than for any other park in the state’s history--they at least ought to be able to get in and out easily.

After a lengthy legal battle, residents won a 10-year lease extension--until 1993--and already are gearing up for another fight in hopes they can stay.

It isn’t just the buildings but a way of life that will disappear when--they prefer to use the word “if”--the state takes over.

“I’ve never made any plans for what I’d do if I had to leave here,” says Alice Powell, who has lived in the house called “Hi De Ho” since 1971. Many of the houses have names, such as “Sea Shell,””Whistle Stop” and “Crystal Cave.”

“Everybody’s so nice and neighborly,” says Helen Shirley. “If you run out of something, you just keep knocking on doors until you find it.”

“We’re never going to be able to live like this again,” says Helen’s husband, Mike. With rents ranging from about $550 to $1,000 a month, he says, the Crystal Cove cottages are a bargain for oceanfront property.

“I grew up here. And I want my child to grow up here too.”

Unlike the Crystal Cove residents, beach regulars reluctantly accept that in a few years they’ll be moving on. They make the extra effort to hike down the steep paths to get away from crowded, noisy, look-alike beaches. But they see the loud invaders with their Frisbees and boom boxes who have started showing up in recent summers as the first of a new crowd that will follow the development.

The beach here isn’t much good for swimming or surfing--too many rocks lurk beneath the waves--but the tide pools are as rich as any in Southern California.

And it’s the perfect spot for long walks or jogs, on the cliffs or near the surf. If you just want to be left alone with a good book and hundreds of yards of sand between you and your closest neighbor, this is the place.

“You go to the (Balboa) peninsula or Huntington State Beach, and there’s a massive parking lot with concessions and loudspeakers. It’s unreal,” says Rob Hilchey, a frequent Crystal Cove beach-goer since 1974. “In Crystal Cove, you don’t hear anyone say ‘Boo.’

“Three or 4 years from now, a lot of the people who are drawn to this beach now won’t be here. They’ll be south of San Clemente, or up above Malibu. That’s the only place left,” he says.

“Every orange grove, every strawberry field, every hillside--there seems to be a thing about leaving nothing untouched in Orange County,” Hilchey says. “In time, everything’s going to have something on it. I’m amazed that this (coastal area) stayed the way it did as long as it did.”

On the inland side of Pacific Coast Highway, meanwhile, fresh scars on the hillsides are proof that the change forestalled for so long has arrived at last.

Winter rains will turn the parched brown hills there green for the last time this season. After that, the slopes will be unnaturally green year-round.

In the past month, bulldozers and backhoes have taken out sharp bites of earth in preparation for two 18-hole golf courses, the first phase of an Irvine Co. development that eventually will include as many as five hotels and 2,600 houses.

From 1864 until 1979, the whole area was Irvine land. In the early 20th Century, Irvine family guests rode buckboard wagons down the dirt road that is now MacArthur Boulevard to spend an afternoon or camp at what was then called “Family Beach,” according to Christine Shirley, Mike Shirley’s stepmother and a part-time Crystal Cove resident since 1965.

By the early 1920s, the Irvine Co. began renting some of the land to vacationers who were allowed to build cottages and the area was renamed Crystal Cove.

Cottage after cottage sprang up “completely informally” in the cove during the ‘20s, says Shirley, the hamlet’s unofficial historian. “Often they had a pad for a tent, then later they’d put up a first story, and then finally a second story, and then they’d add on. It was really hysterical the way some of the places developed.”

About that time a Hollywood producer happened upon the spot and arranged to lease the cove as a set for a series of South Sea island-themed movies.

“Everybody was supposed to keep their cottage thatched with palm so that they could shoot the films,” Shirley says.

The cove is still a favorite Hollywood backdrop. “Beaches,” a Touchstone film starring Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey, was shot there during the summer and is scheduled for release in December.

By the 1930s, the buckboard wagons were replaced by cars, and cove visitors came from farther away.

In the summer, they would set up huge cabin tents on the sand in front of the houses.

“The people who came down in the tents considered themselves the elite because they were right on the sand, with the waves breaking,” Shirley says.

The tents had no bathrooms, but by the 1940s they had electricity. Most of the houses did too, by then, but utilities didn’t arrive all at once. As they did, the cottages were numbered, for billing purposes, in the order in which they were hooked up. So even now, house No. 2 is between No. 15 and No. 24, and so on, randomly.

“It drives the delivery people crazy,” says Vivian Falzetti, whose family began visiting the cove long before she and her husband, Doug, moved in 11 years ago.

The place was crowded in the summer, but the rest of the year it was mostly abandoned, Shirley says.

“It may be difficult to grasp this, but in the early days, the ‘30s and ‘40s, no one would be caught dead in a beach community in the wintertime. They were strictly summer colonies,” she says. “A person would be considered a bum if they used the beach in winter.”

Shirley knew the cove well by the time she bought her cottage in 1965. She had visited there frequently as a child, and her aunt also had a cottage. Still, many of her friends and relatives told her she was crazy to pay $11,000 for a lease that was riddled with cancellation privileges. The Irvine Co. could have asserted its rights at any time, and Shirley would have had to leave with nothing to show for her money.

But it was the state, not the Irvine Co., that called the option after it bought the 12-acre settlement as part of the park package in 1979.

For several years after the state bought the land, the bluffs and open sections of beach remained fenced off behind barbed wire and no-trespassing signs left by the Irvine Co. But some beach-goers knew the signs no longer applied, and they parked along the highway, slipped through the fences and hiked in to a beach that was unimproved and unpatrolled. Some pockets became known as unofficial nude beaches.

Even today, a few brave souls carry on the tradition on warm, uncrowded days, although most are careful to cover up when the rangers drive by.

After the settlement was officially declared a historic district in 1978, and especially after the state took over, the residents were prohibited from making any changes in the dwellings.

Each resident seems to have a different interpretation of what is and is not permitted. Some believe that they are not even allowed to make repairs. Others have made discreet but hardly historical improvements.

“They may make repairs of kind,” says Tom Miller, district superintendent of the state Parks and Recreation Department. “Let’s say that the roof needs to be replaced. We will permit them to replace the roof in kind. If it’s a green rolled roof, they can replace it with a green rolled roof.”

Last month, the whole community chipped in to repair a boardwalk and seawall that had been wiped out by a severe storm last winter. The same wall and walkway had been rebuilt 5 years ago after another storm.

“The state agreed that we have a valuable asset here that needs to be protected,” Doug Falzetti says. “Then they told us we’d have to get permits from the (state Department of) Fish and Game, the Coastal Commission, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the state.” The residents were also told they would have to haul in sand for the project because the sand on the beach has to be preserved, Falzetti and other cove dwellers say.

As discreetly as possible, considering the fact that the boardwalk runs right along the beach, the damaged area was repaired over two successive weekends, sans permits. No one will say for the record where the sand for the construction came from.

Miller says he heard about the repairs, but “anything they wish to build that was not there when the historic district was formed is questionable as far as being legitimate.” The boardwalk, he says, did not date back that far.

Whether permissible or not, all repairs to the houses, the water lines, even the pavement, are done and paid for not by the state but by the residents. That practice is evidence that the residents actually own the cottages and should have rights that extend beyond 1993, says Al Willinger, a resident since 1973. “Wouldn’t you like to be able to live there? When the time comes, you will be able to, on a short-term basis. We want to use that area to give the public as much pleasure as we possibly can, and still treat the tenants of record as fairly as we can. But we have to think of the taxpayer also.”

Miller says he has no figures on how much that conversion might cost. But the residents contend it will take millions of dollars just to bring the cottages up to code and make them sturdy enough for short-term rentals.

“These places were never built to any code standards,” says Willinger, who has to jack up and brace his hillside home every couple of years to keep it even semi-level. “The only way they’ve lasted is through the constant, loving attention of the people who live here.”

From steep cliff-side stairways to odd-sized doors and sloping floors, residents claim the idiosyncrasies of the dwellings also would leave the state vulnerable to lawsuits from vacationers who might fall or otherwise hurt themselves. “I deal with risk management in my business,” says Willinger, a building contractor. “And I know that’s a serious concern.”

“When it comes down to it, we are the best caretakers of the property,” says Doug Falzetti. Carleton Whitehead, whose wife’s family bought a house at Crystal Cove in 1941 and who works for the Sierra Club, suggests that Crystal Cove residents be treated similarly to residents of some national parks. “At least they should be allowed to live out their lives here.”

Stella and Hayden Hiatt, who live on the Palos Verdes Peninsula during the week and Crystal Cove on weekends, look forward to retiring in the cove despite the 1993 deadline.

She has been coming to the cove since the tenting days, and she still believes that the residents will find a way to stay. “They’ll have to carry me out,” she says.