Wave of Development Threatens to Erode Surf City’s Culture

Before Gidget met Moondoggie, when downtown Huntington Beach still had a saltwater plunge, Gordie Duane was making surfboards. Out of balsa wood.

In the heart of what would become a worldwide surfing capital, he opened Huntington Beach’s founding surfboard shop--a Hawaiian-looking place at the oceanfront corner of 13th Street and Pacific Coast Highway.

He worked there 3 decades, but in recent years his shop had become an island in a sea of apartments and four-story condominiums at the edge of the city’s largest redevelopment area. Now it isn’t his shop at all. Developers--who plan to build condos like those that cast an early shadow over the lot--evicted him last month.

“I didn’t even get mail service here when I opened up in March of ‘58; it ended at 10th Street,” Duane, 57, said nostalgically. He puffed on a Tareyton and grimaced. “If they really do (redevelop) Main Street, you won’t be able to afford the rent anymore, ya dig? We put Huntington Beach on the map, surfing did, and they are biting the hand that feeds them!”

Duane may be the first of the local legends to leave, but he surely won’t be the last.

Long known as Surf City, downtown Huntington Beach is on the crest of a personality change. City officials are finally making progress in a 20-year-old quest to revitalize the aging and scruffy coastal area. Drawing redevelopment boundaries around 336 acres stretching along Pacific Coast Highway from Beach Boulevard north to Golden West Street, they hope to create a financial rebirth by capitalizing on the natural allure of the oceanfront.

With the first of the new Mediterranean-style hotels, restaurants and shops, however, property values are expected to rise. For the surf shops, where owners already haul out the bikinis and sunglasses to scrape through the off-season winter months, the price may be too high.

“Redevelopment is really to create the village atmosphere, and surfing shops are certainly compatible with that,” said Huntington Beach City Administrator Paul E. Cook. “This is the surfing capital of the world, and we want to continue to be. We love that.

“(But) we’re not providing much retail space, and with redevelopment, the rents should increase. Those that are strong will survive the rent increases, but others won’t. And we’re not sure what the effect will be.”

In a wistful but resigned way, Surfer magazine editor Steve Pezman views it more profoundly.

“Huntington is an example of redevelopment that is going to defuse the surf culture in Orange County,” Pezman said, “and I suppose it will be the end of an era as a cultural focal point for the sport of surfing.”

A bust of Duke Kahanamoku, the Father of Surfing, stands at the base of the Huntington Beach Pier, a tribute to the famous Hawaiian swimmer. According to surf lore, the Duke rode the swells off the pier during the ‘40s and ‘50s. Gordie Duane--nobody calls him Gordon--arrived in 1957.

Before his face turned the color of sunburned rawhide and his sideburns went white, he was a 20-year-old Navy molder on a submarine stationed at Pearl Harbor, where he learned to surf during the Korean War. Before he was discharged, he had a daughter and made his first surfboard, out of a raft. He moved to Compton but surfed Huntington. And he made balsa wood boards--the 10-footers--beside the old plunge. A fire in 1958 forced him out of his next digs, a shedlike building south of the Huntington Beach Pier. He made boards out of his 13th Street location until last month.

“I put the first wood center stick, or stringer, in a foam surfboard,” he said proudly, his blue eyes flashing. “They’re still like that. I have a reputation for being a rebel okee dokee, but history is still history. God, if I’d have patented that!”

He would not know that the surfboard industry would last, but said, in a nostalgic break from a bitter tirade about redevelopment, “I had to try it. It was in my heart.”

Like Duane, there are only a handful of “old-timers”--surf shop owners that have been around long enough to speak firsthand of the days when surfboards could be bought for less than $100. One of them is Guy Guzzardo, owner of Windansea surf shop on PCH.

He and a partner bought the shop, along with a 50-car parking lot and a five-story house owned by a city founder. From this location, excellent because it is right across the street from the waves near the pier, Guzzardo has seen several surfing eras come and go.

There was the ‘60s “flower children” period, when Calvary Chapel rented the adjacent house as a Christian commune and the town was a surf haven. By the 1970s, the original owner of Jack’s Surfboards, Jack Hoganson, had begun actually merchandising boards for the first time, and an industry had been born.

It blossomed throughout the 1970s, Pezman said, and remains strong today. The market for beachwear and accessories is tremendously strong, but anybody can wear a Hawaiian shirt; not just anyone can ride a surfboard.

Surfers and board makers populated most California coastal cities and towns, but Huntington Beach became the vortex, Pezman said.

“It’s got waves you can pretty much ride year-round,” he said, “so surfers were naturally drawn to Huntington.”

The result?

“Huntington Beach is a surfboard-making mecca, in a county with the highest concentration of surfers in the world--next to Hawaii--and far more than any other focused area in, I might safely say, the surfing world,” said Pezman.

Compared with other coastal cities, like the pricey Laguna Beach, commercial leases in downtown Huntington Beach are still cheap. The rundown conditions--some buildings are seismically unsafe, and a brothel where runaway teen-agers were pimped was busted in recent months--have kept rents down to about $1.50 a square foot.

Leases are expected to rise by at least $1 a square foot once the first of the big projects, such as Pierside Village on the ocean side of PCH, break ground in the next several months.

Not much?

When your profit margin is about 15% on the typical $350 surfboard and you’re doing good to sell 30 a week; when, at best, only half of your income is off the boards, and most shops do well to sell 30 of them a week--a rent hike may spell financial wipeout.

Unlike the multibillion-dollar industry of mass-produced merchandise, such as thongs and trunks that the surfing culture spawned, the boards themselves must still be made by hand--from shaping the foam blank to attaching the fin. Tightened standards by government at all levels on the use of such surfboard materials as resin have forced board makers to install costly safety measures, such as sprinkler systems. Yet a child and his or her parents will pay only so much for a surfboard, the apparent price ceiling being about $400.

“You won’t make it just selling surfboards,” said Carl Hayward, 31, who shapes his own name-brand boards and sells them at his downtown shop. “People are having to sell T-shirts and other things to get by.”

Suntanned and lanky in swim trunks and thongs, Hayward looks like a surfer. He is also a successful shop owner. Still, he fears that the $400-million renaissance designed to attract new business life to the three-block stretch of Main Street may spell the demise of his.

“J. W. Robinson’s has opened a surf shop! In the mall ! Already it’s hard enough to compete with department stores,” Hayward said with a sigh. “If Mom and Dad can go to Robinson’s, why are they going to come downtown for surfboards?”

Hayward has about 2 1/2 years remaining on a 3-year lease for his 900-square-foot shop at 120 Main St.--a great location in the first block up from the ocean. He pays $1.50 a square foot rent for his shop. Before he moved there, he had been paying 40 cents per foot across the street, at a shop in the same building as the landmark Jack’s Surfboards.

He figures that, like other property owners, he will have to put up with 2 years of construction. “The No. 1 problem is going to be where they (surf shop owners) are going to go” while the new buildings are being built.

There are other hooks, Hayward said. Sure, the redevelopment agency is going to pick up the tab for relocation, but beyond the expected rent hikes, there is the issue of parking. If property owners do not currently provide parking space for their shops, they will have to meet current codes for that when new buildings go up. That means they’ve got to pay $10,000 per parking space in one of the planned parking structures.

By the time some of the new redevelopment projects are completed, his lease will have expired, and his rent will surely rise by at least $1,000 monthly.

“I’m looking at another spot outside downtown,” he said. “The shops will have to diversify or move. I’ve put bikinis in my shop. I’ve never done that before.”

City officials and merchants say those that own the property beneath their business will probably fare best. Very few surf shop owners do. Among them are owners of Jack’s at the corner of PCH and Main, and George’s Surf Center, a couple of doors down, whose business is predominantly buying and selling used boards. But they are the exceptions.

Strength in unity might help the owners, Surfer magazine’s Pezman said, but it is unlikely. “Getting the sport to do anything cohesively is tough,” he said, amused at the thought, “because the idea of surfing is the opposite, to paddle out as far from people as possible. And organizing is the antithesis of that.”

Pezman says surfboard makers in coastal towns up and down California have or will experience the rent increases for which Huntington shop owners are bracing. As coastal real estate “goes off the map in California, they’re gonna get forced out of their positions everywhere, I guess.”

The most creative of board makers are “living at the focal point, but that part of the sport may slip beneath the waves, so to speak,” Pezman said. “But you can’t blame Huntington Beach to want to do the redevelopment and increase the tax base.

“Maybe this little phenomenon of Surf City in Huntington Beach has run its course. It’s a microcosm of the California beach culture and a period of change of our society. It’s like the orange groves getting carved down in Orange County, a passing of an era where the value of the land just gets too great for folk art and subculture use. And 30 or 40 years from now we’ll be looking at old photos of Surf City,” he said with a chuckle, “and trying to tell our kids about the old days.”

“You still have the kids coming down, idolizing the best surfers, the girls coming down and they want to go out with the best surfer,” said Hayward. “But it looks like that will all be different.”

As for Duane, a longtime Surfside resident, he is working now at a friend’s shop in Long Beach--restoring woodies. That is where he stores the fourth board he ever made, a balsa wood beauty with Gordie written at the tip in red grease pencil. If he returns to board making, it will have to be inland.

“After 46,000 boards, you kinda get burned out,” he said, shaking his head. “Maybe I should make wood toys for my granddaughter instead.”