A Tradition Revived : Group Tries to Restore the Lane of Christmases Past

There was a small crisis on Daisy Avenue in Long Beach last Tuesday evening. The ice skaters had disappeared from the pond and the block was abuzz with alarm.

The trio of skaters, as it turned out, had just been carted home for the night by a protective guardian after some women and children had rudely hopped up and down on the pond.

The next morning, Maria Norvell and Cathy Cangro were on the scene, power drill in hand. They were bolting the skaters, all hand-painted wooden cutouts, to the surface of the plywood pond. Norvell and Cangro had labored mightily over the four-block Christmas display that includes the skating scene, and they were determined that no harm should come to any part of it.

A Proud Tradition

The two women are members of a neighborhood organization that is doing its best to revive a once-proud Long Beach tradition, Christmas Tree Lane, in the city’s Wrigley District on the west side.

In the 1960s and ‘70s, the wide median of Daisy Avenue was so thick with lifelike holiday displays that it attracted people from throughout Southern California. “It was absolutely spectacular,” remembers Jeanne Wagner, legislative assistant to Councilman Ray Grabinski, who represents part of the area.

But Christmas Tree Lane owed much of its splendor to the city, and when Proposition 13 cut into municipal property tax revenues in 1978, the lane went into decline. As one person noted, “It’s been--just not great.”

Enter the Wrigley Assn., a once-anemic neighborhood organization that has rebounded in recent years, playing an active role in the district’s affairs.

Last summer the association held a fund-raising fair, collecting $4,000 to give to the city to buy lights for the lane, which stretches for four blocks north of Pacific Coast Highway.

Cangro, a 17-year Wrigley resident with an artistic flair, designed new scenes for the median, including the skaters, elves and Santa Claus with a team of reindeer. City workers cut out wooden forms for the characters and a number of miniature houses, and association members assembled and meticulously painted them.

Altogether, the lane will have more than twice the number of exhibits it had last year. The displays, primarily miniature houses, have been erected between stately cedar trees wreathed in Christmas lights. The trees were planted in 1953, when the Christmas lane tradition was started at the urging of a Wrigley woman. The association planted three more cedars last weekend.

Caroling and dance performances are scheduled between 6:15 and 9 tonight and next weekend on an outdoor stage. The tree lights were to be turned on Saturday evening, in time for a Christmas parade down Daisy Avenue.

However much of an improvement this season’s lane is over recent years, the Wrigley Assn. is not about to rest on its reindeer. Come January, Cangro says her group will start planning something bigger and better for next Christmas. She and her helpers want the lane to be as grand as it ever was.

“It’s so special for the children,” said Cangro, whose own children trooped down the festive lane when it was in its glory. “I guess I’m a big child,” she said of her own devotion to the lane’s revival.