Mixed Feelings in Huntington Beach : Wave of Development Rolling Into ‘Surf City’

Sweet-faced Gordie Higgins, 75, grew up here when the streets were dirt, the sidewalks wooden and oil--not surfing--was the lifeblood of Huntington Beach. As he sits in the heart of downtown, cross-legged on a bench smoking his Dorals, the old man speaks without nostalgia when he says, “It never will be the old town, such as it was.”

The young surfers know it too--the ones who wave at him as they cycle past towing their boards, hollering, “How ya feelin’ Gordie? What did the doctor say yesterday?” So do the regulars who spend each morning at the Sugar Shack, a friendly Main Street coffee shop where locals learn of affairs, so-and-so’s dad dying, and other important personal developments.

Right across the street from their outdoor tables, an entire square block is gone. Until recently, it housed a bank and bikini, record and golf stores, a surf shop and a real estate office. Now it is a dirt hole in the process of becoming a multilevel parking garage.

This is the last summer of Surf City as we know it.

Storm-Ravaged Pier

The 76-year-old storm-ravaged Huntington Beach Pier, home to fishermen and strollers and downtown’s anchor, is closed for reconstruction until 1991. The old Surf Theater has been closed for months, its marquee stripped, its insides gutted. Some roads are closed and many shops are either boarded up or waiting for the wrecking ball.

The landmark Golden Bear, closed Jan. 30, 1986, will be replaced by a six-plex theater and retails stores now under construction. Jack’s Surfboards will return, but not necessarily at the corner of Main and Pacific Coast Highway.

There are mixed views about the plans to turn the pier area into a billion-dollar, Mediterranean-style resort--a “visitor-serving village” as one city official puts it. No question, though. One of the last real beach towns in Orange County will never be the same.

Oil is what put Huntington Beach on the map during the Roaring ‘20s, and there was interest in creating a resort town long before that.

A man named P.A. Stanton owned what is now downtown, when turn-of-the-century Huntington Beach was still called Pacific City. He dreamed of turning the dirt strip known as Main Street into a West Coast Atlantic City, but those plans fizzled for lack of interest by 1902.

Along came Henry E. Huntington, who bought Pacific City that year as the end of the line for his Pacific Electric Railroad. Seven years later, the town was named after him and incorporated. It was 1920 before oil was discovered along the coastal downtown.

When the oil began drying up after the Korean War, the city’s financial support shifted to new industries such as aerospace and utilities and the natural appeal of its eight-mile-long shoreline. Huntington Beach grew like weeds in a lawn during the 1960s, one year becoming the fastest growing city in the nation.

State restrictions on developing the shoreline were drastically tightened during the 1970s, however, and city leaders launched plans to revamp downtown Huntington Beach as quickly as they abandoned them. Meantime the downtown buildings of stucco and brick languished and aged, some of them now seismically unsafe.

Bohemian in its heyday, the downtown became increasingly scruffy, emptied of people before nightfall. Police say the streets now belong more to transients, drug dealers and prostitutes.

But in these post-Proposition 13 days, when most Southern California cities are struggling financially to pay all the bills, Huntington Beach--the county’s third largest city with 187,000 people--believes its answer lies in a creating a renaissance in downtown.

It is at the core of a 336-acre redevelopment project area spreading from Beach Boulevard north to Golden West Street, and will feature four luxury hotels, beachfront restaurants, retail shops and condominiums. City leaders hope out-of-towners and residents alike will flock to the businesses and, by spending money there, will help bankroll Huntington Beach with sales and bed taxes for at least 35 years.

In the area roughly bounded by Pacific Coast Highway and Lake, Pecan and 6th streets, Douglas N. LaBelle, a deputy city administrator, believes the city is creating a village atmosphere where people live and work, shop and play. Construction worth $90 million will produce 219 condominiums and 124,000 square feet of retail space by next summer.

The value of the property and the rent will increase, LaBelle said, and some tenants may not be able to afford to stay. But the better-looking city center can only help the merchants and residents who will want to be downtown after years of staying away after dark.

“You’ll see the shops down there that you saw 30 years ago,” LaBelle said. “I believe that. I believe the residential being brought down there” will attract not only tourist-oriented business but those like Laundromats and hardware stores that serve the needs of residents. “In terms of the uses ,” LaBelle said, “you will see a Main Street from 30 years ago.”

The June morning is typically gray, but warm and windless and perfect for surfing. Across the street from the ocean, outside WindanSea Surf, members of the Huntington Beach Longboard crew are stripping their wet suits.

They are aware that their outdoor clubhouse beside the shop, only two months old, may not be around much longer. Buddy Guy Guzzardo has said he expects that the store he has co-owned since the 1960s will be torn down by year’s end, replaced by a new Mediterranean-style building.

Eddie Enriquez, 38, is somewhat resigned about this, although not at all pleased about much of the redevelopment. He doesn’t remember the name of his first girlfriend, but he knows where he bought his first surfboard: downtown.

As a self-employed street sweeper who works out of his Costa Mesa home, Enriquez has shaped his life around surfing the north side of the pier, and he will miss his daily ritual. It always starts with surfing about 6:30 a.m., followed by hanging out with his friends until 9 a.m.

If the surf shops can’t afford to move back into the new downtown--and many will not--where will the loosely structured club and other surfers congregate to talk waves?

“I guess we can always go to the beach,” Enriquez said. “The surf will always be there. We’ve tried writing letters through the Surfrider Assn. (a group that lobbies for the rights of board riders and sunbathers). But you can probably guess we didn’t make much progress.”

Tyler Mathieson, 13, takes the bus from Newport Beach most every day so that he can ride waves in a “real surf town.” While certainly not schooled in the details of redevelopment, the freckle-faced blond is sure he hates it.

“I surf. A lot. I think (downtown) will change for the worse,” he says. Upon learning that WindanSea may be closing, he says: “I hope this stays around for, like, a long time. It’s one of the last of the old-fashioned surf shops.”

Down the street a block at Cagney’s by the Sea, Maureen Gilley tended bar in the afternoon. The Lakers are about to lose the NBA championship to the Detroit Pistons, and the place has only three customers. As “Under the Boardwalk” played on the jukebox, Gilley, 38, talked about the pub with a view of the pier, about how it will close in December.

“Business has slowed down a lot since all the construction began, and with the closing of the pier (last July) too. We’ll have a new place in the new building, but it will be a different place. It will look different,” she said. “It looks like it will be real modern, with the Newport Beach-type look, not like the old town.

“I don’t know. I think it’s kind of neat right now,” she said wistfully. One of her customers nodded in agreement. “Most all the beach towns aren’t like this. They all look alike.”

Around the corner, in the first block of Main Street, a member of the Huntington Beach Chamber of Commerce strolled along the sidewalk with his 2-year-old son, Sean. Tanned and wearing shorts, he would only give his age, 34, and his first name, Michael.

He said he grew up down Pacific Coast Highway in a trailer park and loves the downtown. “But all it can do is get better now,” he said, running errands and chatting with some of the 16 shopkeepers whose businesses he cleans. “I think that it will be great for business down here, for the people who work down here, and--Hi, Nancy! Yeah, this is my son--and anyway, it will just look better.”

At the end of the block, Nancy Chen has already closed the coffee shop she and her husband have owned for 10 years, and it is only 3:30 p.m. The glass front doors are chained and locked. She speaks through the crack between them.

Terry’s coffee shop, which is her diner, is in the second block of Main Street, on the north side, an area that the city allowed owners to renovate instead of rebuild because there are no seismic problems.

Asked if she will be rebuilding their shop or seeking city help in getting federal loans to remodel or “rehab” the exterior, Chen just shrugged. “We don’t know. We just wait.”

How does she feel about the changing downtown? “For our situation, we just don’t want to leave, but it’s not our building. We only own the business. Not clear what we will do yet.”

Looking across the street at the dirt hole where ground will be broken for the parking garage Thursday, Chen added: “Who knows what it will be like? This whole thing. Who knows?”

Bernard’s Upholstery is vacant, closed for some time now. Nearby is the Main Street Hair Co., a three-chair salon that is still open. A waitress from Perq’s down the block has her dark mane partly wrapped in foil. Asked of the downtown redevelopment, she said, “It sucks!”

The woman working on her hair, smiled nicely. “The merchants love it. The people who work here think it’s going to be great. The locals, the people who live here, they don’t seem too excited.”

Louis Polley, 16, and John Brown, 18, were sharing a small table against the wall of the Sugar Shack, coffee cups between them.

“I bet in four or five years we’re gonna be the next Irvine,” says Polley, a Huntington Beach High School student with dark hair. “It will be no Surf City. It’s gotten all capitalist. I’ve lived here my whole life--born and raised--and I just want to live in a peaceful community. A nice family place.”

His friend, smoking Camels, agrees.

“We work for the TV station at school, and I wrote a story about the end of downtown,” Polley said. “And it was so anti-development they (producers) thought it was too biased and wouldn’t let it run.

“But I think pretty soon (there) will be busloads of like, tourists running down my street with like, zinc oxide on their nose creating traffic.”

Brown puffed on his cigarette. “In 1992 it will be great for retail business down here.”

Polley shook his head. “I’m afraid I’ll be telling my kids, ‘Well, there used to be this. There used to be that.’ I’m just not sure about this Spanish plaza villa-type thing that they’re doing. I guess everything has to change. But we’re kids! We grew up here.”

Just outside their table, Ken Bailey, a 33-year-old regular who lives downtown, read the newspaper to the drone of heavy construction noise next door at a future cafe. And what of this new downtown business? What did he think?

“I like it. It looks like a little of the old, a little new,” he said, pouring syrup on a pancake. “What I’m going to miss is the laid-back quality. I lived in Berkeley and Napa Valley and Yosemite, and they felt good like this does.

“I do think they’ve booted out the surfers, they’ve booted out some smaller businesses. With the expensive restaurants and homes it’s going to look like Balboa Island. But I don’t know. I would miss this place a lot. I would.”

Michele Williams Turner, owner of the Sugar Shack, scurries over with a coffee pot. Now 35, she is as much a fixture as anyone downtown, having grown up working at her parent’s cafe. “I’d like everything to be done with a handshake. I don’t know. We’ve been waiting for redevelopment down here since my parents bought the place in 1967 so who knows what will happen.”

Willy Beyer, 49, a painter and downtown resident since 1959, said he comes every morning to the Sugar Shack for breakfast and “to get all the gossip.”

The new downtown will be far better than the old, he said. “A lot of people will come down here and it will offer the tourists something besides run-down buildings and business.”

He arrives at 6:30 a.m. and stays until he leaves for work about 8 a.m. Only in the summer does he venture downtown at night, and that is a wasted effort. “There’s nothing open. No restaurants. People hate to change, but this isn’t 1940 anymore. It’s 1989.”

At another table, Gordie Higgins continued to hold court, blue eyes flashing as various friends stopped to chat. He can remember the days when there were only two cars in the whole town of perhaps 3,500 people. He remembers the tent city downtown where the roughnecks camped while working the oil fields in the 1920s.

He remembers the saltwater plunge and how people threw pennies into the deep end for him and other divers. He remembers the first gas station in town, the red cars that could get you to Los Angeles in 45 minutes.