Trouble in Avalon : But Plans Afoot to Help With Crowds, Housing

By boat, the view approaching this tourist town presents a trio of vivid images, each rising from the morning mists like a post card come to life.

First, the Hamilton Cove condominiums emerge on the horizon, tier upon tier of gleaming white buildings hewn into a hillside of the rugged Santa Catalina Island terrain.

Then, the landmark Casino Ballroom, a round, domed Art Deco-style structure, comes into view, perched on a showy vantage point of land jutting into the blue Pacific.

Finally, rounding the curve into Avalon Bay, the town itself unfolds, exuding Old World charm and a Mediterranean-like ambiance. Picturesque houses with red-tiled roofs line the steep, winding streets, overlooking a white sand beach and a boat-filled harbor.

Once ashore, Avalon lives up to its idyllic image.

It is a town where many residents are on a first-name basis and where townspeople pick up their mail at the post office because there are too few addresses to justify the expense of home mail delivery.

Crescent Avenue, a pedestrian mall of souvenir shops and restaurants with quaint names like Buoys and Gulls and the Busy Bee, retains a small-town flavor, though year-round residents tend to avoid it in summer months because of the throngs of tourists.

But even in picture-perfect Avalon, there are problems.

In surveys conducted over the last year by the Santa Catalina Island Co., residents and visitors alike identified a number of ways that life in Avalon could be improved.

Basically, the city of about 2,500 is bursting at the seams.

Avalon suffers from a shortage of housing for permanent residents, and would-be workers in the year-round tourist industry often have trouble finding a place to live.

Traffic congestion and a lack of parking spaces are critical issues. Even though many residents tool around the hilly streets in space-saving golf carts, and the city strictly limits the numbers of cars and other vehicles, summer traffic often collects in bottlenecks at downtown intersections.

“Overtown” Tourists

For residents, tourism is both an economic boon and a hindrance of day-to-day life. As many as 15,000 tourists from “overtown,” as the mainland is called, flood the 1.25-square-mile town daily, providing big profits for Avalon merchants but straining the town’s already taxed fresh-water resources, streets and sewer system.

Twice weekly, the tourist tide swells when cruise ships are moored offshore and hundreds of vacationers are ferried to the Pleasure Pier for a few hurried hours of sightseeing.

Longtime Avalon resident John W. R. Windle, who arrived on the island as a 6-year-old in 1910, reveres Avalon’s small-town charms but says the city’s growth and its increasing popularity as a year-round tourist attraction cause headaches for permanent residents.

“Some things need fixing, there’s no doubt about it,” said Windle, 85. “And it’s getting more commercial, it really is. Sometimes, I get to feel like a stranger in my own town.”

To ease the problems, officials at the Santa Catalina Island Co. have unveiled a sweeping, 15-year plan aimed at redeveloping much of Avalon in three-year phases.

The plan--still at a conceptual stage--is intended to address some of the most pressing issues facing Avalon, including lack of year-round housing and a water supply so limited that saltwater is used to flush toilets and to douse fires.

The plan proposes new moderate-cost apartments and homes for year-round residents, a new transportation center to consolidate ticket-buying and other travel functions now spread over the town, a desalination plant, three new hotels with a total of about 200 new rooms, and a general sprucing-up of Avalon’s streets and parks.

Island officials are uncertain how much it will cost to implement the plan and how any future development costs will be divided among the island company, the city and private developers. A desalination plant that purifies water will alone cost roughly $3 million, officials estimate.

Many residents, while acknowledging that the changes are overdue, say they want to preserve Avalon’s small-town quality.

Therein, island company officials say, lies a major dilemma: how to upgrade Avalon without altering its charm.

“Avalon’s now 75 years old, and a lot of the things that were convenient and appropriate 75 years ago are no longer convenient and appropriate,” said island company vice president Ron Doutt. “They are, as a matter of fact, contributing to these problems.”

Santa Catalina Island was purchased in 1919 by the family of chewing gum magnate William Wrigley Jr. through the island company. The company now owns about two-thirds of the land in Avalon and about 20% of the city’s buildings. In 1975, the company deeded about 86% of the island to the nonprofit Catalina Conservancy, which maintains the pristine interior.

Some of Avalon’s buildings--such as City Hall, a wood frame, stucco-covered structure built around 1917 into a steep hillside--date from the early part of the century. Office space at City Hall, for example, is so limited that some city workers share desks in the council chambers, which holds a maximum of 36 people.

Space is at an even greater premium at the Avalon fire station, across from City Hall on Metropole Avenue.

“Oh, it’s unbelievable,” said Fire Chief Jack Goslin. “We don’t even have a ramp to pull out the trucks and work on them.” During daily maintenance checks, the trucks must be pulled out onto Metropole, partially blocking the thoroughfare, he said.

A new fire station--proposed for a site on Avalon Canyon Road near the school and Avalon Municipal Hospital--could provide training space for the department’s 25 volunteer firefighters, Goslin said.

“I would love to see it done,” he said.

A few residents have expressed dismay that the plans will take 15 years to complete. “It’s not fast enough,” one resident wrote on an island company survey.

But Mayor Hugh T. (Bud) Smith called the plan “workable and doable” and said he supports the island company’s plan to proceed “a step at a time.”

Island company officials say developing the project over 15 years will minimize disruption to Avalon’s tourists and residents. The plans call for:

* Building 50 units of housing a year over 15 years. The additional housing is planned for three locations: Las Casitas, the site of a former bungalow-style hotel where the Chicago Cubs held spring training until 1951, now used as housing for island company employees; Bird Park Canyon, the site of a former aviary, once the home of a private collection of exotic birds, and Quail Canyon, on the outskirts of Avalon.

* Building a civic center, including a new City Hall, fire station and day-care facilities, on part of the 7-acre Las Casitas site.

* Building a desalination plant near the Southern California Edison power plant on Pebbly Beach Road to provide a source of fresh water for new homes and apartments.

* Building three hotels, including a high-quality hotel and public-access beach at Descanso Bay, a 16-acre site between the Casino Ballroom and the Hamilton Cove condominium development. A second hotel would be built near a city park at the western end of Crescent Avenue, the town’s main street. Also, the Atwater Hotel would be razed to make room for a new hotel.

* Making land owned by the island company available for lease and eventual purchase by permanent residents to build single-family homes.

* Establishing a central commercial area for residents, to include a new 15,000-square-foot grocery store and a new post office, providing a place for residents to shop and check their mail away from the onslaught of visitors on tourist-crammed Crescent Avenue. Nearby would be a “transportation hub,” where tourists would validate cross-channel transportation tickets, check in baggage and purchase tickets for tours into the interior. Such arrangements are now done at various locations, including Cabrillo Mole on Pebbly Beach Road and the Island Plaza on Sumner Avenue.

* Reducing traffic by relocating many service-oriented businesses away from tourist areas.

* Sprucing up the city’s parks, possibly adding landscaping along Sumner and Metropole avenues, based on the same architectural theme as the pedestrian mall on Crescent Avenue.

Island company officials said it is difficult to estimate how much the new developments could bring the city in revenue from hotel and business taxes, but one official ventured a rough estimate of about $1.7 million annually. Avalon’s current annual budget is about $8 million.

Some aspects of the plan have been in the works for at least 20 years, said lifelong Avalon resident Malcolm Renton, a retired vice president of the island company.

For example, building a grand hotel at Descanso Beach has been the company’s goal since the St. Catherine Hotel, an elegant structure where Clark Gable, Mary Pickford, Cecil B. De Mille and other Hollywood stars once stayed, was razed in 1966.

“The plan was always to keep that a choice hotel location,” said Renton, 81, whose father also worked for the island company.

In June, the island company presented conceptual plans to residents at a town meeting, and reaction was mostly favorable.

Of 67 residents who responded to an island company survey after the presentation, 25 residents, or about 41%, unconditionally approved the overall concept. Only two residents didn’t like the plan. More meetings are planned over the coming year.

In interviews, residents seem confident that the plan will succeed.

“It’s a beautiful set-up,” said Lolo Saldana, owner of Lolo’s Plaza Barber Shop on Sumner Avenue.

“I’m absolutely impressed with it,” said Lita Mulvihill, an Avalon resident for 17 years, who said the plan “is renovating and restoring and bringing things back to life that used to be, like the old St. Catherine.”

Wayne Griffin, executive director of the Catalina Chamber of Commerce, said the chamber is unlikely to take a formal position on the island company plans. But Griffin said he approves of the plans and the island company’s solicitation of response from the town.

“I thought it was great,” Griffin said. “They’re being very up-front about what they’re doing and asking people what they think. It’s refreshing.”

Patricia Moore, director and curator of the Catalina Island Museum, said the timing couldn’t be better.

“I think our town needs to take a good hard look at ourselves because we’re outgrowing ourselves,” she said. “I think we’re due for an uplift.”