Victory in the Bay War : Parklands: Newport Beach couple led tumultuous battle to save the Back Bay from development. They won the fight, and next month county planners will begin meetings on a park to rim the marshlands.

In 1963, shortly after Frank and Frances Robinson moved within a few blocks of the Back Bay, their son delivered some news: “No Trespassing” signs had sprung up on the banks of that wilderness basin. The landowner, the Irvine Co., was announcing plans for a new development.

The Robinsons, who had imagined their two children playing on tranquil shores where Gabrielino Indians once lived, were alarmed.

“It was all selfish in the beginning,” Frank Robinson said of the impulse that propelled him and his wife into a battle with the city, the county and the county’s largest landowner which lasted for nearly 30 years. “They were going to dredge out and narrow the channel and make it like lower Newport Bay. We got a little upset.”

The couple, who say they didn’t know a duck from a coot when they started their fight to save the bay from development, admit their initial concern was not for the environment, not for what one nature lover called the “shaggy sweetness” of the wetlands or for the endangered birds and plants which make the bay their home. They were simply determined that the land should be open to the public.

An environmental movement began to swell around them. Friends of Newport Bay and Stop Polluting Our Newport were born. National groups, including the Audubon Society and the Sierra Club, joined the war to save what some considered a suburban swamp.

“As we got into it, it was a little bigger than a bellyache about not having a beach for our kids,” Frank Robinson said. It became, he said, “a real bloody fight for a number of years.”

While there may still be a skirmish or two on the horizon, the war over the future of Upper Newport Bay seems now to be over. And the Robinsons won.

County planners will begin meetings next month with environmentalists and homeowners to design a 140-acre regional park to rim the marshlands, now an ecological reserve. The consensus seems to favor a gentle modification of the land from its virgin state into a “natural park,” with meandering trails and picnic areas. It is a peaceful plan that belies the tumultuous history of the land.

It was in the early 1960s that environmentalists staked their claim on the Back Bay, which flourished as a seaport in the 19th Century and was the site of a salt company until 1969.

The initial movement was fragmented. A handful of residents, including the Robinsons, had been working to block development in the bay for a few years when a separate group, made up of about a dozen residents from throughout the county, formed the Friends in 1968. Even within that small group, the goals were splintered, according to Chuck Greening, first Friends president.

One member, for example, favored creating an amusement park-type miniature city in the bay to ensure that people would be allowed access, Greening said. Another envisioned the bay as “unapproachable,” an area people could drive past but no more. When the “wildly divergent ideas,” failed to yield to a single goal, Greening said, the group focused instead on simply blocking the development.

“Any position we took, we would fracture the little group and several of them would go off mad and so on,” said Greening, a Fullerton resident and retired space scientist. “So I just didn’t let us do that.”

The Friends was still in its infancy when the Santa Barbara oil spill shocked the state and awakened a concern for the environment.

Then, when fierce flooding hit in February, 1969, Greening said, Orange County environmentalists discovered they were not alone.

A few months before the storms began, the Friends had begun to conduct tours of the bay to call attention to the endangered land. In February, the tour was featured in Sunset magazine. Greening’s phone number was printed in the article.

But then the storm hit the Southland, drenching the county and rupturing the main dike a half-mile from where the tour was to begin. As a result of ongoing construction, mud slid down the bluffs and gushed into the bay.

But at 5 a.m., Greening’s phone began ringing with callers wanting to know if the nature walk was still on. Not knowing the answer, Greening said he and his wife, Ada-Jane, headed for the bay. In the still pounding rain, people from as far away as Santa Barbara began to arrive.

“As far as we could tell, it was something over 1,000 people turned out in that pouring rain,” he said. “It had to be a turning point for us.”

Ada-Jane Greening held an umbrella over a table and began collecting names. With rain pouring off his wide-brimmed hat, another Friends member began describing plant life to the group gathered in the mud. He will never forget, Greening said, “people just standing there spellbound, listening to this man.”

“Here these people were, muddy up to their knees, drenched, with water dripping off them, and smiling and saying, ‘Thank you,’ ” Greening said. “I think that morning we realized for the first time the breadth of interest there was in the bay.”

“None of us ever dreamed that someone would wake up in Barstow at 4 in the morning and climb in their car and drive to the bay for the tour,” he said. “I don’t think any of us dreamed there were people that far away who were interested.”

Looking back, insiders say the battle to save the bay was fought on two fronts. While nature lovers plugged into the growing environmentalist movement to keep the spotlight on the Back Bay, others whittled away at the legal agreements between the county and the Irvine Co. It was on the legal front that the first major battle was won.

Under attack was a land exchange outlined in 1960 between the county and the Irvine Co., owner of three islands in the bay and most of the land around it. The proposal called for the islands to be dredged and for a navigable channel to be created with a marine stadium and parks. The Irvine Co. would receive certain public tidelands and filled areas along the channel for development of homes, a commercial area and a hotel. The county would pay to dredge almost three miles of the bay.

“We felt it was a horrible rip-off, to be honest about it,” said Frank Robinson, one of six people who challenged the constitutionality of the agreement in court. In 1970, after a 20-month legal battle, a Superior Court judge ruled the exchange constitutional. Three years later, an appeals court reversed that decision.

Greening heaped credit on the Robinsons for the court victory and for the fund-raising effort that paid for that battle against giant opponents.

“My comment was that you might think that was one-sided,” Greening said, “if you didn’t know the Robinsons.”

In 1975, the state bought 527 acres of islands and lowlands up to the 10-foot contour of the bluffs for the Department of Fish and Game to operate within its Ecological Reserve System. The Irvine Co. was paid $3.48 million. The county accepted $1.65 million for disputed back taxes. And the developer’s dream of a marina community evaporated.

But another battle had long been brewing. Even before the Board of Supervisors accepted the agreement to turn the Back Bay into a permanent ecological preserve in 1974, environmentalists had begun eyeing the bluffs which surround the wetlands. That land was vitally important, they said, both as a buffer between the bird sanctuary and the crush of urban life, and as an oasis for people.

But the Irvine Co., which still owned 114 acres along the bay, planned to build homes on 71 acres bordered by Irvine Avenue and University Drive, a spokesman for the developer said.

By then, however, the preservationist movement was firmly rooted. The membership of Friends had swollen to 1,500. And an offshoot organization, SPON, was created in 1974.

The fate of the remaining acreage was decided when the Irvine Co. agreed to deed the land to the county if SPON would drop a 1987 lawsuit which threatened to block expansion of Fashion Island, the Newport Beach mall owned by the developer. It is that 114 acres, along with other pockets of property owned by the county and the city, that will now make up the Upper Newport Bay Regional Park.

A final knot should be smoothed out Wednesday when the Board of Supervisors is expected to remove the extension of University Drive from the county’s master plan of arterial highways. The extension, which would have stretched across the northern edge of the bay, would pose still another hazard to the bay, environmentalists say.

When the board meeting begins at 9:30 a.m., Robinson, a retired aerospace engineer, “will be there, you can bet,” he said. And next month, when the committee meets for the first time to nudge the park toward its destiny, he will be a member.

Frances Robinson has been taking classes to become a nature guide. She hopes to do full-time volunteer work at the park.

The distinctive thing about the Robinsons, now both 71, is that they have staying power, Greening said.

“My personal feeling is it’s hardly possible to give them too much credit for what they’ve done,” he said.