Crystal Cove’s Future Clouds Lives of Many : Recreation: As the state begins to transform the coastal park into a tourist attraction, longtime residents think ahead to when they will become outsiders.

For almost 16 years, Virginia McKinney has dished up date shakes and sandwiches from a wisp of a building perched high above the ocean and overlooking peaceful Crystal Cove State Park.

She would like to stay, to build on the little business that has been a fixture there for so long, but next month she will leave. McKinney’s Sunshine Cove date shake shack, just off Coast Highway between Laguna Beach and Newport Beach, is finally giving way to progress.

“I’ve loved that little store,” McKinney said of the tiny stand, which, since 1945, has drawn motorists and bicyclists from the busy highway for a moment’s rest. “I just get waves of nostalgia when I think I’m not going to be there. That’s been my life.”

As part of a plan that will change the character of Crystal Cove State Park forever, the State Parks Concessions Board Tuesday reviewed bids from operators eager to replace McKinney and capitalize on a surge of tourists expected when the area is transformed from a quiet, residential beach community into a full-fledged park system.

The state is requiring that besides food, the new concessionaire also sell umbrellas, suntan lotion and other merchandise more in tune with concession stands found at other state park facilities along the coast.

Robert Vellanoweth, chief of the Concession Programs Division for state parks, said from Sacramento that a new concessionaire would be chosen today for Crystal Cove.

The management change is just one step in a larger plan to convert the park, almost 3,800 acres of hillsides and beachfront property sprawled along both sides of the highway for 3 1/2 miles, into a major attraction.

Since the property was purchased from the Irvine Co. in 1979, state officials have been considering ways to protect the landscape while offering the public more picnic areas, overnight camping spots and a restored historic community.

To make way for this vision of the future, however, Virginia McKinney is not the only one who will have to cut her ties with the past. Two entrenched residential communities, Crystal Cove and El Morro Beach Mobile Home Park, will also have to pull up stakes between now and the year 2000. While the lease for the mobile-home park does not expire until 1999, the lease for the 46-home Crystal Cove community expires in 1993.

“We think it would be a good thing for everyone if we were able to stay,” said Cinda Combs, whose grandmother first moved into one of the 46 Crystal Cove beach houses, cradled in the buffer zone between the highway and the surf, just after World War II.

Not surprisingly, many locals are not looking forward to the changes such as those in store for Sunshine Cove. As far as Combs is concerned, pushcarts or canteen trucks at the ocean’s edge will not improve the area’s special allure.

“This is rather a special beach,” she said. “The people I know who come down to stay the day come because it’s not like Huntington, not like Bolsa Chica. They don’t come because they can get hot dogs nearby.”

But Alan Tang, associate landscape architect for the state Department of Parks and Recreation, said it was only reasonable for the state to provide enhanced recreation opportunities for the public after paying $35 million to acquire the park. An extended stretch of coastal property offers special opportunities, he said.

“I think there could be an opportunity to provide accommodations and some recreation facilities you wouldn’t find anywhere else along the coast,” he said. “We see this as an opportunity to provide an alternative which can’t be duplicated really anywhere else. Where else are there cottages by the ocean that the public at large would have access to, either as overnight accommodations or as a park-related function?”

“Because we paid that amount of money, the public has a right to use those areas,” he added. “Some of the best parts of the beach and the coastline are at Crystal Cove and at El Morro.”

State officials say they have been restoring natural vegetation on the coastal strip, which Tang said has been scarred by cars and dirt bikes. In addition, eight restrooms and a park headquarters and maintenance facility have been built and more than 1,000 parking spaces are now divided among seven parking lots.

Once Crystal Cove is vacated, Tang said, workers will begin rehabilitating the old, beachfront buildings while preserving the “historic ambience” of the homes, which were built in the 1920s and 1930s. Those homes will be available to the public to be rented for overnight stays or for special group events.

To supplement what Tang said is one of the better underwater park areas in California, the state’s plan also allows for the creation of support facilities for scuba divers, including a small shop on the beach where divers could refill their tanks or buy equipment, and areas where divers can drive near to the water to unload equipment before parking their cars.

When El Morro Beach Mobile Home residents move from their 294 homes, those areas will probably be used to provide more parking, picnic areas and campgrounds, Tang said.

Bill Peyton, whose family took over and expanded the 294-home mobile-home park in 1955, said residents don’t seem to be worried yet about the “magic moment,” Dec. 31, 1999, when their lease will expire and they will have to move.

“Everybody signed the lease that that’s what they were going to do,” Peyton said. “But nobody around here is really thinking about it that much yet.”

For Virginia McKinney, however, the moment is just around the corner. And whatever the public benefit, McKinney describes the transition in personal terms. Although she had hoped to keep her store, the changes have left her feeling disappointed and almost looking forward to the next month, when the lease expires and she can put the move behind her, she said.

“If I can just coast out of there and retire with dignity,” she said, “that’s what I would like to do.”

Staff writer Lanie Jones contributed to this report.