Norman Rockwell Meets Single Scene : Belmont Shore: This part of Long Beach reclaimed from marshes is home to a diverse community of renters and owners content with the lifestyle.

He took his time walking the two blocks home, stretching it out, listening to the quiet streets. It was just a little before midnight, but Tuesday was slow in Belmont Shore, everyone hunkered down, waiting for the weekend, when the bars offered two-for-one tequila shooters and dirty dancing contests. . . . His building was pink stucco--what the classifieds call mission-style--two stories of wrought-iron grillwork and decorative brick, rounded archways, and a red barrel-tile roof. It looked more like a Taco Bell than the Alamo.

--Robert Ferrigno “The Horse Latitudes”

There are two distinct communities in Belmont Shore, a conveniently located Long Beach neighborhood wedged between Alamitos Bay and the Pacific.

The better known of these--thanks to resident Robert Ferrigno’s hot new mystery--is the fast-paced world of singles, renters and apartment dwellers, of night swimming in the bay and hanging out days on the nearby section of beach called “Horny Corners.”

“Single people rent down here because of the activity, the action,” said Janie Smith, of Rene Realty. “Most of the renters are college students or people who can’t afford to buy.”

The greatest concentration of apartments is at the edges of Shore, along the bay, the ocean and Livingston Avenue, with the rest sprinkled throughout the neighborhood.

But for many other Shore residents--homeowners running the gamut from young families with children to two-career couples to retirees--the friendly beach town is more like a California version of Norman Rockwell.

Belmont Shore is the kind of community that gave Long Beach the nickname “Iowa-by-the-Sea,” one that generates enough pride to produce its own post cards, bumper stickers and license plate frames.

“There are two Belmont Shores,” conceded author Ferrigno, who moved into an apartment as a bachelor eight years ago, and has since moved to larger quarters in the neighborhood with his wife and young son.

For residents of both, he said, “it’s the best place in Southern California to live. . . . I like the feel of Belmont Shore. It’s like a European Riviera kind of town. . . . I like the languid sensuality. . . . It’s an archetype for Southern California.”

The air is relatively clean and ocean breezes cool the hottest of summer nights, but for both of its communities, the secret of Belmont Shore’s success is its scale.

Within walking distance, it has one of each of the things any community could want: an ocean pier, a library branch, fire station, post office, weekly newspaper, an elementary and a middle school. A single, hotly contested seat on the Long Beach City Council represents the area.

There are also multiples of other requisites in the neighborhood, such as houses of worship. Diversions include a pocket-sized recreation area right off Alamitos Bay, where wind surfers abound; boat slips; a recently completed three-mile beach bike path, which also provides lanes for pedestrians, skate boarders and roller skaters, and a new children’s playground under development.

Colleen Bentley-Adler, who grew up in Long Beach, likes being able to park her car on a weekend and not move it. “Not having to drive is wonderful,” she said. She also likes her neighbors. “There’s a good mix of older people who’ve lived here 30, 40, 50 years; college kids, and a group like us in the middle. I like that mix.”

Bentley-Adler once lived with her husband, Jeff, in Ferrigno’s old apartment building, later buying a one-story house up the street, on the beach block, for $165,000 in 1985. The couple is again looking for an apartment in Shore to stay in while their house is gutted and rebuilt.

Because she and her husband like to go to Los Angeles for cultural events and Dodger games, Bentley-Adler said she will make use of the new light rail Blue Line--harkening back to the days when the Shore was connected to Los Angeles by the old Red Car line.

A hydrofoil connects the Shore to Catalina Island and, for more distant traveling, Long Beach Airport is only 20 minutes away, with Los Angeles International Airport 45 minutes up the San Diego (405) Freeway.

Ruth DeGraw, an active, outgoing 85-year-old widow, didn’t think twice about staying in the Shore after her husband died several years ago, even though she doesn’t drive.

“This is my home,” she said. “I love it. I make lots of friends.”

After more than 20 years in the neighborhood, she uses her own wheeled cart to shop on nearby 2nd Street and, to travel farther, she takes advantage of good bus connections and friendly neighbors who drive.

Marshall Finnan moved to the Shore 30 years ago with his wife, Margaret, herself a second generation Long Beach resident, and he said he has enjoyed the neighborhood’s continuity, watching families grow up.

“People around us are more settled,” he said. “It’s a very stable group. In most neighborhoods, you don’t know the people across the street.”

Finnan said there are “not many negatives” in the Shore. There is occasional friction in areas where apartments are next door to homes--usually involving late parties and loud music or revving motors. Property crime is also on the rise, including the theft of Finnan’s truck while it was parked outside his house.

“The biggest downer,” Finnan said, are the homeless who have appeared in the alleys and on 2nd Street, but even that problem is of manageable scale, limited to six to eight recognizable “regulars.”

Margaret McClain, an 89-year-old resident who has lived in the Shore since 1972, said that when she first saw the area as a visitor in 1906 much of it was a tidal marsh. Many of the current street names--Covina, Laverne, Pomona, Claremont--come from the areas where inland people camped in tents during the summer.

Dredging made the area safe for development in 1919, and in 1922, McGrath & Selover invited people to buy in what was then called Belmont Shore Place, which, “in its ideal location . . . is destined to be the most sought-after residential spot in . . . the West.”

The first lots--about 30-by-75 feet--went for $1,600, enabling some people to buy a lot and a half. When houses were built, the building code limited the value of houses to another $2,500.

As a result, most were one-story, 800- to 1,200-square-foot rectangles, in varying shades of pastel stucco, with a variety of Mediterranean fronts and exteriors. For decades, the houses were rented for the summer to vacationing inland people.

Belmont Shore’s unofficial historian, Bill Hepler, is also a neighborhood fixture, conducting his real estate, small arms and private investigation business on the phone in his front yard, usually shirtless.

Hepler--who once worked as a bodyguard for Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor--has stayed in the area for nearly half a century, he said, because there’s “a bohemian lifestyle down here, and I like it.”

The tanned, 75-year-old retired Long Beach police officer paid $4,750 for his house in 1942, but he can recall chasing polliwogs in the area as a boy before the dredging.

In the 1930s, one of his neighbors and fellow lifeguards was John Wayne--still Marion Morrison then and a student at USC. He recalls shoveling bricks with Wayne from alleys after the Long Beach earthquake of 1933, which spared most houses in the Shore.

By the early 1980s, the Shore became especially attractive as prices in the area--from $150,000 to $350,000--were outpaced by equally convenient coastal locations such as Redondo Beach to the north and Seal Beach just to the south in Orange County. By the late ‘80s, prices caught up, and buying in--even in the recently cooled market--is not cheap. Most houses on the narrow, mostly one-way streets now range from $350,000 to $600,000.

That has not dissuaded two-career couples such as Charlie and Sharon Roy, who several years ago began looking for a place that would enable them to commute to his job in Irvine and hers in downtown Los Angeles.

At first, they rented an older house in the Shore and liked the area so much they bought the house in 1986 for $172,000 and renovated it. When they decided they needed more room, they sold that house and bought another across the street, which they have since gutted and rebuilt as a contemporary, two-story, four bedroom home. Apart from the location, Charlie Roy says, what he likes most about the Shore is that “there’s a good group of people living here. We know all our neighbors.”

Recently, many of the original houses--called “doll houses” by realtors--have been expanded or remodeled.

Marshall Finnan, now semi-retired, totally redid the exterior of his home--for which he paid $20,000 in 1959--opting for a Cape Cod style, replacing the original stucco with wood siding.

At much less cost, other residents have been sprucing up their homes with polished wooden doors, small stained-glass windows, canvas awnings and greenhouse window boxes. Because yards are small, many residents who like the open air and a view of the water have built decks.

Land values have gone so high that those few homes that have not been improved are being bought as tear-downs and replaced with large homes, often by developers, and offered at about $700,000.

The heart of Belmont Shore is 2nd Street, the place where its two communities rub shoulders on weekends and meet--if only briefly--around dinnertime. There are seasonal sidewalk sales and the community Christmas parade.

When prospective buyers tour the area, said Betsy Ramirez of Coastline Realty, “2nd Street is the first thing they love.”

During the day, the 14-block commercial strip bustles. There are few errands that can’t be run here: bank, bakery, dry cleaner, video rental, exercise club, shoemaker, doctor, lawyer, veterinarian, gas station, accountant, travel agent, bike repair, office supplies.

Here you can find two bookstores, a hardware store and a corner market--none of which are part of a chain.

The 25 restaurants span the spectrum: Chinese, Mexican, Italian, French, Japanese, seafood, fast food. (A Lebanese restaurant recently closed and the City Council has just voted a moratorium on any new or expanded restaurants.)

For all its charm and diversity, 2nd Street is changing, and some residents fear that skyrocketing rents are destined to turn it into a “little Westwood Village,” with the attendant crush and congestion.

In the past few years, a Winchell’s Donut became Le Donut and Croissant, a camera store was replaced by a clothing chain and a dry cleaner by a print gallery. One of the three locally owned pharmacies was sold to a discount drug chain, which has built a new outlet four times the size of the original.

Parking spillover from 2nd Street is a constant irritant on adjoining blocks, and beach-goers on summer weekends choke the entire area. But residents also acknowledge that a large part of the problem is that very few residents use their garages for parking but for storage. Some have begun parking in the alleys behind their homes.

Belmont Shore is ringed by some equally desirable neighborhoods, like the Peninsula and upscale Naples Island.

Young people who grow up in the Shore often look for Shore rentals, often to attend nearby Cal State Long Beach or Long Beach City College, thus bridging the gap between the two communities that inhabit Belmont Shore.

“Generations and generations keep coming coming back,” said realtor Steve Ramirez. “It’s part of a big city, but it’s preserved its small-town atmosphere.”

Not for everyone, of course. In “The Horse Latitudes,” Robert Ferrigno’s protagonist saw it a little less prosaically:

The Shore was a jumble of ambition, filled with salesgirls who took acting classes at night and bartenders who wrote screenplays during the day, part-time waitresses and substitute teachers, single and anonymous and overextended. People got a SAG card or a sugar daddy and moved out overnight, leaving their furniture and their damage deposit behind. It was a perfect place to get lost in.

AT A GLANCE Population 1990 estimate: 10,390 1980-90 change: 18.9% Median age: 32.9 years Annual income Per capita: 25,517 Median household: 38,900 Household distribution Less than $15,000: 13.3% $15,000 - $30,000: 23.3% $30,000 - $50,000: 30.6% $50,000 - $75,000: 20.5% $75,000 + 12.3%