A Place to ‘Hang’ : Rituals: From soda shops to shopping malls, generations of teens have been searching for somewhere to be themselves.
As if responding to some mysterious summons, Madeline Biesty gathers with her friends at Northwood Pizza after every Irvine High School football game. The 16-year-old would never consider going to any other place.
What’s the draw?
After all it’s just a typical pizza joint with flashing neon beer logos, the usual array of team flags and video games, random athletic events airing on a wide-screen TV, and, of course, pizza with the works.
Its appeal?
It’s a hangout.
A teen hangout.
“It’s always been the place to go,” Madeline said of the Irvine pizza parlor. “It’s the place I go to talk to my friends after the game.”
Hangouts have become as much of a rite of passage for teen-agers as braces and Clearasil.
For Madeline, and millions of teens past and present, the hangout represents an oasis free from the watchful eyes of adults. A place, as she describes, “where you can just hang and meet with your friends.”
Chator Mason, an associate professor of psychology at USC, says hangouts are instinctual.
“Teens have to have a place that’s theirs. A place where there are no adult restrictions and everything is done their way,” Mason said. “In a way, the hangout is like a religious sanctuary. And in this sanctuary, ideas are swapped and social interaction takes place.”
Arnie Binder, a UC Irvine professor who specializes in juvenile behavior and delinquency, said hangouts are an important aspect of life, offering teens a sense of security and a feeling of belonging. “Nobody who gathers in these groups should feel like an outsider,” Binder said.
While teens in the ‘30s and the early ‘40s somehow were able to find each other, it wasn’t until after World War II and the rapid growth of suburbia that true hangouts took on a substantial role in the day-to-day life of Teen USA.
Other than the ingrained fixtures--Disneyland, Knott’s Berry Farm, fast-food locales and the beach--most hangouts sizzle for a short time then die off, evolving in sophistication with each passing decade.
Like a script from “Ozzie and Harriet,” hangouts in the 1950s were simple and harmless. Hamburger joints, roller-skating rinks and drive-in theaters served teens during the somnolent Eisenhower years. In Orange County, even though the landscape was predominantly agriculture and open spaces, teens rocked around the clock at the Rendezvous Ballroom (a dance hall in Newport Beach) and the Skate Ranch in Santa Ana.
Built in 1956 at the height of roller-skating’s popularity, “the Ranch” was the place to take your date, have a Coke, talk with your friends and skate.
“We had some places to meet--Disneyland, Knott’s Berry Farm--but those places were never really considered hangouts when I was a teen. A lot of what we did was left to our imaginations,” said Phil Mackovitz, 50, a Los Angeles building contractor who attended Anaheim High School in the late 1950s. “The surfing craze wasn’t really here yet, so the beach was usually the place where you went with your parents. But the place I have my best memories is the Skate Ranch in Santa Ana.”
“We did a lot of planning (for the future) when we used to go there,” said Mackovitz, referring to his then-girlfriend and himself. “Darlene and I used to (talk about) where we would live when we got married. What we would call our kids--that kind of stuff. As I look back on it, it was all pretty harmless, but I had some of the best times of my life there.”
With the birth of the surfing craze in the early 1960s, lifeguard stations and surf shops shifted the migration patterns of teen-agers their way.
“I guess I was pretty much of a rabble-rouser,” recalled Tom Cornelius, 48, who did his hanging out while he was a student at Tustin High School in the early-1960s. “We used to go race hot rods near Bryan Avenue (in Tustin). It was a simple life. We would race cars, surf and watch the girls.
“(Hangouts) offered me a place to go to be with my friends. Where we could act like kids,” said Cornelius, who now lives in Huntington Harbour.
The former Oscar’s Restaurant on 1st Street in Santa Ana was a favorite haunt, Cornelius said. And just up the street from Tustin High was Tastee Freeze, which is still in operation. The fast-food restaurants offered two of the most important features of a hangout: cheap food and a management that didn’t mind loitering youth.
Adult tolerance is a necessity for a hangout, UCI’s Binder said. “If someone keeps chasing the teens away, like restaurant (management) for example, the teens will simply move on.”
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, head shops and record stores became hangout anchors, offering peace and love.
Jeff Steller, now 39, grew up in Newport Beach but preferred to do his teen hanging in Huntington Beach in the late 1960s. He and his sister, Jane, now 36, were avid surfers who painted peace signs on their surfboards.
Steller said his parents never understood his hangouts. “At that time, there was a lot of conflict in our house, and to my parents the surf shops and the Golden Bear (nightclub in Huntington Beach) were acts of defiance.
“I remember how we would get up early in the morning, hop in my van and drive to the pier,” Steller said. “We would meet our friends, surf, and then we would spend the rest of the day hanging out at the surf shops like Windnsea. And at night, we would go over to the Golden Bear and watch the hippies.”
Now, he says, when he drives through that area, “I get a little choked up because all the places I used to go to are now gone.”
During the county’s development boom in the late ‘70s and ‘80s--at the height of the punk-rock movement--hangouts bounced from skateboard parks, discos and punk-rock clubs to shopping malls.
Jim Guerinot, who attended Sunny Hills High School in Fullerton in 1976, spent all his free time at the local music clubs, which he described as “vibrant.”
“At that time, Fullerton was a happening scene,” said Guerinot, 31, now an A&M; Record executive. “It was a great hang for people like me who wanted to see the bands and be a part of this (punk) movement. There was this place called the Pub, and they used to have quarter beer, and AL Flipside would play videos and music. Every punk in Orange County used to hang out there. The war paint was on when we went to these places.”
Most of the other clubs Guerinot remembers either succumbed to fire or the wrecker’s ball. “There was Igabods. That would be the place to hang on Sunday. Everybody knew each other, and it got to the point that the waitresses would let us pour our own beer.”
A place that didn’t have music but was still popular, he said, was Big John’s Billiard Hall on Orangethorpe Avenue. “They had air hockey and it was big for kids with fake IDs who wanted to play pool.”
Exploding development has gobbled some of the popular hangouts, but new ones are constantly created for the next generation.
Shopping malls took on new significance in the ‘80s, offering hangouts within a hangout.
Kelly Larson, 24, who attended La Habra High School in the early 1980s, said the only real mall hangout was South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa. “A lot of my friends would stay all day there. It had everything you needed--places to eat, lots of shops and boys,” she said.
Larson, who works for a Cerritos accounting firm, said the mall was not provincial, unlike the beach where teens staked claim on their spot of sand.
“It was sort of the universal hangout,” she said. “It didn’t really matter where you were from. Every place was fair game in the mall.”
While Larson said she would occasionally wander to other malls in the county, those trips were serious shopping visits, not the same as a visit to South Coast Plaza. “I probably spent more (money) on clothes at the Cerritos Mall,” she said. “I was too busy running around and talking to buy anything at South Coast Plaza.”
What about the teen-agers today?
Steller, who has two teen-age children, said he sometimes feels sorry for them because they don’t have a place to spend time with their friends. “It’s not the same as when I was their age,” he said. “Today, kids seem to be a wandering tribe, never really establishing any roots. You need roots when you’re a teen-ager.”
His own hot-rodding days long gone, Cornelius has passed the time-honored tradition of hanging out to his 16-year-old daughter, Kimberly.
“My dad has told me all his stories, and I think it’s really great,” said Kimberly, a junior at Marina High School in Huntington Beach. “After the football games, we hang out at Tommy’s Burgers at Warner and Magnolia (in Fountain Valley), Hudson’s Grill and Old World, (both in Huntington Beach). Of course, it’s nothing like the places my dad used to hang out.”
Peter Lak, a 17-year-old senior from Ocean View High School, said there’s really only one reason why he and his friends spend time at the Taco Bell near the pier in Huntington Beach: 59-cent tacos. “It’s the place we seem to gather after we surf or play volleyball,” he said. “We also go to Post Game Pizza (in Huntington Beach) after every football game.”
Ward Avery, 17, president of Associated Students at Orange High School, said he primarily goes to parties, and doesn’t really have a hangout. “Well, we do go to the Lamppost Pizza (in Orange). But it’s the parties (where) I do my hanging out.”
Avery predicted that hangouts may become a thing of the past because of economic factors.
“The big reason parties are so popular is because they’re inexpensive,” he said. “Food and movies cost so much these days. All you can do is rent some movies and watch them at your house with some friends. There really isn’t any place to go to just hang out.”
* YESTERDAY’S HOT SPOTS: Orange County hangouts through the ages. E8