O.C. Starts Here : As Summer Warms Its Funky Soul, Seal Beach Begins to Bloom

A ribbon of asphalt known by generations as simply PCH flows out of urban Long Beach, past power plants, shopping malls and multiscreen cinemas, before crossing a bridge, hanging a curve and gliding into Orange County.

Cruising Pacific Coast Highway in the silky swoons of summer has been a time-honored Southern California tradition. For 40 or so miles, the road links some of Orange County’s most fashionable cities, passing beaches and tidal flats such as Bolsa Chica before reaching the gentle cliffs of San Clemente.

But its trip through Orange County starts here. After the San Gabriel River, there is a subdivision on the left, a hotel, some condos and a McDonald’s on the right, and then near the intersection with Main Street the landmark Bay Theatre, on this day playing a film called “Kafka”: Welcome to “Old Town” Seal Beach.

A right turn onto Main Street takes you past a short three blocks of restaurants, bikini shops and chic boutiques. A funky used-book shop, seashell outlet and a neighborhood watering hole by the Seal Beach Pier complete a picture of America’s hometown gone Californian.

In a small cappuccino bar, a long-haired college student sits reading a newspaper and drinking coffee. “I come here to get some sun, hang out and look at pretty women,” he explains. Seal Beach, he says, has “got a classic atmosphere. It’s kind of cool.”

On a sidewalk bench just a few feet away, a man who later reveals himself to be a retired Seal Beach police officer sits enjoying an ice cream with his four young grandchildren. “It’s a small-town atmosphere,” John Averyt, 66, says of the street near which he has lived for 31 years. “I like it that way. I wouldn’t change a thing.”

The college student and retired police officer have little in common. Yet neither seems out of place in a city where an eclectic range of characters take the first rays of summer as an invitation to hit this pavement leading to the sea.

Perched on Orange County’s northernmost border, Seal Beach has long been a city on the edge. In the 1920s and ‘30s, sailors regularly sneaked down from Los Angeles County to enjoy its illicit gambling and prostitution. In the 1960s, scads of hippies claimed Main Street as their own. And for many years now the city has formed a gateway to Orange County, the first (and sometimes only) stop for southbound sojourners along PCH.

During winter months it is a quiet shopping district. But as summer approaches, filling the air with the smell of salt water and suntan lotion, the city unfolds like a flower bearing all the colors of its myriad past.

Old hippies mingle with young real estate agents. Men in business suits chat with women in bikinis. And shirtless college students, discovering the street for the first time, share its sidewalks with hard-working homemakers pushing baby carriages to the supermarket.

“The mix is beautiful,” says Nathan Cohen, 66, sitting on a ladder sorting books in the Main Street Book Store surrounded by browsers on all sides. “My customers range from homeless people to multimillionaires.”

The neighborhood has the highest rents in Orange County: $1,348 per month for an average apartment, compared to only $794 countywide, a real estate survey shows.

Yet Cohen, a retired merchant seaman whose gray hair hangs down to his shoulders, finds it a friendly environment for his shop, which features about 40,000 rare and secondhand volumes--from Harvard classics to dusty encyclopedia sets--stacked from floor to ceiling.

Farther down the street, Steve Murdock says business is just fine at Condo’s Rock and Shell shop, a fixture there for 42 years.

“It’s pretty much like Main Street Peoria used to be,” he says. “Everything you need is right here on the street.”

Most attribute Main Street’s drawing power to the pier and beach at its far end, directly across the street from the village of small houses and apartments occupied by renters and property owners who call the place home. Graced at its tip by Ruby’s, a popular 50s-style diner, the pier is well-traveled, although an electrical fire forced a temporary closure earlier this month. On the north side, surfers ride waves that lap at one of the broadest beaches in the county.

In the meantime life is lazy on Main Street, Seal Beach, as the season begins. In a parking lot by the sea, a lone pair of rollerbladers practice their antics in preparation for the next few months, while out on the sand a handful of sunbathers brave the still-chilly winds of May.

Across the street at a bar called Kinda Lahaina, however, the spirit of summer seems to have already arrived.

“You turn off PCH, the temperature drops five or six degrees, you smell the ocean and you just feel better,” says Joe DuMong, 39, leaning casually over the bar. Raised in Seal Beach, DuMong--dressed in shorts and thongs--now works on the pier. “It’s real friendly, real low key and casual,” he says. “I’ve lived other places, but I always come back here.”