‘Pocket Paradise’ : Crystal Cove a Quiet Hodgepodge of Old, Ramshackle Beach Shacks

Walking down the long rickety stairway to the beach here is a bit like descending into the Twilight Zone. There is an old wooden bridge crossing a moat to a row of classic beach cottages. The sand is clean and expansive with nary a soul on it. And directly beneath a broken timepiece is a sign advising visitors to “please set your clocks back to 1930.”

The admonition is appropriate; time has stood still for 60 years amid this quiet hodgepodge of ramshackle beach shacks directly below the roaring traffic of Coast Highway. “It’s just a real special place,” says Vivian Falzetti, 47, who’s been living at Crystal Cove, halfway between Corona del Mar and Laguna Beach, for 16 years. “It’s like a little pocket paradise. You come home and it’s like stepping back in time.”

Indeed, the place is listed in the National Register of Historic Places as “the last intact example of vernacular beach architecture,” i.e., the only surviving example of the funky little beach communities that once dotted the California coast.

Yet its inhabitants live on time that is borrowed as well as inert.

Next June will see the expiration of their 10-year lease with the state, which owns the property, raising the specter of mass evictions. If that happens, residents say, it will be the end of an era. “It would be like having our hearts cut out,” Falzetti says. “It would destroy the cove.”

The seeds of this dilemma were planted back in the early 1900s when the beach, then owned by the Irvine Co., became a favorite stomping ground for Irvine family guests who were fond of riding buckboard wagons down the dirt road that is now MacArthur Boulevard to spend an afternoon at the water’s edge.

During the 1920s and ‘30s, the company rented some of the land to vacationers who built cottages on it, a process inadvertently bolstered by a Hollywood producer who, after leasing the cove for a series of South Sea island-themed movies, left several sets that were later turned into homes.

Eventually there were 45 beach houses in all, maintained by the people who built them but sitting on land leased from the Irvine Co. by the month or by the year.

Then in 1979, the land changed hands. The company sold the place to the state, which promptly made it part of the Crystal Cove State Park and issued 90-day eviction notices to the residents who had lived there for years. A protracted legal battle resulted in a new 10-year lease, but upon its expiration on June 30, 1993, state officials say, they plan to evict them and convert the cottages into low-cost rental units, youth hostels, offices, concession stands and perhaps a marine science study center.

“The land was purchased with tax dollars with the intent of turning it over for public use,” says John Kelso-Shelton, a state park superintendent who oversaw the cove until last month. “If you don’t convert it to public use you are subsidizing someone’s private residence; the more we delay, the more we are betraying the public trust.”

Residents argue that it is economically unfeasible to convert the cottages to public use in light of the state’s current monetary difficulties. Not only will California lose the $540,000 it collects annually in lease fees, they say, but it will incur considerable costs in bringing the cottages up to code. And maintenance, residents say, will be much less consistent at the hands of the public than under the loving care of people whose families, in some cases, have been there for generations.

To make their point, the residents have formed an organization called the Crystal Cove Conservancy which, they say, will formally request an extension of their lease within 45 days.

“Some of these places are so fragile that you can knock them down,” says John Killen, the organization’s secretary and a cove resident for 22 years. “The state doesn’t have the money to make these units livable for the public . . . and if they just sit idly they will deteriorate.”

For the time being, though, life goes on pretty much as it always has at Crystal Cove. The waves roll in and out every day as the sun beats down on the wooden cottages dotting the landscape.

While the beach is open to the public, only residents are allowed to drive down the windy road directly to the sand. Others have to park across Coast Highway and take an underpass or--when the parking lot is closed as it is this summer to make way for highway widening work--leave their cars a half-mile away at the state beach parking lot and hike in on a bike trail.

The picturesque village is still favored by artists and filmmakers. In recent years, “Beaches,” starring Bette Midler, was filmed here, as well as a movie called “The Creator,” starring Peter O’Toole. And it is difficult to find an art show in nearby Laguna that doesn’t feature at least one view of the tiny cove.

For most of the residents most of the time, however, life at the cove is a quiet affair that blows in each day with the wind and generally passes their hamlet by much like the distant traffic on Coast Highway.

“This is God’s country,” says Ann Lindsey, a school principal from Clovis who spends her summers at Crystal Cove with relatives who have a cottage. “There’s a beauty and a solitude here.”

Stella Hiatt, who lives in one of the cottages, began coming as a teen-ager in 1937. “Even then I knew it was a very special place,” she recalls. “It really is paradise. The ocean is always there, but always changing; you never get tired of looking at it.”

Has the place changed much since she first laid eyes on it? Well, perhaps in one way, Hiatt allows. “We have newer umbrellas now,” she observes.