Nuevo Laguna : Beach City’s Growing Popularity as a Night-Life Magnet Raises Concern

Old Howard Heisler never knew nights like this.

One recent Friday, the beer was flowing at the late real estate developer’s 89-year-old French Normandy office building on Coast Highway, which has been transformed into a bustling micro-brewery where customers gulp 2,000 gallons of beer a week.

“At about twilight, this place really fills up,” bartender Issac Owens said.

Three blocks away on Broadway, the Romeo Cucina restaurant has a line spilling out the door. On Glenneyre Street, Five Feet Restaurant is booked solid for the evening. At the Renaissance Cafe, the rousing sounds of jazz glide outdoors and echo along narrow Forest Avenue, where the sidewalks, even in the middle of winter, are teeming with diners, window-shoppers and people-watchers.

For years a quiet hideaway for artists and honeymooners halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego, Laguna Beach has emerged as a vibrant weekend night-life destination that attracts 3 million visitors a year.

But for some local leaders and tenured residents, this coming of age has brought tremors of worry that the eccentric community--which somehow manages to be funky and upscale at the same time--risks losing its safety, and maybe its soul.

“This used to be a beach town, but it’s becoming more like a Beverly Hills,” said Andy Wing, 63, an artist and a Laguna citizen since 1957 who remembers when a local carwash, family restaurants and a dance hall typified the downtown. “In a word, it’s glitz. There is so much ostentation and overconsumption.”

Others fret that all the fancy attractions, while enriching the community in some ways, are also crowding out the modest stores and services they have counted on for so long to make life comfortable.

For them, too much of a good thing might--if not controlled--turn their downtown into another Westwood Village in Los Angeles, which was alive with restaurants, bookstores and boutiques in the 1970s and early ‘80s but now struggles to recover from an overdose of commercial development, traffic jams and crime.

Also in the balance is whether Laguna will become another bittersweet story of California, where sooner or later, popularity seems to trample paradise, from Carmel to Yosemite. And a kind of purity is lost to pleasure.

Norm Grossman, a seven-year veteran of the Laguna Beach Planning Commission, has the lesson of Westwood burned into memory.

“When I first got on the Planning Commission, what happened in Westwood was really ingrained in my mind,” Grossman said. When he lived in Westwood as a UCLA student in the 1960s, “there were three movie theaters and an actual village, not the congested, glorified movie mall it is today. We’re trying very hard to keep that from happening here.”

Like Westwood in its halcyon days, the Laguna Beach of the 1990s is evolving rapidly, and many of the changes downtown are results of a plan completed in 1989 to bring more life to the commercial hub.

Known for its bohemians and liberal politics in conservative Orange County (where it is the only city with a law banning discrimination against gays), this town of 26,000 predominantly white, upper-middle-class families with a median income of more than $40,000 a year is rebuilding--and not only on the hillsides and in the canyons scarred by the devastating wildfire of October, 1993, that damaged or destroyed 441 homes.

On Coast Highway, a block from the building owned by Heisler, a former mayor and big-time landowner who died in 1941, workers are refurbishing another Laguna Beach landmark--the 77-year-old White House Restaurant--where 1930s-era Hollywood luminaries such as Phil Harris and Bing Crosby would stop on their treks from Los Angeles to Del Mar.

In the coming weeks, the homey Forest Avenue Market is being converted to a “high-class deli” and restaurant with outdoor tables, cocktails and night dining, the old Marriner’s bookstore will become a Diedrich’s coffeehouse, and even the former Laguna community clinic on Ocean Avenue will be replaced by a restaurant and upscale market with outdoor seating.

“Laguna is clearly changing,” said Police Chief Neil J. Purcell Jr., a cop here for 27 years. “It used to be, except in the summer months during (art) festival time, you could shoot a cannon off downtown after 7 p.m. Not any more. Now you have a mixture of young people and older people staying downtown way past midnight, until 1 or 2 in the morning.”

Even a swirling rainstorm cannot dim the festive atmosphere on a Friday night at the new Laguna Beach Brewing Co. in the Heisler building.

“Laguna is young . . . it’s fun . . . and the rest of Orange County seems old in comparison,” said a smiling Michele Khabbaz, 28, who with her husband, Stephen, was sipping a drink and waiting for another couple to join them.

Like the Westwood of old, downtown Laguna offers a variety of choices, chimed in Stephen Khabbaz, 38. Park your car and then head out around town on foot, something you can’t do at lots of places in sprawling Southern California, he said.

Claes Anderson, the owner of the landmark Hotel Laguna, said he has watched a new influx of tourists arrive in Laguna from around the world.

“We’re finding a more sophisticated group of visitors, more people from Europe and other parts of the world,” said Anderson, a Danish immigrant who hopes to expand his hotel to accommodate the changing Laguna environment.

While many changes have brought style and excitement, sometimes it feels as if the whole outside world has descended on downtown Laguna, where on a weekend it can take an hour to drive through town in bumper-to-bumper traffic along Coast Highway.

And finding a curbside parking space is like a treasure hunt.

“Obviously, there are pluses and minuses in our new downtown,” said Morris Skenderian, a noted local architect and member of the committee that developed the detailed plan to “wake Laguna up at night and give it some life.”

“My sadness about it is that it’s shifting toward more of a tourist, entertainment center,” Skenderian said. “But the economics of a functioning downtown here today require high volume.”

Despite a low crime rate, the community was reminded that it is vulnerable to urban intrusion when a gunman entered the Baskin-Robbins ice cream parlor on Feb. 20, fatally shooting the proprietor and wounding her husband in a botched robbery. It was the first robbery-homicide here in 30 years.

The town grieved over the popular couple--and the City Council quickly found the money to hire five more police officers.

Laguna Beach officials are acutely aware of what happened to Westwood Village, with its crime and slide into blight, and are determined not to see it happen here.

Westwood’s popularity overwhelmed it, acknowledged Tom Carroll, executive director of the Westwood Village Management Corp., which is spearheading an attempt to revitalize the village.

“Westwood is a good area that became too hot,” Carroll said. “It went to the teen-age market, with the T-shirt and yogurt shop scene. Then a few incidents happened--a girl was shot--and it blew up. . . . Frankly, this place went to hell.”

Becky Jones, a former Laguna Beach planning commissioner, once was a regular Westwood visitor.

“Westwood looks like a disaster area,” Jones said. “They lost everything there that was representative of the collegiate atmosphere. Westwood used to be worth driving to L.A. for, but then it lost its fabulous bookstores, its good restaurants. The old Westwood essentially doesn’t exist anymore.”

Popularity--and unchecked market forces--should never be allowed to kill Laguna Beach, Jones said. One hundred and fifty years after being founded by homesteaders, Laguna has kept its charm and it should stay that way, she said.

The planning guide shaped by architect Skenderian and others is a vision of how the downtown evolution should progress. Finished in 1989, it is about to be updated by the City Council.

Its provisions include reserving Forest Avenue, Laguna’s main street, for visitor-serving businesses such as outdoor cafes and restaurants while a block away, Ocean Avenue will be home to businesses that serve residents, Grossman said.

“We now have a very vibrant downtown, but like anything else, it needs to be updated from time to time, particularly in light of the current economies,” said Mayor Kathleen Blackburn. “But we certainly don’t want to lose the ambience of downtown Laguna Beach.”

Some residents think that has already happened.

Besides the robbery-homicide at the ice cream parlor last month, a gang-related shooting at Heisler Park and a nighttime rape at Crescent Bay within a year sent a current of shock through the community.

Yet Laguna has kept a low rate of violent crime compared to most of Orange County, Police Chief Purcell said.

“Our population may be 25,000 people, but our daily policing population is 40,000 to 45,000 people,” Purcell said. “Still, homicides are rare and the more violent type of robberies involving shootings and knifings are very limited. And we haven’t seen where these have increased with our new nighttime activity.”

Still, police have been vigilant--and visible--in stepping up foot and bicycle patrols downtown at night because of the larger populations.

Despite the influx of visitors, crime actually declined in 1994 compared to 1993, a fact Purcell attributes to the police presence.

“It’s just common sense,” Purcell said. “We don’t want to wait for the problems to occur and then bring in the police. We are taking a proactive stance to make sure we maintain the quality of life people enjoy in this village. We don’t want another Westwood situation here, or what happened to Venice or Santa Cruz.”

But other big-city problems are creeping in. Traffic and parking have gotten worse, residents say, and a new multilevel parking structure is being planned to ease the situation.

Aside from such practical considerations is the inescapable fact that the very character and nature of the downtown are changing as commercial real estate prices soar, pushing out the small, mom-and-pop stores that so faithfully served the locals.

One symbol of the times was the recent departure of the Sprouse Reitz from its decades-old Broadway home.

“You know downtown Laguna has changed when you can’t buy sheets, Levis and underwear here anymore,” said Bart Rowland, owner of Laguna Groomers in the Lumberyard Mall and one of those wary about the future of his city.

Kelly Boyd, a former city councilman and Laguna Beach native, shares Rowland’s concerns.

“There is no doubt we need resident-serving businesses, places where you can buy things like bedding and Levis. You just don’t have those anymore,” said Boyd, owner of the Marine Room Tavern, whose grandfather, Joe Thurston, was one of the founders of Laguna Beach.

The high prices will continue to chase out what’s left of the small downtown businesses that serve residents, Boyd said.

“The bottom line is the rent,” Boyd said. “These people have a mighty big nut to crack every month.”

Sprouse Reitz was paying only 50 cents a square foot at its Broadway location, a price that has been pushed to $1.75 for the now vacant 9,000-square-foot building, city officials said. At the former Marriner’s bookstore, the new owners were asking $16,000 a month in rent, an amount typical of current prices on Forest Avenue, city officials say.

Prices are apparently not deterring renters or buyers.

“We have been inundated with interest in our downtown,” said Kyle Butterwick, a 16-year resident and Laguna’s director of community development, noting that most of the vacant downtown shops could be quickly rented to chain stores or fast-food restaurants if the city permitted.

“But those pressures add to the need for scrutiny,” Butterwick said. “One of our unique features is that if you want to do business in Laguna, you are going to have to go through a rigorous approval process. There is no guarantee that our Planning Commission and City Council will approve your business. It may not be right for Laguna.”

Carroll, who was selected to tackle the challenge of revitalizing Westwood after winning praise for his successful efforts at designing Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade, agrees that planning and carefully choosing the right investors are key protections.

“You have to bring in new blood, that’s the secret,” said Carroll, who is charting a pedestrian plaza for Westwood and luring new businesses to rebuild a “sense of place.”

“People throwing their lives and money into a town creates an enormous energy and vitality toward the future,” he said. “These are people who are successful at what they do. Then all of a sudden they attract other people.”

Once the council decides what measures are needed to improve--and preserve--the downtown, Skenderian would like to see the city recruit people who can make it happen.

“Let’s go after them,” Skenderian said. “Instead of standing around being concerned and telling people who shouldn’t come in, let’s decide what kinds of businesses we want and go after them. Let’s offer incentives to come to the downtown and be instrumental in making it happen.”