Hearts of the City / Exploring attitudes and issues behind the news : Sands of Time Slip Away for The Beach

In Los Angeles, we tend to stop seeing those parts of the city that seem eternal. They fade away in front of our eyes, as if they can’t compete with the new. We ignore the old things until, one day, they slip away for good. The list of the lost includes Bullock’s Wilshire, all of Bunker Hill, even the Los Angeles River. When was the last time anybody paid attention to the Los Angeles River?

And now, in a subtle way, we may be losing The Beach. I am not talking merely of the physical strand of beaches running from Newport to Malibu. I am talking about the cultural invention of The Beach, that amalgam of attitudes, posturings, sexual longings and arcane sports that Southern California created sometime in the 1950s. Other places had “the shore,” or “the coast” or they had “beaches,” but no place had The Beach until we invented it.

The loss of The Beach may seem startling precisely because we think of it as eternal. This week, the first week of summer, you can walk down the bike path at Hermosa or Manhattan andsee the kids moving into the apartments on the sand, as always. They sport the same tans, wear the same clothes, stack the same bottles of tequila in the apartment windows. They have no politics, no past and no future. They appear at summer’s beginning and then disappear, in the fall, like ghosts. Those kids created The Beach in the 1950s as a world apart, a universe unto itself where adults could not intrude.

Thirty years ago, the writer Marshall Frady described the scene this way: “The beaches are now populated with sourceless youths looking like members of another species--all uniformly tall and svelte, the girls with neat plump little breasts and bottoms snugly cupped in bikinis, all of them a peculiar earth-colored brownness acquired from the unbright Southern California sunshine, and all of them strangely mute. Above their soundless play, honeycombed apartments are terraced upward precariously on little more than large dirt clods.”

Frady wrote that description 30 years ago, and The Beach has not changed. In our lifetimes, it has always been thus, and we believe it will remain so. But not necessarily. A threat now stems from a proposal to change the historic ownership of eight prime beaches. Right now the state owns them. The county of Los Angeles wants them. The names of the beaches alone suggests their importance in the universe The Beach: Surfrider at Malibu, Las Tunas, Topanga, Manhattan Beach, Dan Blocker, Point Dume, Redondo Beach, Royal Palms.

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Why does the county want these beaches? A good question, especially since the county begged off its historic obligation to maintain lifeguards along those same beaches this year, pleading its budget crisis. Actually, the answer is simple enough: The county believes it can turn the beaches into profit-making enterprises. All it needs is to acquire title and wipe out their status as state parks.

The Times uncovered this maneuver in March, and it continues to work its murky way through the government bureaucracies, always camouflaged with demurrals about the county’s good intentions. But a reporter discovered a memo to the supervisors that revealed the county’s true motives. The county will explore ways to “maximize revenue” from the beaches, the memo said, including the development of a restaurant complex at Topanga, conversion of beach areas to parking lots, etc., etc. The memo demurely noted that the transfer of ownership would “eliminate state oversight on potential revenue-generating sources.”

We only have to look at another ward of the county, Marina del Rey, to see where all the good intentions would lead. And what of the state, which might be expected to defend its beaches? Don’t ask. The state Parks and Recreation Department has revealed an unseemly haste to dump them on the county. Hitting the right note, Deputy Parks Director Patricia Megason has said of the giveaway: “I don’t think there will be any huge change in how business is done down there.”

That distant phrase, “down there,” happens to refer to the heart of The Beach itself. If you hand over Surfrider, Redondo, Las Tunas and all the others to the itchy hands of the county, you pass ownership of the beaches over to the upscale crowd that can afford the hotels and restaurant complexes the county will license, the nifty wine-sipping terraces. At the point the beaches cease being The Beach, they lose their separateness. They become mere extensions of Montana Avenue onto the sand.

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In Los Angeles, we grow accustomed to loss. Things burn, collapse in earthquakes, get mowed down because someone wants to put up something newer. But The Beach has endured. In fact, The Beach may be the last of the great, cultural creations of the 1950s that remains more or less intact. Suburbia has gone sour and faded. The freeways broke their promise. All corrupted, except for The Beach.

It kept its integrity for good reason. As Dick Dale, the father of surf music, has pointed out, The Beach was created out of the need for young people to have a culture of their own. And each year, they re-create it. Although many millions of dollars have been made off The Beach by clothing firms, by rock ‘n’ roll bands, by the makers of every kind of accessory equipment, The Beach itself has remained essentially pure because it stayed in the hands of its makers.

“We invented our language, we invented our sports, our music, the way we dressed, everything,” said Dale. “People say I invented surf music, but really I stole it from the surfers. I stole their attitudes, the whole feel of surfing.”

Let us remember that The Beach did not happen in Florida or the south of France or Australia. It happened here. In many ways, the creation of The Beach stands as one of Los Angeles’ great legacies. We have made--and then destroyed--so many other legacies, it may be time to think seriously about saving this one.