Town’s Owner Brings Discord Into Harmony
Forget the lovey-dovey name. Forget the sappy story that feuds must not be carried into town. Just forget it. Please.
Because Harmony has, of late, dissolved in discord.
And folks in this tiny Central Coast town just south of Hearst Castle are in quite the snit about it.
“I don’t think Harmony has ever been this unharmonious,” one local grumbled. Added another, with scowling sarcasm: “They should rename this town.”
The uproar started when Hollywood developer Samson Marian Mehdizadeh bought this artsy enclave a few months back and started talking up the town’s potential as a sort of world peace theme park.
When Mehdizadeh talks--and he loves to do so--people here have to listen. He is, after all, the boss. He owns the block-long downtown. He owns the four-pew wedding chapel. He owns the two houses and he owns the shuttered restaurant; he even owns the signs that boast “Population 18.”
In addition, Mehdizadeh hopes to soon close escrow on 700 acres of adjacent grazing land that sweeps in soft folds to the ocean. If he has his way, that land, too, will become part of Harmony, which is now not much bigger than a typical strip mall.
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Mehdizadeh has big plans for this new, expanded Harmony. He wants to develop it into a perpetual world’s fair, a place for dozens of nations to display the customs, cuisine, crafts and culture that make them special. He plans to invite foreign guests to live on site for months at a time. He hopes to construct a city hall for discussion of global problems.
And he dreams of testing his theory on violence prevention by building a kosher slaughterhouse to teach would-be criminals how to satisfy their blood lust by butchering poultry and lambs. (“If you kill 200 chickens during the day,” he explains, “at night you’re not going to want to go out and shed more blood.”)
Sketching his vision as he strode past a herd of cows poking along in the sun, Mehdizadeh boasted that the new Harmony will have it all: playgrounds for kids, seminars for seniors, dances for singles. Even a livestock auction and an equestrian center.
“I don’t see how the people of Harmony can object,” he said.
But object they do. And loudly.
Bringing harmony to the world is fine, they say. Just don’t bring the world to Harmony.
“We want Harmony to keep the same magical lost-in-time feeling it’s always had,” said Linda Fayette, a local merchant who crafts sweatshirts and purses out of denim jeans. “Samson wants to create a Disneyland North here. We’d end up being like any other tourist trap.”
As is, Harmony pretty much exists for tourists. It’s just that its style of reeling them in is understated, not at all like the chic boutiques of nearby Cambria or the gaudy grandeur of Hearst Castle.
Harmony attracts visitors with a faded, almost diffident charm.
The public toilets don’t flush quite right. There’s no place to buy a snack. The post office is so cramped that if three people queue for stamps, the line stretches out the door. And merchants routinely leave their stores unattended to chit-chat in the streets. Rodeo Drive it’s not. Yet both Mehdizadeh and local merchants estimate that up to half a million visitors from around the world stop by Harmony each year.
If they’re lucky, they might catch the glassblower at work, or they might peek in on a wedding. Mostly, though, there’s nothing much to do in Harmony except browse and relax.
And that, locals say, is precisely the point.
“This is the place people come to get their senses back,” said Denise Mikkelson, who conducts 150 weddings a year in the chapel.
“The lack of hustle and bustle . . . is something you don’t see much of any more,” glassblower Carl Radke said. “I like it the way it is.”
That’s the kind of attitude that infuriates the 43-year-old Mehdizadeh. It’s selfish, he says, to keep Harmony so secluded. “Nature has done something so beautiful for this area,” he said. “This area should do something beautiful for the world.”
Plus, the way Mehdizadeh looks at it, Harmony is bound to be developed sooner or later. So why not turn it into a force for social good?
Otherwise, he warns, asphalt will conquer even the lazy green hills of the Central Coast. His wife, Raquel, finishes his prophecy: “Target,” she says, pointing toward the ocean’s shimmer. “Albertsons.” And over there, by the gawky calf nuzzling at his mother’s udder? “Kmart.”
Sure, Mehdizadeh’s own plans for Harmony include several commercial ventures, such as restaurants, camping sites, an RV park and the slaughterhouse. He is a developer, after all. But he insists that in Harmony, the aim will be peace, not profit. “This is not for money,” he said. “This is not for fame.”
His arguments have won over at least one backer in Harmony.
Rick Brekke, who makes and sells silver jewelry, gives Mehdizadeh credit for planning a development that emphasizes the area’s agrarian roots, with livestock, open land and maybe a feed store. If the peace park brings in more tourists, Brekke adds, well, so much the better.
“It will change the character of the town,” he conceded, “but little towns have a way of changing.”
Others point out that Harmony has survived at least five owners in the past two decades, without appreciable change. For all his brash talk, they doubt that Mehdizadeh will get much done. “Every owner comes in with a lot of plans, and not much of it ever gets done,” said John Schoenstein, a potter who has sold his work in Harmony for 24 years. “I’m not too worried about it.”
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Because the land around Harmony is zoned for agriculture, Mehdizadeh could bring in livestock, farm buildings and even a slaughterhouse, said Art Trinidade, resource protection supervisor for San Luis Obispo County. Most of the developer’s other projects, however, would require county permits, environmental impact reports and perhaps zoning changes. The Coastal Commission has final say over development on the 700-acre parcel where Mehdizadeh plans his peace park.
Locals do not take much comfort in the review process. “If even one-tenth of what he plans comes through,” Fayette said, “we’re obsolete.”
As Fayette points out with a sour grimace, Mehdizadeh has already left his mark on Harmony--without waiting for government approval.
He chopped down some willow trees by the river (and had to get a retroactive permit from the state Department of Fish and Game). He threw a come-one-come-all weekend bash, complete with rock ‘n’ roll bands playing until midnight. And he is building a wooden shed near the wedding chapel--which the county is letting him finish as long as he applies for a permit in the next 30 days.
Mehdizadeh has peaceful explanations for the changes: The trees were sheltering a junkyard. The party introduced a new crowd to Harmony. The shed was to host a children’s Christmas show.
His antagonists, however, see far more sinister motives. They suggest that he cut down the trees to better expose a “Visit Harmony” billboard. They grumble that the raucous party drove out the tourists who come to Harmony to relax and interrupted two weekend weddings. As for the shed, they speculate that Mehdizadeh will convert it to a pizza joint as soon as the holidays are over.
It’s all too much change to take in a town where for decades the only controversy was how much to spend on repainting the billboard. If the slaughterhouse and the peace park go through, locals moan, Harmony will be done for.
“It will ruin the place,” said Linda Newcomer, who runs an equestrian ranch just outside Harmony. “It’s insane. It saddens me. It really does.”
Mehdizadeh, however, presses on, undaunted. If he has to, he says, he will travel with his wife and their 10-month-old son around the world, begging for funds to build the Harmony of his dreams.
“The information superhighway is one thing, but this will be an emotional highway, a highway of peace,” Mehdizadeh said. “This will bring people together.”
Smothering his son, Aaron, with adoring smooches, Mehdizadeh switches into baby talk. “We’re going to have a good world when you grow up, aren’t we?” he coos to Aaron. Then he looks up, his adult voice suddenly serious. “I just don’t want their generation,” he said, “to have the same problems we do.”
