Sight Unseen

They call it the Great Wall of Irvine.

On one side, a series of gentle ponds serves as home to a community of ducks and other wildlife. On the other, thousands of motorists race back and forth along one of the city’s busiest thoroughfares.

Between the two extremes lies a wide gap of controversy.

“I think it’s the worst thing they could have done,” resident Dayton Knorr said regarding construction of the 20-foot-high berm and block wall stretching 2,240 feet along Campus Drive roughly from University Drive to Carlson Avenue. “I thought they were putting in an industrial area.”

Peer Swan, a director for the Irvine Ranch Water District, which built the wall, has a different view entirely. “We needed a separation,” he said. “The object is to make all the hubbub disappear.”

But one man’s serenity is another man’s blight.

While water district officials say they built the wall, at a cost of $190,000, to protect both wildlife and hikers from the glare and roar of passing cars, many motorists say they resent having their view blocked.

“The view of people driving along that land used to remind them that they live in a place that once was rural and pastoral,” said Mark P. Petracca, chairman of UC Irvine’s political science department and a longtime area resident. “Now, it’s no longer there.”

The wall is an outgrowth of the area’s pastoral past. It marks the southwest border of the San Joaquin Freshwater Marsh enhancement project, a $6-million effort by the water district and the Irvine Co. to turn 150 acres of degraded wetlands into pristine natural habitat for a variety of ducks, wildlife and migratory birds.

According to project director Ken Thompson, the restoration project calls for turning 11 older rectangular ponds into five larger ones complete with islands. Plans also call for the creation of 3.5 miles of trails around the ponds to be accessed from the nearby San Joaquin Wildlife Sanctuary and featuring various observation points and native vegetation.

While the Irvine Co. is paying for half of the project as mitigation for its development of the Irvine Spectrum and other areas, Thompson said, the water district, which owns the wetlands, is looking to create an “environmental buffer zone” near its Michelson Water Reclamation Plant at the edge of the marsh.

“It will be a place of quiet enjoyment,” Swan said of the area, which is virtually complete except for landscaping and some roadwork. The restored marsh is expected to open for visitors sometime next month.)

“It’s so people can come, have peace and quiet, and enjoy an environment away from urban intrusion,” he said.

The wall along Campus Drive was designed to help minimize that intrusion, both for people and for animals and birds. In addition, Swan said, it will provide some security against trespassing in order to limit vandalism and reduce the water district’s liability.

Some commuters who pass that way consider the wall itself a liability.

Writing in a magazine called Orange County Metro, local columnist Hugh Hewett recently railed against the construction as an “elaborate, expensive and hideous-looking monstrosity” representing a “ridiculous exercise in misplaced masonry.”

Petracca worries that it will eventually become a canvas for local graffiti artists.

And Scott Denny, a Tustin-based writer who spends most of his days doing research at nearby UC Irvine, said it represents another step in society’s march toward separating nature from humanity. “Nature is being so isolated and divided,” he said. “It’s already so fragmented now--this is just more concrete.”

Water district officials say they are hopeful that public opinion will change once the new wall is covered with more natural and attractive-looking vegetation in two to three years.

Susan Sheakley, president of the Orange County-based Sea and Sage chapter of the National Audubon Society, said the wall’s presence will indeed benefit birds and wildlife by protecting them from outside intrusions.

And according to everyone involved in the project, the wall is nearly completed and is not likely to be torn down.

“I think it kind of spoils the country atmosphere we’ve had here,” said John Webster, a retired advertising executive who drives past the wall at least twice a day. “Now that they’ve beautified the area,” he said, “it would be nice to be able to see it.”