The Second Time Around

When Jesus was born wise men brought him gifts of frankincense and myrrh, creating a tradition that has resulted in Sears, Macy’s and Robinsons-May.

I realize I condensed the process, but it’s the point I’m making that’s important here, that this is the season of giving, and I’m about to give.

To backtrack a little, some might recall my trashing of Long Beach last August. It was achieved as an aside, the primary point of my words being a disdain of the superhype that attended the opening of the Aquarium of the Pacific there.

The trouble with asides is that they can assume a life of their own, like Saddam Hussein giving a speech saying he’s a peace-loving guy and mentioning in passing that he’s going to bug-bomb Israel next Tuesday.

I felt that the aquarium was just another $117-million fish tank and then went on to say that Long Beach itself has seen better days and was generally reduced to celebrating the opening of Burger Kings.

I heard from everyone but the guy who sweeps up after the elephants, including the city’s public information officer, Greg Davy, who, with words tempered by diplomacy, said I didn’t know what I was talking about.

Ralph De La Cruz reached the same conclusion in his column in the Long Beach Press-Telegram, using my own words with which to skewer me. That’s when I decided to take a closer look at Long Beach.

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This spirit of benevolence embraces all of the towns I have trashed in recent years. That includes Culver City, notable for its lawn-dwelling families of plastic geese, and Chatsworth, where the lacquered bouffant hairdo was invented.

Since Long Beach was my most recent victim, I decided to revisit the place. It was done in the company of Davy, who handed me a binder full of information to prove how wrong I was about the city he loves.

The visit was made on one of the glowing, wind-scrubbed days that would make even hell look good, although I am not comparing the two. I am just saying that the city gleamed. Somewhere along the way, Davy informed me that Long Beach has 345 days of sunshine every year and this was one of them.

We visited Rainbow Harbor, the new Job Corps Center, the Cabrillo Housing Project, the canal-front homes of Naples, the Shoreline Village shops, the restaurants and antique stores along Pine Avenue, the Marketplace where you can shop by boat and the city’s only major department store, which is Sears.

Long Beach is in the midst of a building boom which, while it is not quite equal to Shanghai’s, constitutes a major recovery from the Crash of the Early ‘90s, when the naval base shut down and McDonnell Douglas downsized.

That put about 100,000 people out of work. And then small businesses closed, the Spruce Goose left town, and I came along like a stranger from hell to shoot the wounded.

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But it’s different now.

I began to have an epiphany about Long Beach while standing on a bridge over a lake in the El Dorado Nature Center, a cool slice of forest paradise on the city’s eastern edge, just a short spit away from Hawaiian Gardens.

Migratory birds come here and foxes cross the sheltered trails of the 100-acre woods, contributing to a kind of ethereal hush over a land of redwoods, oaks and alders, of chaparral and sycamores. I felt like singing madrigals.

This is another world, an island of serenity in the hurly-burly. It gave me new perspective on Long Beach which, when combined with this season of contrition, resulted in a fresh attitude toward the city I once scorned.

I was so taken with the new spirit that I wanted to hug Davy, which caused him to back away slightly, and then I wanted to run and skip along Rainbow Harbor but I have a bad back and skipping is definitely out.

I will say now in this hour of atonement that Long Beach is The City of the Future. Its new Towne Center, under construction on the east side, epitomizes the renaissance.

Where the old naval hospital once stood will be 1 million square feet of retail store space. Auto Nation and Barnes & Noble are already open and Del Taco is on the way. I don’t know about Burger King, but if it should rent space in the new center and hold a grand opening, you can bet I’ll be there. I’m that kinda new guy.

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Al Martinez’s column appears on Tuesdays and Fridays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com