Unrest In The Village

Famous as a funky, bohemian outpost of eclectic old bungalows and meandering streets, Laguna Beach would never be mistaken for a rule-bound planned community.

Yet maintaining the rakishly independent charm of this city of 24,416 involves a strict historic preservation ordinance and a long list of picky codes and guidelines. It also involves an unusually inclusive public process that has become more impassioned in recent years as ‘90s notions of the good life clash with Laguna’s simpler past.

Though the city’s demographics have changed--average household income, now $98,931, shot up more than 171% during the 1980s--its ethos hasn’t. For citizens who have deputized themselves preservationists, retaining older buildings is as much about protecting a spirit of neighborliness and tolerance of eccentricity as it is about real estate.

“You have a tremendous amount of people who really care about the community intensely,” says former mayor and City Council member Neil Fitzpatrick.

“They show up in droves and participate. They feel protective--they want to be able to influence how we live here and how it grows. Slowly, we hope.”

Those fighting for the “old” Laguna often point to architect Mark Singer’s 1995 remodeling of an old downtown market into an upscale restaurant as emblematic of a dreary future in which their city looks like any other wealthy beach town--and in which greed and indifference cancel out old-fashioned trust and accountability.

Other residents welcome such amenities as shops selling European designer clothing and restaurants offering sophisticated fare, as long as they respect the city’s pedestrian scale and seaside beauty.

“Laguna 20 years ago was a place you moved to because you couldn’t afford to live in Newport,” says architect Morris Skendarian, whose clientele has changed over the years from teachers to professionals who don’t flinch at $5-million price tags. “Now people come here as a first choice.”

As new businesses step in to feed residents’ yuppie tastes, “Village Laguna”--a phrase coined in the early ‘70s by preservationists--has begun to erode. Over the past 10 years, architects working around town have chafed mightily against city rules favoring the Village look. Small, dark, quaint buildings do not take advantage of a 20th century revolution in the use of light and space, they say, not to mention sleek new materials and finishes.

“I’d like to think the Village atmosphere was about things that transcended style, scale and massing, not little cottage-y places,” says Laguna architect Horst Noppenberger.

As the kind of centrally located “little cottage-y place” that architects yearn to transform and preservationists yearn to rescue, Forest Market was destined to become a flash point in the ongoing battle over the city’s future.

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Opened in the early 1920s as a fruit and vegetable store, Forest Market had become a local landmark by 1940. Forty-one years later, the city put it on a new inventory of historically significant properties and gave it an “E for excellent” rating, though old photographs show a plain, flat-roofed building with a facade of wooden folding doors.

In fact, the “E” reflects the market’s status as one of few remaining original businesses on Laguna’s equivalent of Main Street.

Longtime residents remember how the chief of police would stop by for his daily sandwich. Locals would pop in for a cold drink, a cut of meat or a gossip update before walking down the street to pick up a prescription or buy a pair of shoelaces.

In the mid-’80s, the market changed hands again. Its new proprietor, Amos Swimmer--brother of Jules Swimmer, the current lessee--says he sank more than $100,000 into shoring up the walls, replacing rotted flooring and painting the forest-green doors white.

Swimmer installed seating, beefed up the deli counter’s menu and sold seasonal novelty items. But the store depended almost entirely on tourism, which declined after the devastating Laguna Beach fire in ’93.

In November 1994, six months after the market closed, Swimmer petitioned the city’s Planning Commission to convert the market-cum-sandwich shop into what he called a “gourmet market and restaurant.” He offered to put it on the Historic Register, which meant promising to retain the building’s historical features.

In December, the City Council-appointed Heritage Committee drew up a list of 10 preservation recommendations. They included the retention of such key original features as the folding doors (to be kept “operable”), the front facade--with minor stipulations--and exterior lighting fixtures, the wood floor and the tin ceiling.

As a purely advisory body, the Heritage Committee has only one carrot to dangle in front of the owners of old buildings: a recommendation that they be exempted from city rules.

One highly coveted perk in car-clogged, built-out Laguna is a break on the fees businesses pay for parking slots they must provide if space allows. With the OK of the Planning Commission, the market owners would get $88,000 in parking credits--representing 11 spaces, or about half the number required--in return for placing the building on the Historic Register.

And they would earn more parking credits by providing outdoor seating, thanks to a city incentive meant to encourage visitors to linger after dark.

At first, the wheels of preservation and commerce rolled merrily along. In early 1995, the Design Review Board approved the conversion of the market to a market-cum-restaurant.

The Planning Commission issued a conditional-use permit for the project, with several provisos requiring, for example, that the new establishment--to be called 230 Forest--offer takeout food as a service to local residents.

The process began to unravel after architect Singer, a co-owner of the restaurant, petitioned the Heritage Committee to make four, in his words, “extremely minor,” changes to the preservation recipe.

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Singer, 49, noted for his low-key contemporary style, is a frequent awardee of the Orange County chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

He is a past member of Laguna’s Design Review Board.

While detractors describe his designs as “cold”--he favors concrete, angular silhouettes and self-contained facades--Singer says his interest is in “progress and technology and the site and the clients” rather than a set style.

“Every time [people] see a building with sharp corners, it’s a Mark Singer building,” Singer says wryly, noting that many contemporary Laguna homes were designed by others.

The changes he wanted for 230 Forest included replacing a portion of the wood floor with concrete (unpolished only), removing the tin ceiling--found to be a recent addition--and relocating the trash enclosure.

The Heritage Committee OK’d those requests but nixed a new metal trellis above the front door.

Then the Design Review board weighed in, overruling the committee on the trellis. At the board meeting, a member remarked that a too-rigid approach to historical renovation might mean sacrificing attractiveness and functionality. A trellis entwined with Wisteria sinensis would be just fine--a link, in fact, between old and new.

Soon after, the Planning Commission voted 4 to 1 against the proposed modifications and declined to issue the parking credits.

Swimmer appealed this decision. The City Council reversed both decisions--despite concerns voiced by every council member about the mechanics of using a parking credit program for historical preservation.

Singer and restaurant co-owner Swimmer got their contemporary building, except for the trellis.

The Heritage Committee was outraged.

After witnessing what they viewed as a laissez-faire approach to the alteration or destruction of other historic sites--the White House restaurant, Fahrenheit 451 bookstore and the last two original cottages on Main Beach--the committee sent the City Council a memo detailing the ways the restaurant had deviated from the promised preservation plan.

The folding-style front doors were propped open, effectively turning the high-tech, glass-fronted interior into the building’s facade. The new exterior paint was a “stark, contemporary white,” and the concrete floors were polished and colored so that they no longer looked “old.” The rear facade, supposed to be left untouched, received a box-like addition.

“When you talk about saving doors, I can’t make this into Notre Dame,” Singer replies. “You preserve what you can. If there was something great to preserve, I’m all for it.”

Heritage members accused Singer of bad faith in using the provisions of the 1989 Historic Preservation Ordinance to get parking credits by promising to retain precisely the elements of the building he changed.

According to a transcript of the Planning Commission meeting, Singer had promised to create “a living-room type environment” that “will feel as if you’re having dinner in a cottage somewhere in Laguna.”

Singer now dismisses what he calls “the warm, cozy look” as “a Disneyland approach to historical conservation . . . not good design.”

The memo further charges that even the stated function of the building (“gourmet market and restaurant”) was deceptive, because 230 Forest turned out to be a sit-down restaurant.

Singer counters that the design plan--with restaurant seating clearly marked--was part of the documents reviewed by the City Council and Planning Commission. (The city’s “parking analysis” document lists 39 indoor seats for “proposed restaurant use.”)

Anne Frank, a Heritage Committee member, is blunt in her assessment: “What we have is a very attractive, tasteful restaurant. It could be in California, in Madrid, in Paris, in Tangiers. And that’s not necessarily a negative statement. But what was eradicated was something that belonged [specifically] to Laguna.”

Preservation, Frank argues, is not just about keeping famous or prominent buildings. “Just as important--in some ways more so, because their existence is so fragile--are the ordinary buildings, the sort that give a town character,” she says. “They’re important because they’re not important.”

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For Singer, it’s an irksome notion that “anything old is great, anything new is not so.”

“A lot of what makes downtown different isn’t really the facades,” he insists. “It’s the planning. We don’t have huge parking lots. . . . it’s almost a pedestrian mall.”

He contrasts the detail-minded proclivities of Laguna’s preservationists with the live-and-let-live approach of European cities, where centuries-old buildings abut new construction.

Singer describes standing in I.M. Pei’s 1987 addition to the Louvre in Paris: “You’re seeing this 16th century building through the glass pyramid. It’s a strong way of representing who they were and who we are.”

Frank doesn’t buy that analogy. “They didn’t tear it down,” she argues. “There’s something new next to it.”

When Frank visits Italy, she expects to see regional architecture. By the same token, she says, “People like to come to Laguna because it’s one of the few places in south Orange County that has a sense of history.”

Disgruntled residents claim that Singer’s stint on the Design Review board in the late 1980s and early ‘90s was merely a means to an end: learning how to play one city department against another to get what he wants.

Yet Singer, who, with his wife, Myriam, and two children, has lived in Laguna Beach for the past two decades, says he’s not the enemy.

“What I love is the character, the way the town is organized,” he says. “The beauty is walking down the street, meeting people I know, because I’m not in my car, driving 70 miles an hour, going from one shopping center to another.”

As a Design Review board member, Singer says, he tried “to be sensitive to what Laguna is now rather than strictly, ‘What do the rules say?’ The reason you have a board is to interpret the rules.”

Interpretation, of course, depends on who is is calling the shots.

Until the early ‘90s, few board members had design credentials--a state of affairs that prompted veteran architect Chris Ables, Design Review’s first chairman, to quit mid-meeting. He had been arguing the merits of a project with people who, he said, “knew nothing about architecture” and couldn’t read a plan.

Design Review currently includes architects, a builder and a developer. Norm Grossman, an electronics engineering instructor and Planning Commission member, believes the lay boards worked better.

Design Review “was set up to reflect community standards,” he says. “What architects may think is innovative design may destroy a neighborhood.”

Indeed, says one architect: “Design Review ensures that you do not get bad projects, but it also ensures there’s no great architecture produced.”

Because architects have to accept the compromises involved in the public process, this architect says, “you can’t win with a great [innovative] scheme.”

The community watchdogs, however, vow to never let down their guard. For them, the 230 Forest brouhaha yielded but one positive result, and it was the sort of detail that only a weary veteran of preservation battles could appreciate: An amendment to the municipal code stipulates that the “historic character” of a building includes “visible ground-floor interior elements” if they are “integral to the building design.”

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Architecture Watchdogs

Although Laguna Beach puts on the appearance of a hang-loose beach town, it takes many rule-makers and monitors to maintain the city’s eclecticism.

DESIGN REVIEW BOARD

(also sits as Board of Adjustment)

* Founded: 1972

* Members: Five, with one alternate; appointed by City Council

* Qualifications: Experience in a building trade, architecture, historic preservation, landscaping or real estate is considered an asset but not required

* Term: Two years

* Compensation: $120 per month

* Meetings: Thursdays.

* Purpose: Regulatory authority set up under aegis of state government to review plans for a variety of building projects, private and commercial. Determines their compatibility with existing structures in terms of size, scale, view, grading (for minimum disturbance of natural terrain), landscaping, lighting, signage. Considers requests for zoning-code variances.

PLANNING COMMISSION

* Founded: Decades ago; exact date unknown

* Members: Five, appointed by City Council

* Qualifications: Experience in land-use planning, architecture, engineering and real estate is considered an asset but not required

* Term: Two years

* Compensation: $60 per month

* Meetings: Second and fourth Wednesdays of the month

* Purpose: Regulatory authority advising City Council regarding development and modification of land, including amendments to the general plan, zoning ordinances, subdivision regulations and special projects related to land-use planning.

HERITAGE COMMITTEE

* Founded: 1990

* Members: Seven, appointed by City Council

* Qualifications: None

* Term: Two years

* Compensation: None

* Meetings: First Thursday of the month

* Purpose: Advises city on matters pertaining to historic preservation and, using a $500 annual budget, organizes preservation-related activities; encourages owners to place homes or commercial buildings on the Historic Register in return for incentives (such as waivers of city fees or setback requirements); advises on proposed alterations to or demolition of historic structures in commercial zones.

COMMUNITY GROUPS

* Village Laguna: Founded in 1970 “to preserve and promote the village atmosphere”; about 400 members; president: Don Pendergast

* Laguna Beach Historical Society: Founded in the late ‘70s, dormant by mid-’80s; resurrected 1987; 350 members; mission, according to president Belinda Blacketer: “To preserve the memories and places that make Laguna important.”

Source: Individual groups, Times reports; Researched by CATHY CURTIS / Los Angeles Times