History’s Last Chance in Long Beach

If you read past the Monica news last week, you may have noticed an odd little item about a shipping firm known as the China Ocean Shipping Co., or Cosco for short.

Cosco is not your everyday shipping firm. It’s owned and operated by the Chinese government. And it seems that some diehard commie haters in Congress have decided to prevent the company from leasing federally owned land in the United States.

We don’t normally get into international relations on this page, but bear with me. Cosco’s problems in Congress just might turn out to be good news for all of us in Southern California.

That’s because the piece of land that Cosco coveted, and wanted to use for its shipping operations, happens to be the old, elegant naval station at Long Beach. The blocking of Cosco’s plans--if it sticks--just may amount to a reprieve for the naval station.

“The Cosco plan was wrong for a lot of reasons,” says Los Angeles attorney Richard Fine, who has sued to try and preserve the naval station. “If the plan dies, maybe people will come to their senses about the base.”

By any measure, the Long Beach station qualifies as the dead-man-walking of historic sites. Chained-off for years, the station has seen the days dwindle down until it gets plowed under and converted to a flat expanse of asphalt.

In effect, the base has become a case study in how Southern California obliterates its past and converts its once-elegant niches into urban horror zones.

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If you’re not familiar with its sad history, let me recap: Once known as Roosevelt Base, the station played a key role in supplying ships and troops during World War II. Its central buildings were designed by the architect Paul Williams and have been declared eligible for the National Register of Historic Places.

For generations, Navy officers and enlisted men strolled across the station’s vast, grassy lawns that face onto the waterfront. Even today, the base center looks like it was stolen from the set of a World War II movie by John Ford.

In its outlying areas, the base sported conference buildings, recreation centers, an Olympic-sized swimming pool, a huge gymnasium and apartment housing. As late as the 1980s, the Navy invested upward of $40 million in new facilities at the station.

So, in short, the base offered Long Beach the same kind of opportunity--in miniature, of course--that the Presidio offered to San Francisco when it was closed by the military.

San Francisco, as most of you know, capitalized on its opportunity by leasing the Presidio’s facilities to various urban organizations and maintaining its grounds as a park. Today, the Presidio remains as glorious as ever.

Long Beach did exactly the opposite. When the station closed in 1996, Long Beach Mayor Beverly O’Neill announced that the city planned to demolish every building, chain-saw every tree, and pave over the base with asphalt in hopes of luring Cosco into a long-standing relationship with the Port of Long Beach.

Never mind that the city desperately needed new urban parkland. Never mind that the nation’s taxpayers had invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the base’s facilities. Never mind that the base represented an important link to the city’s past. The city wanted a deal with Cosco, and that was that.

Even the Navy, in its environmental assessment, concluded that a mix of uses at the base--including a ship repair facility--would create more jobs for Long Beach than would the Cosco operation. This plan would have offered space to various public and private agencies, including the city’s Fire and Police departments, and preserved the lawns and waterfront.

Even that conclusion made no difference. Nothing did until last week, when The Times’ Paul Richter reported that, “Driven by fears of a rising Chinese military threat, congressional conferees have agreed to kill an industrial development project . . . .”

That project was the Cosco deal in Long Beach. Unless Long Beach is able to reverse the decision at the last minute, the Cosco deal is dead. Goners.

So what now? Ann Cantrell, a leader of the group trying to preserve the base, says, “Certainly it would seem logical that the city would now reconsider destroying the base since the reason for destruction has been removed. But you have to remember, this is Long Beach.”

For his part, attorney Fine says that a soon-to-be-built container facility at the Port of Los Angeles would gladly accommodate Cosco’s needs, along with those of many other shipping firms. Mayor Richard Riordan made exactly that point to Chinese officials when he visited Asia this summer.

Port of Los Angeles officials say their facility will cover 315 acres and, in a period of declining Asian business, may absorb all the new business for years to come.

“The people at the Port of Long Beach have been quoted as saying that if the naval station is not converted to a shipping facility by the year 2000, then Los Angeles might take over the container storage business. That appears to be the reality they’re facing,” Fine says.

But, as Cantrell noted, this is Long Beach. Mayor O’Neill says the city is unmoved by the setback in Congress. She promises that the destruction of the naval station will proceed whether or not the city has a customer to occupy the site. In fact, she says, the bulldozers are scheduled to roll in October no matter what Congress does.

“We are dismayed that Congress made this apparent decision behind closed doors,” she says. “If the decision becomes final, it simply means we will go out and find new customers for the facility. We believe we can do that.”

Of course, the city of Long Beach also believed that millions would flock to the Queen Mary. And believed that its downtown would be saved by bulldozing its old buildings and throwing up high-rises. And finally it believed, almost pitifully, that the city would be revived by asking Disney to make a theme park out of downtown.

Is it possible that the death of the naval station will go down as another of Long Beach’s long-shot dreams?

We don’t know. We only know that a sweet, poignant part of our past--and perhaps our future--is about to die.

And we don’t know if there’s good reason for that death. But this is Southern California, and we’re used to it.