History’s on the Menu at Newport Landmark

It’s a common mistake, thinking that the Newport Harbor Nautical Museum off Pacific Coast Highway is a quaint, quirky sideshow of Anthony’s Riverboat Restaurant.

The error is understandable. The “riverboat” started out in 1964 as a restaurant, the Reuben E. Lee, and has become one of the most recognizable landmarks in Newport Beach.

But it rankles the museum’s staff and volunteers that a restaurant is still the first thing people think of when they see the white replica of a delta paddle-wheeler. And it’s a building, not a boat. It was built on a steel barge and the paddle doesn’t work, never has.

The 450-pound sea bass hanging just beyond the front door isn’t real either, even though it looks as if it were just caught. “This is our photo op,” said curator Marcus De Chevrieux, pointing out the chalkboard with the pertinent information -- date, time and place caught.

Parts of the former restaurant’s dining rooms, kitchen and lounges now provide a setting for three major exhibits a year. The museum also introduced such activities as model wooden boat races every Tuesday night and the Heritage Regatta, an annual race for classic wooden boats. There are also boat-building weekends, during which teams of parents and children make small dories from kits.

“They start on a Friday and launch on Sunday,” De Chevrieux said.

The museum has hosted a visit by the Endeavour, a replica of Capt. James Cook’s exploration vessel, and other tall ships. It’s even part of the fifth-grade curriculum in the Newport-Mesa Unified School District. In a partnership with the city and Orange County Coastkeepers, students visit the museum once a week and learn “science, math, history and geography, as it relates to the sea,” said Glenn Zagoren, the museum’s president and chief executive.

And yet, “people still think it’s a restaurant,” De Chevrieux laments.

But at least now, instead of being a hole in the wall on Balboa Boulevard -- where the museum started with four employees in 1986 -- it now has 13,800 square feet of space, a 3,000-volume maritime library, an archive of 58,000 historic photos of Newport Beach and surrounding coastline, 13 employees and about 80 volunteers.

“Every day we’re a little bit better-known than we were before,” said Bette MacDonald, the museum’s administrator.

“When we had the replica of the Endeavour here in 1999, we had 15,000 people in a week,” she said. “That put us on the map.”

Currently on exhibit are 50 marine paintings by Joe Duncan Gleason and a collection of model ships paired with touch-screen computers that take visitors on “tours,” explaining the history and significance of the models and the ships they represent.

A model off by itself -- the queen of the museum’s model collection -- is an intricate replica of White Wings, a yacht built by Newport Beach’s Rolly Kalayjian.

Kalayjian spent about six years building the model of his yacht. Much of its remarkable detail is not even visible, such as the fuel tanks under the bunks, the nails fastening the deck to the hull and sliding oven racks in the range.

The sink has a swinging-spout faucet, and there are miniature coffee mugs, rolls of toilet paper in the heads and a postage stamp-sized portrait of the yacht in the salon’s forward bulkhead. The winches work and the engine runs in forward and reverse.

Kalajian had to build the tools to build the 4-foot model, De Chevrieux said. De Chevrieux is working on an interactive computer program for a self-guided tour of the model that should be ready by December.

Zagoren was hired to take the museum to a higher level. There are plans, he said, to turn it into a seaport village “that preserves the heritage of this harbor as well as the harbor heritage of the West Coast.”

Complete with several restaurants.