The way it was

Jennifer Kho

Former Costa Mesa Mayor Bob Wilson remembers a time before John Wayne

Airport opened, a time when Sky Harbor Airport reigned at 19th Street.

“One of the owners of the airport was Lana Turner,” Wilson said.

“Howard Hughes was one of the famous aviators who flew out of there.

There was no Orange County Airport. This was it: the Costa Mesa airport.”

Then, in 1951, the airport was shut down to make way for the Freedom

Home development in what is now considered the Westside of Costa Mesa.

The 900 three- and four-bedroom homes cost between $8,995 and $9,995,

which, at that time, was a good price for a house, Wilson said.

The Freedom Homes, the first modern tract housing development in

Orange County, were an example of the kind of housing that seemed to be

the answer to a countrywide housing shortage, said Mitch Barrie, a Costa

Mesa Historical Society member.

The homes were new, inexpensive and in high demand. New houses had not

been built during World War II because everything was being put into the

war effort and some families were still suffering from the effects of the

Great Depression, society member Mary Ellen Goddard added.

But while the Freedom Homes provided low-cost housing for veterans and

others at the time, the development seems to be a symbolic precursor to

the problems that besiege the Westside today.

Wilson said Freedom Homes sold rapidly, and more tract housing

developments sprang up all over Orange County. On the Westside,

high-density housing also became the norm.

“The Freedom Homes tract brought high-density, and then we just

continued it because it was so successful,” he said. “It wasn’t until

probably 1960 that we began to notice problems with high density and

began changing ordinances to make it tougher for high-density projects.

We allowed entirely too much density. We wanted to be a big city, so we

built a lot of cracker boxes, things I’m ashamed of today.”

The Westside hasn’t always been associated with high density, however.

Until the 1950s, the Westside was by far the part of the city with the

most open space.

It kept its farms until the 1950s and ‘60s, while housing developments

had been popping up on the Eastside since 1923.

WESTSIDE--EASTSIDE DIFFERENCE

The reason for the disparity in the housing ages is not entirely

clear.

Bob Shaw, an Eastside resident for 52 years, said he thinks the

difference had to do with the apple blight, which wiped out many of the

city’s apple groves.

“All the Eastside had in the early ‘20s and before were apples,” he

said. “Each person had their five acres of apple farms until the apple

blight hit in the ‘20s. Over on the Westside, there were little farms

with goats and stuff like that. You had some of that on the Eastside,

too, but it was mostly apples.”

Though the ‘20s were before Shaw’s time, he thinks the more diverse

crops on the Westside protected the farms from the apple blight, while

Eastside farmers may have been more willing to sell.

Although apples are normally grown in cool weather, farmers managed to

grow them successfully in Costa Mesa until after 1923, Barrie said.

Donald Dodge, a former apple farmer and justice of the peace who

became Costa Mesa’s first judge, described the farming in a living

history he wrote in 1948 for the Globe-Herald, the Costa Mesa newspaper

that became the Daily Pilot.

“Before the development of the water systems, dry farmed barley and

beans had been the principal crops, with some sheep pasturing,” he

handwrote in a document preserved in the Historical Society office.

“However, under irrigation, fruit trees were planted in considerable

numbers and truck crops and poultry raising became popular. Apples became

the principal orchard trees with citrus fruits, mainly lemons, ranking

second. Peaches, plums and pears were favorites in home gardens. The

apples proved to be of exceptionally fine flavor and were in great demand

throughout Orange County.”

After a bumper apple crop in 1922 and another good year of growing in

1923, apple growing took a downturn.

“A series of warm winters and every pest known to horticulture had

made the locality unsuitable for raising deciduous fruits, so the

commercial growing of apples was given up,” Dodge continued. “Many people

with interests other than agriculture came to live in Costa Mesa and much

of the small farm acreage was re-subdivided into small parcels and

building lots. The Huntington Beach oil field and the booming building

industry here in the ‘20s provided profitable employment for many Costa

Mesa residents.”

The blight may have given the Holstein family the right opportunity to

build houses on the Eastside.

The Holsteins, who built many of the homes in Lido Isle and Newport

Beach, also built many of the first housing projects on the Eastside. The

projects were considered expensive, although they were not as expensive

as the Lido Isle homes, Wilson said.

Wilson has a different theory about why the Westside was developed

later than the Eastside.

He said he remembers seeing remnants of orange orchards when he moved

to Costa Mesa and thinks farmers did not give up their farms because of

the blight, but instead began growing oranges.

“I think the Holsteins chose the Eastside because it has the best

weather, 12 months of the year,” Wilson said. “You don’t have a cold

breeze like you do on the Westside, and you have sandy soil that you can

just reach into the ground and dig with your hand. I think the weather

brought the expensive homes to the Eastside, and they went really fast.

It wasn’t blight [that changed the Eastside], it was houses.”

THE BEGINNING

The northwest side of the city, technically west of the Costa Mesa

Freeway but considered Mesa Verde instead of the Westside, was the first

part of town to be developed.

The Westside is loosely bordered by Joann Street, Harbor Boulevard,

Superior Avenue, Talbert Nature Preserve and the Newport Beach and county

borders.

“Some people consider this to be the oldest part of town,” Barrie

said. “The town of Fairview, at the corner of Harbor Boulevard and Adams

Avenue, was a boomtown that lasted from 1887 to 1889. So as far as a

contiguous settlement, Costa Mesa really started this century.”

Damage to important railroad tracks, as well as the Southern

California land boom that ended up drastically reducing land values,

turned Fairview into a ghost town, according to “A Slice of Orange: The

History of Costa Mesa,” by Edrick Miller. A big drought, from 1900 to

1903, drove most remaining families off.

As a contiguous city, Costa Mesa began on the Eastside in 1906, the

same year the first oil wells were drilled on the mesa, south of the

present location of Newport Harbor High School, according to a chronology

by Barrie.

The Eastside -- then called Newport Heights -- was the first to be

subdivided into five-acre farms, Newport Mesa -- now the Westside --

followed, and Fairview Farms was subdivided soon after that.

Regardless of the reason for the time gap between the Eastside and

Westside housing, the gap had a big effect on the Westside’s development.

When the city, at only about 3.5 square miles, was incorporated in

1953, it was concerned about revenue and wanted to be self-sustaining,

Barrie said.

The Eastside was already established with houses, and the city turned

to the Westside to meet its business and industrial needs.

“It didn’t want property taxes, so it relied on business and

industry,” he said. “It was a self-contained city, isolated with no

freeways. People wanted the town to have a complete base where they could

live, shop and work, so part of the town was industrial. Now, things are

more spread out because of the freeways. But then, the Eastside had

already been developed with houses -- although there were some blank

spaces on the Eastside as late as 1955 -- and there were oil wells on the

Westside, so they wouldn’t have wanted to develop it for nice

residences.”

Industrial businesses were moving in by 1965, Barrie said.

Wilson, who sat on the city’s first Planning Commission, said the

industrial part of the Westside, including the bluffs that some residents

now hope to convert to high-end housing, was badly zoned by the county

before the city was incorporated.

“South of Freedom Homes, there was an awful lot of industrial,” he

said. “The first Planning Commission was called the Salvage Commission

because the county didn’t have good planning sense.”

Requests to the county to provide information on the reasons behind

the zoning were unsuccessful.

THE CHANGES

In some ways, little has changed on the Westside.

For one thing, the Westside was regarded as the poorer part of town as

far back as most longtime residents can remember.

“It was always the part of town with cheaper homes for people who had

a lower income,” Wilson said. “A lot of people used the homes as starter

homes, and it was also a haven for illegal” activity.

One indicator of the Westside’s relative poverty was the goats people

raised instead of cows, which need more room, Barrie said.

According to Miller’s book, Costa Mesa’s nickname, “Goat Hill,” began

about 1930.

“As the story goes, the land northwest of the Harbor and Newport

boulevards intersection was offered for sale at relatively low prices in

the mid-1920s,” Miller wrote. “These low values attracted a number of

poorer families who then had old houses moved in from the Santa Ana area.

Initially, they had tried to raise cows for their children’s milk needs.

But, when the land failed to support cattle, the people turned instead to

raising goats.”

The name became popular after Newport Harbor High School, which

included students from both Costa Mesa and Newport Beach, opened in 1930

and a rivalry evolved, according to the book.

“According to Costa Mesa resident William ‘Bill’ St. Clair, who was a

student there at the time, ‘We called the kids from Newport Beach

‘Mackerel Flatters’ and they said we were from ‘Goat Hill,”’ Miller

wrote. “So the name stuck.”

Barrie said the Westside was also the part of the city with the most

Latino residents, largely of Mexican descent.

Many of the Latinos living in the city were farm workers who lived on

the Westside, where the farms were, Barrie said.

“Mexicans have always been here,” he said. “This was Mexico, of

course, and some of them stayed after California was annexed. In the

class pictures of schools on the Westside, you always find Mexican

children and also some Japanese children. The [Latinos] are never

identified in the pictures, though, so people probably didn’t mingle

much. Many were laborers who worked on farms and didn’t make much money,

so they weren’t able to live in the good parts of town.”

In 1930, the Monte Vista School opened for Mexicans only, which Barrie

believes is a sign that racial tensions existed in the city even though

Costa Mesa Grammar School Principal Dale Evans “was convinced that the

district’s Mexican students -- the majority of whom were having language

difficulties -- would learn more at their own school,” according to

Miller’s book.

The idea would probably not be greeted with much enthusiasm today. And

Brown vs. Board of Education, the Supreme Court’s decision overturning

the notion of “separate but equal” facilities for different ethnic

groups, would not take place until 1954.

Longtime residents agree that race relations have changed in the city,

although they disagree about what some of the changes are.

Shaw said he remembers having friends of different races in the early

‘60s.

“Us kids were always running around together having fun,” he said. “We

weren’t gangs. There were no shootings or stabbings, but it seemed like

just about everyone got along. We went fishing in the Santa Ana River,

and then all the kids got into surfing. We had parties as young teens in

groups of 200 to 300 kids with live bands in different homes. The police

always came by and told us to keep it down after 10 p.m., but we were

never really rowdy. There were Hispanics, Japanese and all different

races, and there was no such thing as racial problems in those days, I

don’t think. But I think that people became more aware of different races

after a while and everybody got stereotyped.”

Wilson said he thinks race relations only began to improve in the last

four or five years.

Different races “didn’t kill each other in Costa Mesa, but they

ignored each other,” he said. “People aced Latinos out of good jobs and

made slaves of them. They weren’t really accepted in society. I think

it’s changing right now. It’s new, but I think that, especially in

Southern California, we are more tolerant of differences. We disagree but

let each other go our own ways.”

Paty Madueno said she has noticed a positive change from 1980, when

she moved here.

“When I came here, we were people who were afraid to walk on the

streets,” she said. “People didn’t appreciate seeing us and didn’t like

for me to speak Spanish. Some people still give me dirty looks because

they think I’m saying bad things about them, I guess. We were still

struggling to get a Spanish Mass at St. Joachim Church. By 1986, we had

two or three of them. The Latino population gradually increased and

acceptance came gradually as well. Now it’s much better. It is much

different from that time. Costa Mesa is a different city, a friendlier

city.”

She still runs into problems sometimes, however.

“Once in a while, you find people who are so lost you can see the

black cloud on top of their head, but most people nowadays are friendly,”

she said. “I used to get calls from people saying, ‘Go back to working in

the kitchen and having babies.’ Nowadays, it’s ‘Get out of town and go

back to your country.’ It used to intimidate me, but it doesn’t anymore.”