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As Crystal Cove, California, changes, a life-long visitor asks: can places like these really be owned?
Photographed by Jackie Bohnert for Metropolis
By Karen E. Steen
February 2002
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Hidden by the bluffs along Pacific Coast Highway, the rustic cottages of
Crystal Cove are an island in time.
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On an August evening sometime in the mid-1950s, as a perfect California
day drew down to darkness, a small sailboat on its way home to the Newport
Beach harbor skated too close to shore and got stuck in the surf. The sailors
were starting to panic when a group of browned burly men on the shore spotted
them and swam out through darkness to help beach the boat. As they landed,
the smell of roasting meat wafted over from what looked to be a village
of thatched huts. A group of natives sat around a bonfire, drinking
and singing. "My god," one of the sailors gasped. "Where
are we? How far did we drift?"
They had strayed just a mile and a half. They'd landed not on some South Pacific
island but on the rustic shores of Crystal Cove, California, an hour south
of Los Angeles, beloved atoll of vacationing American families. My father
was one of those burly rescuers, and my mother and grandparents were sitting
at that bonfire. Although I wouldn't be born for another 15 years,
I consider this one of my family's most profound stories. It says: "This
life of ours was ideal. To passersby, it seemed impossibly exotic, a tropical
fantasia, a mirage." It is a tale from the Golden Age of California,
when automobile motoring opened up new vistas and rustic beach colonies
sprang up along the coast, from Malibu to San Diego. A time when it was
legal to dive for abalone--and there was still abalone left to dive for.
When the hills beyond the beach were thick with wild grass and sagebrush
instead of golf courses and gated communities.
Today Crystal Cove and its 46 ramshackle cottages stand empty. Until recently
its residents--some year-round, some vacationers--had continued to enjoy
a relaxed existence not so different from my family's 1950s idyll. But their
tenancy arrangement was as casual as their lifestyle, and the residents
did not own the beachfront property, just the rustic cabins they'd built
on it. The unusual arrangement dated back to the 1920s, when rancher James
Irvine II allowed squatters to erect simple structures on a slice of his
110,000-acre coastal property. In 1979 the late Irvine's wish for Crystal
Cove to remain undeveloped was respected when it was sold to the state parks
department. But that turned the long-standing residents into tenants of
the California Parks Department--which this past July evicted them to make
way for public use of the cottages.
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Vernacular architecture peeks out from overgrown vegetation.
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Laura Davick on the front step of her family's cottage.
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According to Cove legend, this cottage built by two brothers was divided
into a duplex after they had a fight.
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The eviction followed two decades of legal battles between residents and
the parks department, which felt its property should be open to all Californians,
not just a lucky few. A third faction wanted the cottages razed and the
land returned to wilderness. Early last year, when I learned that the residents
had lost their fight and would soon have to move, I decided to investigate
what was going to become of my favorite place. The parks department did
not yet have an official plan, and locals were both worried about the
state's intent and arguing over the best use of the land. Although my own
politics would usually put me on the side of public parks, I couldn't get
past the idea of Crystal Cove as I knew it ceasing to exist.
I started my reporting by calling the one person I still knew at the Cove:
Laura Davick. Her father and mine grew up together there and were widely
regarded as the reigning studs of the beach in the late 1940s and early
'50s. In those days camping was allowed on the beach and a community of
summer people returned every year to put up elaborate tents on Memorial
Day, not taking them down until Labor Day. It was a life that revolved around
play: luau parties, sunset cocktails, endless volleyball games, and catamaran
rides. Kids were never bored, and waterskiing men named Pinky and Babe never
seemed to grow old.
Laura's parents met at the Cove as teenagers and bought a house there in
1960, when she was a year old. In the 1970s, when my family spent every
August at cottage no. 17, Laura was one of the carefree, long-haired teenagers
I looked up to--a party girl with a husky laugh who worked at the Shake
Shack, a bright yellow roadside stand that overlooks the Cove from Pacific
Coast Highway. In recent years she'd started sending out a photo Christmas
card that pictured her in a Santa hat and red minidress, perched in front
of a giant decorated pine tree that she installed on the beach every December.
Whenever I made a day trip to the Cove, she was still at cottage no. 2--ever
tan, ever bikini-clad--inviting me to park in her driveway, where I wouldn't
get a ticket from the vigilant park rangers.
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Clockwise from top left: A new high-end development looms across the
highway from Crystal Cove; creeping iceplant turns lawn furniture and a
bust of Beethoven into yard art; cottages on the sand can only be
reached by the handmade boardwalk; a surfboard doubles as decor; a relic
from the Yacht Club days, when neighbors gathered for cocktails under a
thatched canopy on the sand. |
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This is the person I expected to meet again when I took up this story--and
in many ways I did. What I didn't expect was that to defend the place that
means so much to her, Laura has funneled the force of her larger-than-life
personality into becoming a very savvy, very powerful community activist.
"It's something that I've always felt I was supposed to do," she
told me. "I don't even know how to put it into words. It's like it's
my job to try and save this place." In June, a few weeks before the
residents would be evicted, she invited me out to her cottage to soak up
the last lingering days of an era that was swiftly coming to an end.
There's a pinpoint-able feeling that ac-companies any return to Crystal
Cove, whe-ther you've been away a few decades or a few hours. The off-ramp
from Pacific Coast Highway quickly drops down to a potholed road snaking
around huge eucalyptus trees and through embankments overgrown with morning
glory. The zzzp zzzp of highway traffic becomes the slow rhythmic build
and crash of waves. The smell of California reaches up from the past: the
winelike ferment of warm ice plant and eucalyptus, the dusty dirt road,
and the tang of drying seaweed--all wrapped in a fine mesh of ocean
salt.
I arrived to find the cottages looking as they ever had, nestled in
so cozily that they seemed to have grown here, twining along the bluffs
with the bougainvillea and nasturtiums. Around the same time that Frank
Lloyd Wright was meticulously siting low-slung homes into Midwestern landscapes,
the amateur builders of Crystal Cove were pursuing a remarkably similar
goal. The results were nowhere near as graceful, but you get the feeling
that Wright would have appreciated the curving boardwalk and hill-hugging
staircases that lead to those cottages the dirt road does not reach.
The people who crafted this world--and it is a world of its own--are as
laid-back and friendly as the cottages. As Laura introduced me around, I
was offered stories, grilled-cheese sandwiches, beer, and membership in
the world's most casual private club, the Crystal Cove Yacht Club. "We
have only one requirement, and it's very strict," founder Jim Thobe
told me. "I have to like you."
The oldest of the cottages started out as tents and shacks in the 1920s.
As their needs grew, the families added rooms and built patios, enclosed
porches, and outdoor showers. Jane Burzell told me her family's impressive
two-story house "started out as a palm-frond hut and a slab of concrete."
Brent and Peggy Ogden showed me the droll physiology of their bluff-top
home: two separate cabins had been joined together by an ad hoc bathroom
with a door at either end. Cove building materials included salvaged train-car
windows, driftwood and hatch covers washed up by the sea, and leaded glass
purchased at Carmen Miranda's estate sale in Hollywood. As a result, in
1979 all 46 houses were listed on the National Register of Historic Places
as the last intact examples of Southern California vernacular beach architecture--a
style that once dominated these shores, then gave way to the tile and stucco
of shopping centers and luxury resorts.
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