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Clockwise from top left: handyman and guard Alan Wallace with his deputy,
Shadow; Jane Burzel and her son Blake on their porch; Jim Thobe and Pam
Gardner, commodores of the Crystal Cove Yacht Club; Stella Hiatt, who started
coming to the Cove in 1938; a plein-air painter finds inspiration in the
Cove's modest charm. |
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Because the houses were small and close together, and because they didn't
have private yards or fences, anyone who lived at the Cove had to embrace
the outdoors--and the community. The obsessions with privacy and property
that often isolate people or flare into conflict simply didn't
exist. "People have compared it to being like a tribe down here,"
Laura says.
Certainly Crystal Cove was a place where neighbors helped out the older
folks and watched each other's children. It was even a place where an itinerant
artist-handyman like Alan Wallace could find a niche as a caretaker
and guard. Most residents weren't sure where Alan actually lived, but for
almost 30 years he spent most of his time at the Cove's entrance road and
garage. With a righteousness bordering on vendetta, he discouraged intruders
from crashing the gates. "We had a sign there that used to say 'No
Trespassing,'" he says. "Well I changed it to 'You are trespassing.'"
In return the other residents didn't question his right to stay; and when
the state tried to get rid of him, a few even signed letters naming him
official caretaker of their cottages. On New Year's Eve 2000, when
Alan got into an altercation with a trespasser who broke his wrist, Laura
was the one who picked him up from the hospital. Whatever the doctors and
nurses thought when they saw the 75-year-old man with broken teeth and weathered
skin stepping into a Mercedes convertible driven by a tall leggy blonde,
it probably didn't have much to do with community spirit. Yet if you can
picture the bridging of that particular social gap, then you can begin to
understand what community means in a place like Crystal Cove.
One morning I sat down with Laura to get the dirt on Cove politics and her
role in it. She explained that she'd first gotten involved as a resident
who didn't want to leave her cottage. Starting in 1982, when the state first
threatened the residents with eviction, Laura joined her neighbors in a
string of legal battles that extended their leases for a few more years
in exchange for giving up relocation rights, housing replacement allowances,
and even ownership of the cottages (with no financial compensation).
"Bit by bit we've given up everything we could possibly give to stay
here for additional time," she told me. "It's down to where there's
nothing left to bargain with."
About the time the residents first began running out of things to bargain
with, Laura broadened her focus on the Cove to other issues, including environmental
protection. She even crawled through drainage pipes to investigate runoff
pollution from a housing development across the highway. In 1997, when Republican
Pete Wilson was governor, the state adopted a cynical plan that would have
turned the cottages into a luxury "eco resort" with a swimming
pool and restaurant. Wilson's funding solution to historic rehabilitation
of the cottages--mandated by their listing on the National Register--was
high-end units that would charge no less than $375 a night. Laura now faced
the most important battle yet, and to fight it she founded the Alliance
to Rescue Crystal Cove in 1998.
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They appear patriotic, but these 1950s tent campers (above) are actually saluting
the beloved martini flag, which bore the outline of a cocktail glass. A
postcard shows the beach during its midcentury heyday, when tents lined
the sand (below).
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The idea of a state-park facility being affordable only to the rich was
offensive to almost everyone who heard about it. "They hadn't gone
through the public-review process properly," Laura says. "They
had signed away the historic district for sixty years to a private for-profit
developer. It would've been like the Ritz-Carlton down here." To anyone
who had ever stayed in one of those cottages, the plan was preposterous.
With their makeshift rooms added one by one, their sloping floors and
tilting walls, the cottages are hardly a luxury accommodation.
Soon Laura was focusing all of her time on stopping the resort plan: she
enlisted environmentalists, historic preservationists, and parks advocates
to speak out along with members of the local community. It was the first
time these groups were all on the same side, and the effect was enormous--enough
to bring 800 irate screaming citizens to a public meeting in January 2001.
The shout-down that ensued has become legendary: it embarrassed the parks
department and changed the fate of Crystal Cove forever. Soon thereafter
the California Coastal Conservancy, a state agency, agreed to contribute
$2 million to buy out the resort developer, and the plan went back to the
dark place it had come from.
In engaging various groups to fight the resort, Laura had begun to
look at the Cove from a broader perspective. The result was an extraordinary
transition from a resident hell-bent on staying in her home to a crusader
for a new paradigm that goes very far toward uniting the warring factions
who have fought over Crystal Cove for so long. "I realized that our
time was limited," she says. "There was going to come a day when
we would all have to leave here, but I still wanted to do whatever I could
to be part of this place for the rest of my life."
Her solution was a proposal that would make a variety of groups stakeholders
in the future of the Cove. One cottage might be an office for a nonprofit
environmental group; another could house the park's tide-pool interpretive
program. The Coastal Dolphin Survey Project of Orange Coast College could
establish a permanent research outpost. Plein-air painting groups, who have
been setting up their easels at Crystal Cove for decades, could provide
accommodations for a visiting-artist program. And there would still be some
cottages available for overnight stays by regular folks--at prices nowhere
near $375 a night. It was a plan the parks department just might embrace--and
an acknowledgment that staying involved with Crystal Cove would mean working
with the state, not against it.
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The author's grandmother and mother in their tiki tent, circa 1951.
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Windows from an old train car provide a panoramic view from one of the cottages today.
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In the 1920s the cottages were draped in palm fronds to create a
tropical backdrop for silent movies.
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By virtue of the twelve-hour days and six-day weeks she has spent defending
this place, Laura is now more or less married to Crystal Cove. "I was
talking to someone from the parks department," she recalls, laughing,
"and I said, 'You know that state park up north where those historic
buildings were turned into a conference center? You know how the place mats
in the restaurant have a picture of the woman who saved those buildings?
Someday you're going to see my face on a place mat at Crystal Cove.'"
Outspoken activists draw heat, and Laura has earned her share of nemeses.
To some she's still just a resident looking out for her own best interests.
To others she has hogged the spotlight or muddied the argument by bringing
environmental groups into the fray. But when you ask these people what they
want to see at the Cove, a lot of them are now proposing mixed-use plans
that sound a lot like hers.
In December 2000 Laura found a powerful ally in another woman with deep
roots in the area: the formidable Joan Irvine Smith, granddaughter of James
Irvine II. Smith is one of the most powerful and tenacious people in Orange
County, and she regards Crystal Cove State Park as her family's legacy.
She likes to recall the story of her car trips to the Crystal Cove area
with her late mother: "We'd look down on the coast and she would say
to me, 'Now dear, you know your grandfather wanted this to be a park, your
father wanted it to be a park, and I want it to be a park. You must see
that they never develop this.'"
In enthusiasm for Laura's idea, Smith set up the Crystal Cove Conservancy,
a nonprofit organization to help fund a center for history, the arts,
and the environment. Funding, of course, is the hitch. How much, exactly,
does it cost to restore funky, falling-down beach cottages to their equally
funky but less falling-down previous state? Estimates put the rehabilitation
at as much as $20 million, but where that money will come from remains unknown.
The state's intent, however, is finally clear, even if its funding
source is not. After the residents moved out in July, the parks department
held several public meetings to determine an official plan. A "vision
statement" completed in September 2001 calls for historic preservation
of the cottages for state-parks programs; overnight rentals; the Crystal
Cove CARE Program for culture, arts, research, and the environment; and
a beach store and snack bar. Laura, who is monitoring the cottages while
they're empty and will continue to act as a watchdog, is happy with the
plan. Never content with the minimum effort, however, she tells me her latest
ambition: "We want to do something that can be a role model for sustainability
along the California coast."
On my last morning at Crystal Cove, I took the walk down the beach that
all Cove families have taken thousands of times. It always begins at First
Rocks--a smooth, flat tide-pool formation that's easy for even the
youngest kids and the oldest grandparents to navigate. I thought it might
be a good place to start my own journey into Life-after-Crystal-Cove-as-I-Knew-It.
As I watched a pair of white herons search for breakfast among the rocks,
I remembered that this was the spot where Laura stood when she returned
the ashes of her parents to the ocean that they loved. Because her mom and
dad will forever reside just off the First Rocks, it continues to be her
true spiritual home. Her connection to the Cove is so strong that merely
displacing her from the family cottage there does almost nothing to remove
her spirit or watchful eye.
If places, like people, can be said to have natural genius, then Crystal
Cove is a savant. It is a beautiful ruin, overgrown to perfection, casual
and glamorous, welcoming and secretive--all without ever seeming to try.
The cultural factors that created it are lost (imagine squatters scoring
California's most valuable coastal property today). So perhaps it's inevitable
that the lifestyle that went with it could not be sustained in such a changed
world.
Recently I came across an out-of-date Web site that was a tribute of sorts
to Crystal Cove. It contained some pictures, a sample protest letter to
the state about the (now dead) resort plan, and a journal entry about a
recent visit to the Cove. "I know my rocks remembered me," the
author wrote of her walk to the tide pools. The words jarred me: Does the
rock miss the Indians? Does it pine for the early tent campers? Will it
even notice that we are gone? And in knowing the answer, I knew something
more: we don't own Crystal Cove--it owns us. If we really care about the
Cove, we can stick around and get involved in its next life, whatever that
turns out to be. But we shouldn't mistake possessiveness for stewardship,
we shouldn't forget that it has been the land that has nurtured us most,
and not vice versa. To respect that is to respect the historical reality
that we too--like the Indians, like the campers, like the herons--are just
passing through. And if we really love and admire the genius of a certain
place, what we take away from it is not just memories but lessons in how
to live, how to create new places that are worth fighting for and will
someday be worth mourning.
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