Seal Beach’s red-tile-roofed hacienda-style City Hall was built in 1929, but lately part of the lower floor has been rented out to a beauty salon to bring the town a bit of extra revenue. Midway through my work on this essay, I had stopped by to ask about the finer points of town history. Joanne Yeo, who until recently occupied the City Clerk’s office longer than anyone can remember, rummaged under the counter and handed me a little book called “A Story of Seal Beach.” Now, I had popped in on the spur of the moment after a morning walk on the beach – I had on some old jeans and a sweatshirt and I’m not even sure I had shaved – and Joanne didn’t know me from Adam. But when I told her I had run out without my wallet and didn’t have the $5 purchase price on me, and I started to slide the little book back across the counter, she just waved me off and said, “Take it. Come back and pay whenever you get a chance.” Imagine walking into City Hall in L.A. or Santa Monica or Santa Ana or anywhere else this side of Mayberry and having a clerk (once one finally deigns to saunter over and acknowledge your existence) tell you, Take it, go ahead, I trust you. This just does not happen in this century in this part of the world – except, in Seal Beach, it does.

This is what we call The Seal Beach Way. This is why few people who stumble on this place ever leave, why Seal Beach gets into their blood, why they move into horrendously overpriced ’50s-era tract homes on pint-size lots and start plotting with architects to add a hideously overpriced extra 300 square feet of living space – and consider themselves damn lucky to do it. For they have found, tucked inside one of the most heavily urbanized landscapes on Earth, the last little unspoiled beach town in Southern California. People actually walk here. We leave our cars at home and stroll to the not-Starbucks coffee shop, amble to the Gap-less and Banana Republic-free Main Street, walk our kids to school, or simply put one foot in front of the other until we reach the beach or the market or the playground. Sometimes we even talk to each other along the way, which turns out, after all, not to be unlawful in car-centric SoCal.

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Part of the reason Seal Beach has pulled this off is a matter of the company we keep: The town is the first and easiest-to-miss pearl on a string of larger, more prominent beach cities stretching southward into Orange County. It lies at the very top of the chain, abutting the concrete-bedded San Gabriel River that forms a cold, gray border with L.A. County. Because Seal Beach lies right on this boundary, non-locals are often confused about exactly which side of the Orange Curtain divide claims Seal Beach. The correct answer (philosophically, if not legally) is neither: Seal Beach is proudly not part of L.A. – the town’s founding father, Phillip Stanton, formerly speaker of the California Assembly, made sure of that 90 years ago. But it also shares little in common with the planned communities and new-money mansions commonly associated with “The O.C.” (where nobody outside of Hollywood scriptwriters and preternaturally attractive 20-something actors pretending to be teenagers actually calls it that). You can plaster your garage with a rainbow-hued seascape mural or paint your stucco walls flaming purple or erect a strangely large-scale model of a lighthouse on your front lawn and the taste police will not knock on your door here.

Seal Beach is militantly untrendy. Confusion about Seal Beach’s identity and location is key to its survival – people who live 20 minutes away aren’t quite sure where or what it is, and once you hit the geographically fashionable zones of West L.A., you might as well say you live on the Yucatan. It would never occur to those folks, happily for us, to drive those 40 miles south to Seal. The center of Old Town Seal Beach is Main Street, a true old-fashioned downtown, where most of the businesses are locally owned and the fanciest restaurant’s only dress requirement is shirt and shoes. Business is conducted in shorts and T-shirts; the local congressman can be seen now and then yakking on his cell in his wetsuit after surfing.

At the foot of Main Street is the Seal Beach Pier, and the stretch of sand on either side of it is broad and flat and mostly empty. The beach is so wide it is possible to be lonely here, to feel small, to not hear the Nokia song chiming in someone’s pocket. It was not always this way. Seal Beach started where its sister beach towns have ended up, the first town served by the Red Car Line, bringing in the beach-bound hordes beginning in 1904. City father Stanton rounded up a pool of investors and built the longest pleasure pier on the West Coast, with 52 giant “scintillators” left over from the most recent world’s fair erected at the end. These huge light standards, arrayed like a battalion of soldiers staring out to sea, cast brilliant rainbows of light onto the water for night swimming.

By 1920, the Jewel Café and the Seal Beach Dance Pavilion and Bathhouse with its 90-foot plunge flanked the pier and were the talk of the coast, a must-stop for weekend beach-goers with a quarter to burn on the trolley, as well as for the stars of the silent screen arriving in their roadsters and limos. Cecil B. DeMille parted the waters in his first filming of “The Ten Commandments” here, as sightseers plied the beach walk on miniature wicker cars powered by electric motors. A giant roller coaster two blocks long towered over all, and celebrities popped into town aboard their private planes, which landed at the Seal Beach Airport, famous for its Airport Club 24-hour casino.

Stop by Clancy’s Irish Bar on Main Street today and ask one of our longest-lived natives, T-Bone, about it, how he used to earn tips as a kid chocking the wheels of the stars’ planes and wiping the motor oil off their windshields in exchange for rides. He loved the old Seal Beach, the splendid pier and the rickety houses and the air of danger, and he decries the “do-gooders” who, with a firm assist from Prohibition and the Great Depression, ground Seal Beach’s incarnation as Sin City into dust. The demise of the Red Cars finished the job.

Now the old airport is long gone, and the coaster, and the giant Quonset hut with all-night poker inside is just a skeletal foundation by First Street. T-Bone can’t afford to live here anymore – he’s in landlocked Westminster down the road. Except for the sky-high cost of its real estate, the town has marched in the opposite direction from Orange County’s other beach cities, becoming smaller, quainter, more family-oriented over time. Accidents of geography and government have conspired to accomplish this. Bounded on the south by the ocean, the west by the San Gabriel, and the east by the Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station, much of which is now a nature preserve, Seal Beach has almost no room to grow. Some briefly wise City Council in the distant past decided to put a limit on apartment buildings and duplexes, and so much of Old Town has remained pristine and stable, a family zone. Except for new commercial development pushing inland past the I-405 Freeway, out past Leisure World and the Boeing facility where moon rockets were once constructed and secret spy satellites are now designed, development has been essentially frozen here since the ’60s. ________________________________________

When I returned to City Hall a few days later to pay my five bucks for “A Story of Seal Beach,” Joanne had some old photo albums waiting for me. A newspaper ad from 1913 stuffed into the front of one caught my attention. It urged L.A. residents to take the train to Seal Beach and to buy a lot for $550 (only 10 percent down!), so that they, too, could enjoy the city that “has no winter and knows no summer growing like a weed and sturdy as an oak.” The vision, then, was for Seal Beach to become the biggest, brightest, trendiest coastal city this side of the Bay Area. That vision flourished, briefly, then failed, thankfully, but 91 years later, it is being resurrected. The city is hard up for cash – there are million-dollar homes, but no money to pick up beach litter or keep City Hall open a full five days – and so the push for progress, to grow like a weed, long dormant, is rearing up. One of the last undeveloped pieces of land in town, the old Hellman Ranch next to the “Hill” neighborhood above PCH, is finally being built with new homes, the city allowing an ancient Indian burial ground and wetland to be excavated and graded to expand the tax base. The most abominable parts of the project – the hundreds of homes, the golf course, the horrendous traffic problems – were long ago killed by public outcry, and Native American monitors safeguard the artifacts and burial mounds. Only 64 houses remain on the drawing board, along with a restored wetland and a nature preserve to keep safe the legion of foxes and water fowl and coyotes who live there, not to mention the street-savvy skunks who prowl the neighborhood to scrounge cat food and show my wolfhound who’s boss. Still, the change is jarring.

The wide, desolate flatlands next to the fragrant eucalyptus trees of Gum Grove Park, where people ran their dogs and hiked along the old cow pasture and horse trails, are gone. More ominously, the City Council, after 30 years of resistance, finally voted to put parking meters on Main Street, a sign that Seal Beach’s unique small-town feel is truly on the auction block. This is one of the last beach communities in SoCal where you don’t have to dig for quarters. Protests came so swiftly and in such numbers that a shocked and awed council soon rescinded its meter vote – but we all sense, now, that it’s only a matter of time. After all, a cell phone shop has opened on Main Street, a beachhead for chain stores. The fact that no customers ever seem to enter the shop has not as yet deterred its corporate owners. And another parcel of land, the last undeveloped piece of beachfront in Old Town, where a red-brick power plant long ago stood by the San Gabriel and provided electricity used to help construct the Hoover Damn, is now being eyed by developers and council members who have budgets to balance and who can no longer be limited by The Seal Beach Way. The neighborhood is set against it and may yet prevail, or at least limit the damage, but consider the once pristine expanse of Crystal Cove just 30 miles south, now vanished beneath bulldozer’s blade and shopping mall shadow, and it’s all too clear just how fragile our slices of paradise truly are, at least the ones that count. Work on the $1.3 million renovation of the Seal Beach ocean wall is wrapping up.

If you have anything to add about Seal Beach or would like to share information related to any of the other beaches in OC, please visit the Travel Forum. “The Last Little Beach Town” is excerpted from “My California: Journeys by Great Writers,” a collection of travel and adventure essays featuring 27 California writers, including Michael Chabon, T. Jefferson Parker, Aimee Liu, Dana Gioia, Pico Iyer and Carolyn See. All of the writers, as well as the editor, publishers and publicists, donated their work so that earnings from the sale of “My California” could be donated to the California Arts Councils to support arts education throughout the state. More information is available at www.MyCaliforniaProject.org.

By EDWARD HUMES

SPECIAL TO THE REGISTER

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It is quiet, perhaps too quiet for visitors seeking a glamorous experience. Most of the beach-goers here are locals. It attracts a young set, those kids who can’t yet drive but can take the bus or bike. It also gets some young pier rats, those kids who hang around under the pier and get into mischief. The north half of the beach is traditionally a family area. Parking is handy, the walk is short and Mom can keep close watch. This is a good spot for beginning surfers. North beach also is called the Gold Coast, named for the row of high-value residences that sit atop a bluff along Ocean Avenue. South of the pier base is a cute tot lot with block wall around it to corral the kids. Notice the town’s little mascot that sits beside the pier entrance walk, a seal statue named Slick. Old-timers say they used to see seals on the beach here

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Main Street is the place for strolling, shopping, dining and heading  to the beach and pier.If you’re looking for a place to visit, vacation, to shop, enjoy a beach, dine, watch a classic movie, fish on the pier, kitesurf and just hang out, by all means come to Main Street, Seal Beach. Of the Orange County beaches, it offers the best blend of shopping and beach-ing that you’ll find.Seal Beach is a favorite beach experience with the premier beach shopping, free parking and shops offering something for everyone at affordable prices.

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Japan-America Kite Festival

Japan America Kite Festival ® is an annual event that attracts over 6,000 visitors.  Since its inception, the festival has grown to become the largest kiting event of its kind in Southern California!  It also has an international reputation as the most “Family Friendly” kiting event.  The Festival is dedicated to educating the general public about Japan and Japanese culture through the traditional art form of Japanese kite making.  The festival showcases traditional and modern Japanese kites as well as other kites from all over the world.  Visitors experience “hands-on” fun, including cultural events and activities, such as free Japanese sode “kimono” kite workshops for children, Japanese kite exhibits, taiko drum performances, traditional Japanese “festival” foods, and much more!

The Japan America Kite Festival® is open to the public with free admission and it is presented by: 

4 October 2009

Seal Beach Pier

Seal Beach, California, USA 

Japan America Society of Southern California

  Building Japan America Relationships Since 1909   jas-socal.org

 Up Up & Away Kites, 139 ½ Main Street, Seal Beach, California

 Up Up & Away Kite Club, Seal Beach, California 

  www.kiteclub.org

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Children pat the sculpture, Slick, the seal, and parents take pictures of their family next to him. Seals don’t frequent this area anymore but the statue offers one reminder of how Seal Beach got its name.

The quaint pier with its wooden planks, fishing popularity and Ruby’s diner on the very end are so much milder than the early Seal Beach days when sizzling rides and bootleggers dragged their booty to shore (rum runners bringing liquor during the prohibition).  Today the pier is a slow going family-friendly entity where people just like to take leisurely strolls. The wind is usually mild, the weather often nice and the views are great.

The pier features a lifeguard tower and the restaurant. There are benches to sit on and relax or you can stroll and soak up the sun and scenery. Located at the end of Main Street, the pier is the icon for Seal Beach. There’s so much shopping and dining to enjoy, but none along the beach. Ruby’s on the pier and the shops downtown on the tree-shaded Main are your best bet for food and snacks.

To enjoy the pier, you’ll find it on Ocean, adjacent to Pacific Coast Highway 1, three blocks away. 

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