Seal Beach at 70: Divided It Stands : Distinct Communities Give This Small City by the Sea Character to Spare

There are 26 cities in Orange County. Seal Beach is at least six of them. You can’t confirm that with official sources. Records list Seal Beach as a single 10.7-square-mile city, on the county’s westernmost boundary, that was incorporated 70 years ago today. Many of its 25,262 residents will gather at 12:30 p.m. today at the municipal pier to commemorate that event.

But it didn’t take City Manager Allen Parker long to learn the truth when he hired on 4 1/2 years ago. Looking back, he said he discovered a city composed of communities geographically separated, very different, sometimes eccentric and often at odds.

“When you look at the town, it’s so diverse you can’t get a sense of the whole,” said Parker, who resigns Friday to become city manager of Half Moon Bay in Northern California.

“It’s like nobody knows we’ve got 7,000 people north of the (San Diego) freeway. Or that we have a shopping center up there--the Rossmoor Shopping Center. And even up there you’ve got a group of people in College Park West where the only way to get to them is to go through the City of Long Beach.”

At one end of the city’s coast, a trailer park where low-income renters pay about $200 a month is within a stone’s throw of the beach.

At the other end of the city’s coast, the Surfside postmaster says she can’t expand her tiny post office because the asking price of the only lots available--small ones right on the beach--is $500,000 each.

In the city’s midsection, the huge Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station carries out two missions: to store explosives--enough to obliterate the city--and to protect the wildlife that inhabits the base’s pristine marshes.

The city is both old and new. “A lot of the old-timers have gone and a yuppie kind of crowd is moving in,” Parker said. “In some cases, income property and old, nonconforming properties are coming down and very large, single-family houses are going up.”

And the city is both stable and changing. “The Hill is built out and stable--very stable,” Parker said. “It’s like any other typical Orange County late-’50s neighborhood.” But in Old Town “the families are tending to get smaller. We’re getting a lot of professional people. Old Town’s more and more in transition.”

And the city is isolated--from both without and within. A bay, a river, two military bases and a freeway keep Seal Beach’s neighbors at arm’s length or entirely out of sight. But similar features also physically separate the communities within the city, making each of them an individual small town and likely to stay that way.

“Leisure World’s got a wall around it,” Parker said. “Surfside’s got a fence around it. Old Town is separated from The Hill by Pacific Coast Highway. So when most people talk Seal Beach, what they’re really referring to is Old Town, and that’s a little community of like 10,000 people.”

One of those people is Eraine Rife, who in 1950 had a teaching job in Los Alamitos and a husband away at sea. She went to Seal Beach and bought a house on Ocean Avenue about 30 paces from the beach. It cost her $10,500 with a mortgage at an interest rate of 4 1/2%. It is worth perhaps 20 to 30 times that today.

“There was nothing here, nothing here at all,” she said. “My parents came down to see it, and my father said: ‘My God, you bought a house in the wilderness!’ ”

The community--born as a resort named Bay City, then nurtured by easy access on the Pacific Electric railway--grew as more summer houses were built. So, too, did the permanent population.

Bill and Terri Jones began working for Bay Hardware on Main Street in the late ‘50s, bought the store in 1963 and still operate it as an old-fashioned family enterprise. Three of their four children, plus a daughter-in-law, work either there or at the family’s new store in Tustin.

“Old Town is a little bit of the Midwest in Southern California,” Terri Jones said. “If you’ve been here any length of time, you’ll walk down the street and say ‘hi’ to 15 people in a block and a half.

“Almost all our customers are Old Town people. Our customer pull is within a two- or three-mile area at most. We’ve got a good central market here, a bank, a post office, two drug stores, and that keeps the neighborhood shopping here.

“We have a little for the tourists, too. It’s kind of a nice mix of both worlds.”

But Main Street has changed a lot, she said. “More sophisticated merchants” are setting up shop in reaction to “a lot of new, young, affluent people moving into Old Town.” That’s the biggest change, she said. “It’s expensive to live here now.”

With some notable exceptions--for example, her oldest son, Greg, 27, lives in Old Town and pays only $150 a month rent. He lives in the Seal Beach Trailer Park, which is one of the city’s oddest sections.

The original trailer park was created in the ‘30s, but a developer bought the land to build high-priced condominiums. The impending displacement of the longtime trailer-park residents raised a strong protest, and after much negotiation and controversy, the city stepped in, declaring the land a redevelopment area. The condos went onto half the land, the trailers onto the other half.

Proof of low or moderate income qualifies a tenant to bring his trailer into the park, which is privately owned but where rents are controlled by the city.

Unique in California

A favorable interpretation of state law qualifies the tenants to do something unique in California mobile-home parks. They may build elaborate homes as tall as two stories around their trailers--even entirely encasing their trailers--as long as they don’t add a kitchen. Without a kitchen, the structure legally is considered a cabana.

The result has been, for example, a two-story Tudor house, complete with stone fireplace, but with the rear end of a trailer slightly protruding through one wall. Another tenant stripped his trailer down to its carriage, then built his “cabana” over it, hiding all exterior signs of the trailer.

“I think it’s great,” Greg Jones said. “It’s close to where I work, and it’s right on the beach. I don’t even have a car. It’s a community inside a community. We’re very close-knit in there. I feel like I’ve left Seal Beach when I go in there.”

Terri Jones, on the other hand, lives in perhaps the most remote section of Seal Beach--College Park West at the most northern, inland edge of the city. She has always loved Old Town, she said, “but College Park West was the only place in 1963 where we could afford a place big enough for our family.”

One Way In or Out

Its 303 single-family, tract houses are utterly isolated--surrounded by the San Diego Freeway, the San Gabriel River Freeway, the 7th Street freeway off-ramp and the San Gabriel River.

Residents have only one way in or out--across the College Park Drive bridge from Long Beach. If that ever is blocked, “we knock down the fence behind the basketball courts, go through the trees and get onto the freeway,” Jones said.

These citizens of Seal Beach are so distant from the rest of the city that they are virtually never heard from at City Hall, Parker said. “The level of complaints from there is very, very low.”

Just across Pacific Coast Highway from Old Town is The Hill, a series of late-’50s housing tracts so named because they are built on a hill that looks down on Old Town.

“In Old Town we have a lot of renters. We have few on The Hill,” said Joyce Risner, mayor and The Hill’s representative on the City Council. (Each of the city’s five council members is elected solely by the ward where he or she lives.)

‘It’s Very Stable’

“On The Hill I’d say they were upper-middle class and very involved in the city. Most of them have owned homes here for quite a long time. It’s very stable, and there’s not much changeover. Some people who move out and rent their house move back after a while.”

Residents of The Hill turn out to vote in large percentage, but not in the numbers of their distant neighbors to the north, the residents of Leisure World.

That completely enclosed and generally affluent retirement community has a population of about 8,500, almost all registered voters. That amounts to roughly half the registered voters in the city. At times, there have been two Leisure World residents elected to the City Council.

Their voting strength has been a source of resentment for other parts of the city, conceded George Supple, former councilman from Leisure World and former president of the community’s governing board.

“We lay ourselves open to the charge that we’re selfish and thinking of our own welfare instead of the common good,” Supple said. But, he added, Leisure World would just as soon have no vote at all in city affairs.

Annexation Called Mistake

“The biggest mistake that was ever made here was when Leisure World was annexed to the city,” he said. “We subsidize the city a very large amount every year. We’re privately owned, and the city goes back to the rule that it can’t spend money for the benefit of private property. We have our own streets, own recreation programs, own street lights, and not a damned cent of that comes from city taxes. We even pay the city--if you can imagine it--to sweep our streets, and yet we paid our share of buying the damned sweeper and the salaries of the operators. Yet they charge us an hourly rate.

“While I was on the council, I tried to detach Leisure World from the city, but I was never able to accomplish it. You know you’ve got at least three votes against you when you start something like that, because for every $2.50 we pay to the city in taxes, they only have to give us $1 worth of services back.”

He said that few people in Leisure World have reason to visit other parts of the city. “We’re pretty much self-contained, and we have shopping centers right outside the gate.”

Across the San Diego Freeway is College Park East, a tract development that looks as if it is part of Seal Beach’s northern neighbor, Los Alamitos. That city’s territory begins right at the edge of College Park West, but the Los Alamitos Armed Forces Reserve Center keeps civilian Los Alamitos out of sight.

Intense Interest in Issues

College Park East, which had no homeowner’s association, rose up spontaneously and gathered enough signatures to call a referendum last January that would have prevented a proposed high-rise office development nearby. (The referendum was defeated.)

Parker said that sort of uprising would not be surprising in any part of Seal Beach. In general, he said, each section is intensely interested in issues that directly affect its own community--and apathetic about most everything else.

“What happens in Old Town doesn’t make any difference out here (in College Park East), unless it may raise their property taxes or something like that. They are concerned about what happens in their neighborhood and their front yard and backyard here, and that’s it.

“It opened my eyes that I couldn’t come in with my school learning and wonderful sense of the whole and the community and that kind of thing, because it doesn’t exist in reality. If I have six distinct communities here, I’m going to have six distinct perspectives on everything--or none at all.”

Three Recall Elections

The intensity of Seal Beach politics, however, is legendary in Orange County. At its most fervent in the early ‘70s, the city held three recall elections within six months, all of them successful.

On the other hand, when the first rumors surfaced that nuclear weapons might be stored at the Navy base, almost all of the protesters came from outside the city. “The old-timers who’d been around a long time, they like having that weapons station there because it’s an open-space buffer to central Orange County,” Parker said.

The military presence in the city really is that passive, Parker said. “It’s like they’re there (the base covers 5,000 acres) but there’s no role that they have with the city.”

Ships’ ammunition being unloaded at the Anaheim Bay dock is a common sight from the Pacific Coast Highway bridge that leads to another of Seal Beach’s unique communities--Surfside. It sits by itself across Anaheim Bay, closer to Huntington Beach than to the rest of its own city.

24-Hour Guard

It has about 700 residents on 275 lots in a community that is three-quarters of a mile long and 350 feet wide. (The width includes a 100-foot wide strip of privately owned beach.)

Surfside began in the 1920s as a development of rustic summer beach homes, but it has climbed the social and economic ladder. If you want to drive in, you must pass a 24-hour guard at the gate, and if you want to buy in, be prepared to pay, on the average, $350,000.

On the other hand, houses remain that were among the originals, allowing the population to range from those receiving stock dividend checks to those receiving Social Security checks, according to Joe Rullo, president of the Surfside Colony Board of Directors.

They receive their checks in Surfside’s very own, very tiny post office with its own postmark and full-time postmaster, Linda Kerley. Everyone has a post office box, and so the post office acts as the town social center. “Everyone shows up here at some time or other every day,” Kerley said.

‘Articulate About Demands’

Houses and lots are owned by the residents, but Rullo’s board has control of streets, access and, in many ways, City Hall, when it comes to Surfside affairs.

“They are very articulate about their demands about what they want and what they don’t want,” Parker said. “There are a whole set of zoning laws that are different there. It’s a different planning district. We are under instructions: No variances. Not a one-inch variance is to be allowed. They don’t like areas of gray, because it causes them problems.”

In Surfside now is a new, never-lived-in, expensive three-story house up on jacks and about to disappear because of the no-variance rule.

“They design this house and they build it for a perfectly rectangular piece of property,” Parker said. “Well, lo and behold it’s not rectangular; it’s a parallelogram. And there’s no way that house will fit without falling an inch or two onto the neighboring property.

‘No Variance Permitted’

“It’s a half-million-dollar house, but no variance permitted. So they jack it up and then try to figure out if there’s any way they can fit it onto the lot. They could have found that out with a piece of cardboard, right? But they don’t. They jack the thing up and find out it just doesn’t fit.

“So it’s sitting there. Surfside is screaming at us, saying it’s an earthquake danger. The house goes into foreclosure. Somebody who lives down there wants to move it. The colony won’t let you move it without a liability policy, which you can’t get in today’s insurance market.

“So they’re going to tear that house down, every stick and stone, because it encroaches a few inches into another property. A black-and-white issue. They don’t deal in gray solutions.”

After 4 1/2 years, Parker said, the city’s character has been a fascinating study.

“It tends to factionalize and fractionalize, and that can be a nightmare to any administrator. I would say most of the time I’ve spent here has been getting people to bury hatchets, trying to find common ground, negotiating, mediating, that sort of thing.”

Tranquil Place

Despite that, he said, he will remember Seal Beach as a place of tranquility, a town removed from its neighbors and protective of it small-town pace. “Driving back into Seal Beach has been like I’m going back to the country, going back to my little isolated corner of Orange County. I like to live in an urban area and have that ability.

“It tends to be place where, when you come to visit, you want to park the car and go walk. It’s just a whole different pace from the rest of Orange County.”

That is reflected on all levels of city life, especially at City Hall, he said.

“You always talk about fast processing and time-is-money to a developer. Well, any developer that comes to Seal Beach is going to spend some time here, because the community is going to get involved and they’re going to talk about it and they’re going to continue public hearings.

“And council meetings tend to be closer to Town Hall meetings. If you want to talk, the council will let you talk on any issue. We’re prepared to be there all night.”

Is that good or bad?

“Neither,” Parker said. “It’s Seal Beach. It has its own pace that doesn’t fit in an Orange County world.”