Rooms With a View--at a Cost : Beach cities: Living on The Strand means priceless vistas and the ocean just yards away. But residents ‘live in a fishbowl’ and real estate values are sky high.

It’s the type of address that one announces proudly, knowing full well the listener understands: “I live on The Strand.”

It means seeing unparalleled sunsets that disappear into the Pacific, not into a neighbor’s roof. It means spotting dolphins frolicking in the surf in the morning, and drifting off to sleep to the rhythmic sound of the waves at night.

Those who reside along the South Bay’s oceanfront promenade--in several hundred homes, condominiums and apartments along four miles of sand in Hermosa Beach and Manhattan Beach--cannot imagine living anywhere else.

“If you’re going to be in L.A. and can’t live on your own island, this is the place to be,” said Doug Bek, a real estate agent who grew up on The Strand and still lives there.

Added Chuck Sheldon, an ex-Hermosa Beach councilman who runs a computer business out of his beachfront home, “There are few houses in which a husband and wife look at each other and constantly say, ‘This is a keeper.’ I can’t imagine a scenario in which this home would ever leave the Sheldon family.”

But even paradise has its problems.

Living a few feet from a boardwalk that attracts hundreds of thousands of beach-goers a year can be like driving a Rolls-Royce without a muffler--luxurious, yes, but oh so loud. Parking the Rolls can be a problem, too, because garages are small, parking meter attendants work 24 hours a day, and spaces are at a premium.

Then there are the annoyances that the elements bring. Humidity makes paint peel. Sand finds its way into drains. Houses vibrate when storm surf pounds the shore.

Residents along the boardwalk say they learn to tune out noise from passersby, just like people who live beneath the LAX flight path in Lennox or near a railroad crossing in Hawthorne. Sheldon, 49, installed double-paned windows to keep the sounds of revelry from echoing through his luxury home, a place so impressive that it was featured as Heather Locklear’s pad on the television sitcom “Going Places.”

“You buy into something when you live on The Strand,” said Sheldon. “Nine months of the year, it is fabulously quiet. The beach is virtually empty. It is magnificent. But for three months of the year, it’s a zoo. . . . On weekends, it is a nightmare in front of me.”

Forget the spacious lawns, huge garages and long, meandering driveways one usually associates with a million-dollar home, or the gated seclusion that often comes with exclusive properties in Rolling Hills Estates, Malibu and Beverly Hills. Houses on The Strand are set down like dominoes, six feet apart. The same windows and decks and patios used by residents to survey the natural beauty elicit stares from passersby.

“Your life on The Strand is in a fishbowl,” said Manhattan Beach Mayor Bob Holmes, 45, who owns an oceanfront condominium. “People cannot go by without looking inside. They’re wondering who lives in there. Voyeurism is permitted. It’s the price you pay.”

And not the only price.

Vacant oceanfront lots hover in the $1-million range throughout The Strand, real estate agents say, meaning that even a ramshackle cottage with surfboards hanging from the ceiling is out of the financial reach of most people. Put a sprawling multilevel home on the lot, and the price tag can double, triple or quadruple.

Renters have to open their wallets wide as well. A three-bedroom house, for instance, now renting on The Strand, is available for $2,600 a month.

Even among the deluxe properties, there is a hierarchy of sorts. In both Manhattan and Hermosa beaches, real estate agents say, the north end of The Strand in each city is considered the toniest, while the south side is perceived as slightly grittier.

Despite the crush of humanity passing by, police say crime is relatively low. Hermosa Beach Police Commander Anthony Altfeld, who has lived on The Strand for close to 20 years, says officers spend more time on noise complaints, pedestrian accidents and cyclists exceeding the 10-mile-per-hour speed limit than on serious crimes.

Still, they happen. For instance, the beach’s breezy atmosphere was shattered in 1988 when a transient hopped over the 32-inch wall separating the boardwalk and Strand homes and fatally stabbed the wife of a prominent doctor.

The Strand was built in Hermosa Beach in 1904 as a wooden boardwalk aimed at luring tourists. Oddly, as South Bay Lifestyle magazine said in a 1989 tribute, the first “beach bunnies” to populate The Strand were not wearing skimpy bikinis and Coppertone tans. They were real rabbits who lived under the planks.

Prices back in those days were in the $35-an-acre range, and the property was not the sought-after real estate it is today. But even then, The Strand was a popular place to live.

Orator and politician William Jennings Bryan summered at 2008 The Strand, and could be spotted during his visits jabbering away on the Hermosa Beach pier. Television actors Ozzie and Harriett Nelson lived with their sons at 3133 The Strand, and the family of Charlie Chaplin lived on Hermosa’s The Strand while he was living in Europe.

The Strand is so rich in history that the Hermosa Beach Historical Society has issued a self-guided walking tour of its most notable homes. One property on the list is 2806 The Strand, where 84-year-old Bunny Seawright has lived for the past quarter-century. Her late husband, Roy, was an innovative cinematographer who worked with Laurel and Hardy and introduced techniques still used in the business today.

The couple, who grew up together in Los Angeles, came to Hermosa frequently as children for the nickel dances at the Hut, an old beachfront music joint. During those days, local ordinances required men to wear tank tops on the beach and women, as well, to cover up much of their bodies.

Bunny Seawright has watched beach fashions get skimpier and skimpier over the years, and she’s been in the midst of another trend, too: the rash of new construction along the strip. The modernization elicits mixed feelings in many longtime residents.

“As the value of the land goes up and up and up, the existing structures are becoming tear-downs,” said Jonathan Coleman, a real estate agent who has sold dozens of properties on The Strand. “What you are seeing is a lot of new construction. That is the trend. Most of the buyers are hoping to tear down what is there and build exactly what they want.”

What they often want are what some residents derisively call “monster homes,” massive edifices as large as local laws allow, that feature indoor pools or elevators.

“When I go back to Manhattan Beach, it isn’t the same place I left,” said Laura Smith, 35, a commercial illustrator who lives in Hollywood but grew up on The Strand. “It looks like a bunch of dental clinics. . . . It’s become ostentatious. It used to be a middle-class place in the ’60 and ‘70s. It was family-oriented, and it wasn’t popular back then to throw your money around.”

Some say the modernization has had another less-than-desirable effect--a breakdown in community.

“I used to know everybody, and they used to know me,” lamented Laura Smith’s 65-year-old mother, Aurora, sitting on a patio as people rolled, pedaled and jogged by. “Now I don’t know who lives next door. The houses are being sold, torn down and remodeled. I like improvements, but everyone seems much busier today. Not to know your neighbors bothers me.”

Still, she realizes that The Strand, like every neighborhood, evolves with the times and cannot go back to the way it was. “Saying I want The Strand to be like it was,” she said, “would be like saying I want to be young again.”

In Hermosa Beach, Seawright is behind two traditions aimed at keeping The Strand a neighborhood, above all else. The sand in front of the Seawright home is overrun with volleyball players every June for the annual Seawright tournament, which is in its 23rd year. And in December, a group called “Strand Strollers” gathers at selected houses to sing carols, eat hors d’oeuvres and socialize.

Although Strand residents describe themselves variously as casual, individualistic and eccentric, a stroll along The Strand from its southern end at the King Harbor to El Porto on the north reveals no typical beachfront dweller.

They include real estate agents such as Bek, who shows homes on The Strand by bicycle, politicians such as Holmes, who discusses local issues on the sand, entertainment industry executives, and even two nude dancers who pay their $1,400-a-month rent from tips.

“I think Strand people are hedonists,” said Ulrich Keppler, 25, who rented a room on The Strand after graduating several years ago from Cornell University in New York. “They enjoy life to the fullest. They are willing to pay extra to live right on the western edge of the United States. They are literally living on the edge.”