Small-Town Atmosphere : Welcome to the Cardboard City of Little Beach, Pop. Lenard Davis’ Friends

LITTLE BEACH —  It was a perfectly civil dinner party until the bickering burst out at the end of the table. Someone’s new house, it seemed, stuck out too far. Just plain blocked the neighbors’ view. All hell broke loose.

And then, as suddenly as the argument had erupted, raucous laughter filled the room.

That’s because the quarrel that night in the dining room of Lenard Davis’ Newport Beach townhouse concerned makeshift cardboard houses perched atop ocean-side bluffs made from putty and paint, with a 360-degree view of, well, the garage.

The dinner guests--real, live dinner guests--were all “property owners” in Little Beach, a fictitious city loosely modeled on Newport Beach and located in the county of Lemon (or Grapefruit, or any citrus fruit other than Orange).

Actually, the “city” limits are confined to Davis’ garage. What started out a decade ago as a model train set zooming around Davis’ Christmas tree has become the mother of all dollhouses, a living, evolving Monopoly game gone mad complete with a local newspaper, endless development projects and, of course, neighborhood disputes.

“What else is there to do?” Davis, a schoolteacher in real life and self-appointed mayor of Little Beach, replied when asked the obvious question about his hobby. “At first I used to think it was kind of a waste of time, but . . . the city’s kind of taken on a life of its own.

“It’s sort of a commentary on life in our age,” he explained. “Things happen in a real city, so things happen here.”

Plenty is happening in Little Beach, an 18-by-5-foot community that sits on a platform just high enough so the hoods of Davis’ cars can scoot underneath.

Hundreds of inch-high figurines are milling about, or sipping margaritas at the yacht club, or hailing taxis downtown, or playing Ping-Pong on the porch. There’s a wedding underway at the church, a fire raging in one of the office buildings, folks enjoying the surf, tourists checking into a hotel, television news crews racing along the freeway.

Someone is moving in, someone else is moving out.

“Most people build a train layout and the train is everything,” Davis said. “In this, the train is just the excuse for everything else. I get into the accessories more than the train.”

Take a closer look, and you see why Davis calls Little Beach “a land of tongue in cheek.”

A whale is swallowing a fisherman and his boat; an alligator is chomping on a wayward bather, a woman bashing the reptile’s head with a carpet beater. Down the coast, near the nude section of the beach, a man in a business suit is rushing for his camera.

The marquees on the town’s two theaters--now showing “Blood Brothers” and “The City of Angels”-- boast Davis’ friends as the stars. The Little Beach Journal, published sporadically with a circulation of “about 20,” Davis says, features those friends in the stories, TV listings and classified ads.

“It’s so much fun because Lenard pays particular attention to detail,” said Mike Losquadro, who serves as congressman for the tiny town. “In many ways it makes caricatures of each of us in real life. He takes something that each of us really do in the real world, and he puts it into the Little Beach community.”

Losquadro, 29, a Santa Ana resident who is a fund-raiser for UC Irvine and works on the county’s Election Commission, met Davis through local politics about five years ago and immediately got a Little Beach townhouse. Since then, he has upgraded to a full-sized home, and has often graced the pages of the Little Beach Journal with quotes Davis makes up.

Once a year, Little Beach “property owners” gather at Davis’ for brunch and to pay their taxes--a penny for every $1,000 worth of property.

“He’s writing like a play, an ongoing play,” said Greg Sheppard, who owns a home in the newly annexed section of the garage, Playa Pico. “We’re not in control of what we do but we’re happy to (hear) about it.”

Davis, who is 39, caught the building bug at the tender age of 12, with a simple train set in his bedroom. He is considering replicating that set--a miniature version, of course--inside the model of his boyhood home that sits on the Little Beach bay front.

“He always used to build things when he was a little kid,” sister Melody Perry mused about her kid brother. “I’d give him my idea for a dream house and he’d whip something up.”

Art and architecture classes in high school and at a community college spawned Davis’ collection. Many Little Beach landmarks--scale models of two Lido Isle bungalows where the Davis family lived and a replica of Newport Harbor High School, where he was graduated in 1971--are leftover homework assignments.

And he still whips up dream houses on demand: His sister’s Little Beach address is a pink stucco Southwestern-style ranch by the bay, where she permanently sips champagne as she lazes in the Jacuzzi and her husband forever sailboards in the “back yard.” Some Little Beach buildings come from kits, while others are fashioned by hand from cardboard, wood, metal, plastic, or whatever else Davis finds lying around.

The pink stucco ranch, for instance, has shish kebab skewers holding up the roof. A neighbor’s patio telescope is just two nails stuck together. Inside, the plates are actually the tiny round result of punching holes in paper.

“Things that other people would throw away or you would vacuum up into a vacuum cleaner, I’ll pick up off the floor and find something to make it into,” Davis explained.

Pointing to a kitchen where the tiny cupboards are filled with cans, silver is set on the table and the sink is stacked with dirty dishes, Davis said his challenge is “to see how small I can get and make it work.”

The prize parcel of property, of course, belongs to the builder.

A few years ago, when he created the exclusive enclave of Playa Pico against the far wall of the garage, Davis sold (for “a couple mil,” he recalls) his sprawling bay-front home with a private staircase down to the beach and spent four days laboring over his new abode across town.

The current mayoral mansion features solar panels, an office complete with drafting table, and, parked outside, a maroon 1966 Mustang convertible like the one Davis drove in his youth.

Hundreds of other model cars dot the roads, which are equipped with working traffic lights and street signs. The roads themselves are made from the putty normally used to fill holes in walls and thus develop realistic bumps and cracks.

“We’ve got potholes constantly,” Davis lamented. “We’ve got to fix them. People get mad.”

Alas, the fantasyland is not immune from realistic urban ills.

Homeless camp under the graffiti-scarred freeways. An armed robbery is in progress at the bank, and a baby was abandoned on a stoop nearby. The Little Beach Journal chronicles an unending list of scandals implicating locals.

And near the gated community of Playa Pico Estates, a mini-fleet of trucks is hauling debris from the future site of a private tennis court.

“We had a toxic waste problem,” Davis admitted. “My cat got up here when I was away and left some toxic waste. It’s happened more than once.”

Other Little Beach “residents” are not always thrilled with Davis’ development decisions. Sheppard, for one, said he “totally objected to the freeway. (Davis) figured, ‘That’s progress, that’s the way the world goes,’ but I thought, ‘That doesn’t have to be--not when you built it!’ ”

That’s life in the little city.