Building an Image, From the Ground Up

When my colleagues step outside after a hard day’s work and look across South Coast Drive, they see the welcoming arms of the two-story IKEA home furnishings building that stands between them and the San Diego Freeway.

And to think it could have been a 32-story IBM office tower instead.

But, no, a Costa Mesa City Council majority shot that down in 1986, and voters later nixed Plan B that would have included a 20-story job.

What materialized in my mind, after Santa Ana voters said yes this month to a 37-story office building near downtown, was the image of what might have been. Different times and different towns, but I couldn’t help but wonder why Santa Ana wants what Costa Mesa did not. It’s not like these are two vastly different communities or vastly different projects.

In search of opinions, I time-traveled and talked this week to Sandra Genis and Donn Hall, both veterans of the doomed Costa Mesa project. Hall was a council member in 1986 and Genis rode anti-growth sentiment onto a council seat in 1988.

Hall, who served from 1984 to 1994 and now is back on the city’s Planning Commission, says he remembers the controversy as if it were yesterday. “I was very disappointed on that one,” he says, still lamenting nearly 20 years later that the Big One wasn’t built.

He sees the Santa Ana tower as, literally, a looming asset for the city. “The first thing that comes to mind is that you can’t stop progress,” he says. “I’m sure when the first tall building went up in New York City, people said, ‘Oh, that’s too tall.’ ”

Concerns about traffic scuttled the Costa Mesa project, Hall says. “I told them at the time, ‘If you think this [a vote to kill the project] is going to stop traffic, you’re wrong. It’s going to be there whether you build a building or not.’”

Hall thought the C.J. Segerstrom family landowners had the right to develop the property, but he supported the proposal for another reason too. “I thought it was a gorgeous project and would have enhanced the image and character of Costa Mesa,” he says today. The tower and surrounding smaller buildings and open space, he says, would have been eye-catching.

Aha, says Genis, who served eight years on the council. She wonders if self-image didn’t play a big part in what drove Santa Ana voters to say yes. Once the high-end shopping hub of the county, downtown Santa Ana might be yearning to reclaim some of that bygone luster, she says.

Indeed, some supporters of the Santa Ana tower -- which would be Orange County’s tallest building -- cited the civic boost it would provide.

A consultant who specializes in environmental impacts on planning projects, Genis says she thought the Santa Ana project was “odd” because it apparently will, at least at the start, stand isolated as a giant edifice. “Nothing leads up to it or comes down from it,” she says, referring to the nearby geography, “so it’s sort of either going to be an anomaly in the middle of quite different development or it’s a precursor. And if that’s the case, how do they plan on getting the cars in and out? That I don’t understand at all.”

Genis remembers some supporters of the Costa Mesa project touting it as a boon to the city’s image. “It almost seemed to be coming out of an insecurity,” she says. “Possibly that’s part of it in Santa Ana: ‘We’re going to have the tallest building in Orange County and nobody is going to be putting us down.’ Maybe that comes from a certain degree of insecurity.”

I’ll leave the psychoanalysis for another day. Does a high-rise make you feel better about yourself? Conversely, is it a sign of self-contentment to say no to a 32-story monolith?

I’d say 32 stories where the IKEA now stands would seem weirdly gargantuan. In fact, I would have preferred they left an open field instead of building IKEA.

Reject a two-story building in favor of dirt? What can I say, I’m really well-adjusted.