by Garrison Frost

To devotees of California, Pacific Coast Highway (Route One) represents all that is good about the Golden State. Views of the Pacific Ocean. Sandy beaches. Charming coastal towns. Nature at its finest.

The highway has achieved a sort of mythical status only achieved by the likes of Route 66 and the Brooklyn Bridge. Books are written about it. Tourists are drawn to it. Businesses go out of their way to include its abbreviation in their names. The aura around its name is the exact opposite of South Central Los Angeles, which the Los Angeles City Council recently changed to South Los Angeles because it felt the name itself contributed to the miserable quality of life in that part of the city. All of this – the Chamber of Commerce boosterism, the Sunset Magazine and Westways photo spreads, the hotel literature – have all created a portrait of Pacific Coast Highway that is more than a stretch of asphalt. Pacific Coast Highway is California and all that California stands for.

In many places, the reality lives up to the myth. One area that comes to mind right off is the stretch of Pacific Coast Highway in Orange County, linking Long Beach to Newport Beach to Huntington Beach to Laguna Beach. Now that's a great stretch of highway. But for some reason, right where one would think Pacific Coast Highway would be at its best, it's at its worst. As Route One curves through some of the most expensive and exclusive real estate in the country, it turns ugly. PCH is clearly the South Bay's most disppointing street.

In Manhattan Beach, unspectacular homes are selling for more than $1 million apiece, but the poster highway for the state of California looks like the main drag of some Midwestern trucking hub. Of course, it's not called Pacific Coast Highway in Manhattan Beach, but that's what it is. Enter the city from the north on Route One and it's not beaches and sunsets you see, but rather an aging shopping mall and decaying storefronts. Some years ago, the city tried to upgrade the median of this stretch with new vegetation and the result has been a series of dry miserable trees that would not even gain the sympathy of Charlie Brown. Continue southward and you see more of the same, taking special notice of the humorless parking lots, empty storefronts and decaying facades. This road could be anywhere, but unfortunately, it isn't anywhere. It's right where the best road should be. Adding to the insult are the banners on light poles touting the beauty of Manhattan Beach and the risks of not stopping at stop signs. Rather than represent, PCH is reduced to illogical social marketing.

In Hermosa Beach, the name actually changes to Pacific Coast Highway, but that's about all that does change. One of your first sights on the left is a bowling alley-turned-New Age-Christian church. Another quarter mile brings you to the Hermosa Pavilion, an empty hulk of a tribute to the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s. In the southern part of the city, the commercial buildings really hit rock bottom. If they're not empty, they are so architecturally incongruous that one might draw the conclusion that the occupants were intentionally trying to make the street look as bad as possible. Commercial signs occupy every conceivable site line, and to make things even worse, at a time when other cities are trying to remove billboards, city fathers have approved the placement of advertising banners across the street itself.

As one enters Redondo Beach, one is greeted by a giant sign that once handsomely welcomed visitors to nearby King Harbor but that now, with its rust and broken glass, actually seems intent on scaring them away. Compared to Manhattan Beach and Hermosa Beach, the stretch through Redondo Beach isn't bad – particularly in the southern area – but it?s not what Westways told you it would be. This could easily be a road in Simi Valley. Here is your Albertson's parking lot, here is your Kentucky Fried Chicken that has been converted into a Starbucks, here is your Taco Bell, here is your hamburger stand and here is your gas station. The one piece of culture you might actually see – a tiny neon sign that is the pride of preservationists tucked in next to a gas station – points to a restaurant that no longer exists. As you leave the city, don't forget to keep an eye out on the left for the residential neighborhood that has actually been constructed on top of a parking structure: a "lofted community" according to the ad copy.

As you enter Torrance, you encounter your first natural landscape – not beaches as you have been led to believe - but trees. No matter, anything will do. But don't get your hopes up because in just another minute or so you are reintroduced to the commercial urban dreariness that you have come to expect by now.

Then comes Lomita, and you notice that the decay of the buildings is becoming even more pronounced. More buildings are empty. More lots are vacant. You enter Wilmington and cross under the Harbor Freeway and things go further in this direction. Things will get much, much worse before they get better.

Certainly not all of this is our fault. Property owners share a lot of blame, but perhaps market forces are more at the center of the problem of what has become of Pacific Coast Highway through the South Bay. Proposition 13 entrenched the concept of big box retail in all its monstrous glory, ensuring that any highway with more than four lanes will have its share of giant retail centers sitting behind parking lots. We are a car culture, after all, and the car has not been kind to thoroughfares like this. Cars need parking lots and parking spaces. Cars need buildings with signs that can be easily seen and read while driving 40 miles per hour. And they need fast food, gas and Quickee Marts.

On the other hand, there is a lot we could do better.

To begin, public efforts at beautification have a mixed history. I'm thinking of Redondo Beach's efforts to improve the appearance of Artesia Boulevard. Was it as recently as the 1980s or early 1990s that the city spent a load on new signs and landscaping? And now they're at it again to improve the mistakes they made just a few years ago. Who's to say that the same bad mistakes won?t be made and the city won't have to come back in 10 years with another "improvement project."

Just a few paragraphs ago, I mentioned Manhattan Beach's sad landscaping along Pacific Coast Highway. These projects are always difficult because too many people are involved in the planning. Residents want more trees to hide the commercial buildings. Commercial tenants don't want trees blocking their signs and windows. To date, negotiations have resulted in projects that aim to accommodate both sides, and thus fall far short of the goal of visual improvement. City planners need to be bold in redesigning their public spaces. Commercial tenants need to understand that an attractive highway draws people to it. There isn't any reason why Pacific Coast Highway couldn't be Melrose Avenue or Ventura Boulevard.

But more to the point, cities have to stop using Pacific Coast Highway as their garbage disposal. Cities confronted for years with a variety of problems have pushed them onto Pacific Coast Highway as a way to get them out of the vision of residential voters. Got too much through traffic on your residential streets? Close off a few streets and force 'em all onto Pacific Coast Highway. Don't want certain types of business downtown? Zone them onto Pacific Coast Highway. Want to raise money by selling banner space? Hang ads across Pacific Coast Highway. This has to stop if Pacific Coast Highway is ever going to retain its glory in the South Bay.

Just about every South Bay city in recent years has struggled to revitalize its downtown or commercial core. Manhattan Beach has Metlox. Hermosa Beach has its pier plaza. Redondo Beach wants to build up its harbor area. Torrance is always looking for ways to breathe life into its old downtown. Same with Lomita. But few of these efforts ever seem to recognize that Pacific Coast Highway is a powerful commercial engine for all of these cities. Compared to those in the downtown centers, businesses on Pacific Coast Highway generate far more sales tax revenue. Why do leaders look the other way? Lots of reasons. But it stands to reason that if Pacific Coast Highway can do so much for the cities while looking so bad, it could do a lot more with a little aesthetic care.

Not long ago, several South Bay cities took the first step by taking control of Pacific Coast Highway from Caltrans. The idea was that the cities could do a better job with the thing. Well, it's time they followed up on that promise. For too many years, residents of the South Bay have viewed PCH as a stranger, just as much of a stranger as the hundreds of thousands of cars passing through upon it. It's time to embrace it, appreciate it and save it from the blighted doom it's been headed toward.

(July 8, 2003)

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