Beautiful Failure
Last night I read a short essay about Seal Beach in My California. As sleepy as it is today, it was intended as a tourist attraction of Las Vegas caliber:
"City father Stanton rounded up a pool of investors and built the longest pleasure pier on the West Coast, with fifty-two giant "scintillators" left over from the most recent world's fair erected at the end... "
"By 1920, the Jewel Cafe and the Seal Beach Dance Pavilion and Bathhouse with its ninety-foot plunge flanked the pier and were the talk of the coast, a must-stop for weekend beach goers with a quarter to burn on the trolley, as well as for the stars of the silent screen arriving in their roadsters and limos."
However, the place where Cecil B. DeMille parted the waters of the "Red Sea" for the first filming of The Ten Commandments has endured a much more quiet fate than was originally conceived. According to Edward Humes, who wrote the essay, accidents of location, history, and government have made it into the sleepy beach community it is today. The Pacific Coast Highway runs inland here, one of the many factors that has kept it hidden. An old Naval Weapons Station, the concrete embedded San Gabriel river, and the ocean help to keep it isolated. Prohibition and the Depression helped squash any hope for a coastal "sin city."
Seal Beach now has the feel of a quiet seaside town, in sharp contrast to the other coastal cities around it (think Huntington or Newport). M and I used to lurk there at a small bakery next to an Irish pub. I'm trying to remember a better piece of zuchini bread without success. If we got bored we'd eavesdrop on the Leisure World residents having coffee and spirited debates on war and peace.
Like Edward Humes, I'm one of those who find the failure of Seal Beach a beautiful thing.
5:42:45 PM 
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