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The Best of OC is Closer Than You Think
By Joe Shaw
OC Voice Columnist
(Oct. 2007)
As I opened my OC Register on a bright day in September, I found a shocking example of waste and fraud: The OC Register’s “14th Annual Best of Orange County”, which was subtitled “Unveiling the Treasures of Orange County”.
How in the world can such inane content be spread across 220 pages?
How can anyone tell us with a straight face that the best sushi is at Todai, the best Italian restaurant is the Olive Garden, the best Chinese food is PF Changs, the best Mexican food is El Torito and the best Deli/ Sandwich shop is Subway? These are Orange County’s treasures?
Of course the OC Register is blaming it all on you: “All category winners were selected entirely by readers of the Register and OC Post during a four-week period in May, and random cash prizes were awarded to voters who completed ballots,” a press release says.
I certainly hope no one was awarded a prize for voting Subway best sandwich shop.
My local sandwich shop, Jan’s Health Bar on Main Street, makes amazing sandwiches, with fresh, high quality ingredients and large portions. When you order a fruit salad, they actually cut the fruit to order. It annihilates Subway in every way.
Joking aside, what’s going on here?
I think part of the problem is that Orange County is a “place”, and not a community. These “Best Of” lists work best on a smaller scales than county-wide overviews.
Culturally we’ve lost a lot of our sense of community in southern California, where in both Orange County and Los Angeles, massive development has created a massive “place” where smaller communities have been enveloped by the freeway system and suburbia.
In book The Reluctant Metropolis, William Fulton writes about Orange County development: “The same suburban planning ideas that the Irvine Company and others had marketed successfully—cul-de-sacs, isolated neighborhoods, quiet local streets—had also robbed Orange County of the transportation flexibility a growing metropolis required.”
Those growth policies, and the civil planning structures created, also robbed us of a sense of community. Who has time for community when, as a new study by the Texas Traffic Institute (L.A. Times, Sept. 19) says, Orange County motorists spend nearly two working weeks a year in traffic?
The Best of Orange County supplement should focus more on local communities, just as we should too. It is at the community level we can create livable neighborhoods and communities that will be more workable and maintain our quality of life for the next generation.
Let me share something with you my brother wrote about the Tulsa, Okla. neighborhood we grew up in:
“A block and a half from my house, was a small market. As kids, we purchased penny candy there, and if our parents needed something, that's where we went. The same lady owned and ran the place from the time I can remember until the time the place closed.
“Another couple of blocks away was a store we called The Dairy. That's where we got ice cream and other things. The same person owned and ran the place until it closed.
“Across the street from The Dairy was Lowell Elementary school. We walked, rain or shine. Across from Lowell, was a gas station. Down another couple of blocks south was a barber shop, a cleaner, a second hand store, a bar and a laundromat. There was a hamburger joint a bit further down street.
“Within a block of my house there was Bullette Park, and four blocks east, on the other side of Peoria, was Crutchfield Park. They shot a lot of the movie The Outsiders in my old neighborhood. A block from Crutchfield Park further east was our church, Hillcrest Baptist.
“The neighborhood I described no longer exists as I have described it. We had the things we needed in our neighborhood. There were no parking lots at these stores or schools or other places. After all, these things existed for the neighborhood, not the entire city.
“In this microcosm of Tulsa, we had pretty much everything we needed within walking distance. We knew the shop owners, and they knew us. Our neighborhood was convenient, and it was also "home" to our home. It was comfortable and accessible.
“Come to think of it, I wonder how we ever thought we could improve on this model.”
With inevitable energy shortages and price jumps, and the need to live simpler and on a smaller scale to mitigate the effects of global warming, it’s time we looked at how we can make Huntington Beach neighborhoods more like the neighborhoods of the past.
One neighborhood that pretty much fits the bill already is downtown. Downtown is comparatively compact, has lots of mobile residents, both on bike and foot. It also has many amenities within walking distance, although a grocery and pharmacy are much needed to make it a complete neighborhood in the sense I mean.
We can create more neighborhoods like this in Huntington Beach if we embrace mixed-use development, higher density along transit corridors, innovative transit solutions and rework some of our neighborhoods to make them more pedestrian-friendly and less isolated from other areas of the city.
I’m hoping our future is living with a real sense of community, in more pedestrian-oriented neighborhoods, where we know our neighbors, we can walk to the store and where the best sandwich shop is not Subway.
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