Harry Helling’s Uncertain Voyage

By Scott Martelle / Photo composite by Geoff Ragatz

You have to admire the space Harry Helling has chosen for this morning’s meeting. It’s big and airy, naturally, since it’s a roofless wooden deck cantilevered over the edge of a cliff. And the view defines Southern California—sand-colored bluffs to the left and right, the seamless ocean straight ahead, the backs of dolphins glistening just beyond the surf break.

You can see a few other things from Helling’s chosen spot, which connects a cultural center and three classic Crystal Cove cottages recently converted to office space. Trailing down the bluff to the south stand some of the other 21 renovated cottages within the federally listed Crystal Cove Historic District. Fourteen of them are filled this morning—as they are every morning—by visitors fast enough to get a spot when the online reservation system opens at the start of each month. And just below the deck, down the steep drop to the beach, asphalt shingles peel from the weathered roofs of some of the 25 other buildings awaiting restoration. A fence and bright-orange “Area Closed” signs warn trespassers away.

The currents of the past, present, and future—what Crystal Cove was, is, and what its biggest boosters hope it will become—all converge here, and Helling, a longtime leader of Dana Point’s Ocean Institute, stands at the pivot. Lanky and with a graying beard, Helling took over as president and CEO of the nonprofit Crystal Cove Alliance in January. Under an unusual arrangement with the state, the alliance was charged with converting the historic district from a cluster of charming-but-timeworn cottages into a one-of-a-kind vacation/education center that preserves one of California’s last surviving party-hardy beaches.

The timing, however, has turned what Helling thought would be a fun and interesting job into one with singular challenges. He took over as the world economy was crumbling, which made stepping into the new post precarious. While Crystal Cove is one of the few state parks Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger did not propose closing to help balance the state’s epically unbalanced budget, donations to the Crystal Cove Alliance have ebbed now that about 1 in 10 California workers find themselves out of a job and businesses have hunkered down. At the same time, state funding for construction projects—including the remaining cottage renovations—have dried up.

All this has to make you wonder whether Helling, a man of great optimism, has signed on as the captain of a cruise ship, or the Titanic.

In a region hellbent on development, Crystal Cove is a testament to preserving the past. What began as a campground and a South Seas set for silent films evolved into a semi-permanent settlement of mismatched shacks and cottages on The Irvine Company land. When the beach was sold to the state in 1979, Crystal Cove’s longtime tenants knew they were living on borrowed time. After a series of lawsuits, the last residents moved out in 2001. But they didn’t go quietly.

Led by Laura Davick and other longtime Covites, the Alliance to Rescue Crystal Cove came together and helped defeat state plans to turn the beach over to private developers who wanted to build a high-end resort. Then the group reinvented itself as the Crystal Cove Alliance and, in essence, joined the enemy by contracting with the state as the park’s concessionaire to raise money and oversee restoration of the cottages to their midcentury condition. The alliance would manage their rental to the public, and design and launch a series of educational and other public-use programs.

Under Davick’s leadership, the alliance raised $12 million to renovate the first 21 cottages, 14 of which now are available for rent. The rest have been converted into workspace for the alliance—including the massive bluff-top deck—and the sand-side Beachcomber at Crystal Cove restaurant. The alliance also lined up most of the needed $6 million for Phase II of the restoration, which includes developing the education center and renovating the end-unit cottage used in the 1988 Bette Midler film “Beaches.”

But then Phase II ran aground with the collapse of the bond markets, California’s budget problems, and the postponement of $2.45 million in grants from the California Cultural and Historical Endowment and the California Coastal Conservancy. Original plans called for work to be underway by now, but the alliance will be lucky if it can start by late winter. Phase III—the planned $20 million renovation of the remaining 17 cottages—would be the last piece, and it drifts in the distance, shrouded in uncertainty.

Helling has the practiced demeanor of a career nonprofit director, careful to name-check the people and organizations responsible for building the Crystal Cove Alliance. He grew up in the San Fernando Valley and, after earning bachelor’s degrees in cultural anthropology and marine biology at UC San Diego, landed a job at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla. “I was on track to be an ocean scientist but also had a foot in the old Scripps aquarium, another great little facility where you could walk in off the beach in your bare feet and see the collections,” Helling says.

He enjoyed developing education programs and found the “informal science” of the museum and science center more appealing than the research itself. It was the early ’80s and the field was undergoing a renaissance, with the Monterey Bay Aquarium already under construction.

“I wanted to be a part of that,” Helling says. He earned a graduate degree in science education at Cal State Humboldt, then won a fellowship to work at San Francisco’s Exploratorium. While on a visit to Orange County, a friend in Dana Point took him to the fledgling Ocean Institute. In 1984 he signed on to lead its education programs.

For more than two decades Helling, now 52, helped build the Ocean Institute from a shack and a dream into a highly regarded 110-employee research and education center. He was happy serving as the institute’s executive vice president for research and education, had no serious thoughts of leaving, and wasn’t even looking for a new job. But last fall, he bumped into Davick, then head of the Crystal Cove Alliance, which was quietly looking for a new CEO to lead the organization into its next phase designing and operating educational programs. Davick would become director of public affairs and build on, among other things, the relationships the alliance famously used to kill the state’s plan to convert Crystal Cove into a high-end hotel.

Helling was curious. The past was intriguing enough, with Crystal Cove woven inextricably into Orange County’s identity as a place of endless beaches, sunshine, surfboards, and old Ford woodies.

Tucked along the beach under the bluffs, the cove feels like a hidden slice of the past, the beach that time forgot. It’s part myth, of course, but myths serve their purpose. So Helling toured Crystal Cove after Phase I was completed. He took in the new and unused cultural center, the lightly used beachside cottage refashioned for art exhibits, and the research lab equipped with small ocean tanks and a computer system. At that point, Phase I had primarily hosted meetings. Then there was Phase II, still on the planning board, to build an educational center in the heart of the enclave, and a small museum.

“You lay that all out for somebody who’s passionate about the ocean and science and education, and what I saw was potential. Lots of potential,” says Helling. “We have something [in the cultural center and other facilities] that reminds me of where we were 20 years ago with the Ocean Institute. … Nothing had been set up in them. This is the work I love: bringing in the researchers and melding their work to innovative education programs. And they said, ‘Could you help with that?’ ”

Helling accepted the job last November. Now, in one sense, he is helming a radically different project than the Ocean Institute, primarily because the focus isn’t so much to lasso science and make it accessible to the masses, but rather to lasso history. He took on that task just as the bottom fell out of the economy.

“Everything turned around, upside down, and backward,” Helling says. “But this organization has a pretty solid footing and we have not had to lay anybody off. It’s a small staff and everybody’s working very hard, and we have the same challenges that everybody has.”

Maybe Crystal Cove isn’t at a crossroads. But with further cutbacks likely in state parks funding, the alliance could find itself shouldering more unexpected costs, such as grounds maintenance. At the same time, Helling is looking ahead to the alliance’s Sept. 26 gala, “Prohibition Party and Jazz on the Beach,” which plays off the cove’s rumrunning history. That annual fundraiser usually accounts for nearly 40 percent of the organization’s operating budget. Other nonprofits, Helling says, have experienced revenue drops of almost one-third from their annual galas. A similar shortfall would severely dent the alliance’s $883,000 annual operating budget for 2010, though Helling says by early August ticket sales were ahead of those for last year’s gala.

The Crystal Cove Historic District is in better shape than other state parks, many of which are showing the signs of $1.2 billion in deferred maintenance. Even before the current crisis, state parks were receiving about 40 percent of what they needed for maintenance and general operations, according to Elizabeth Goldstein, president of the California Parks Foundation, a 100,000-member advocacy group for the 279-park system. The nonpartisan state Legislative Analyst’s Office estimates the parks are underfunded by $117 million per year for required maintenance.

“They do amazing things with the dollars they have, and stretch as far as they can,” Goldstein says. “This problem needs to be turned around, but this clearly is not going to be the year.”

According to Ken Kramer, superintendent of California State Parks’ Orange Coast district, Crystal Cove’s list of deferred maintenance projects includes repairing the roofs, windows, and floors of the visitor center, widening doors and adding ramps for handicap access, resurfacing roads and a parking lot, and replacing lighting systems. “We have facilities such as public restrooms and other park buildings in need of repairs,” Kramer says, adding that the effect on the park from the broader state parks cutbacks was not yet clear when this magazine went to press. “It’s all part of the backlog affecting the entire [parks] system. We’ve got dozens and dozens of those identified, and we’re doing our best to keep them functioning.”

Caroline Godkin, a senior fiscal and policy analyst who monitors parks for the Legislative Analyst’s Office, says, “It’s a very bleak picture. They are really grappling at the local level with how to keep the parks open when you’ve just had effectively a 10 percent cut in your workforce.”

During an hour-long conversation at a table on the deck, Helling is interrupted half a dozen times by workers and volunteers. Ever the optimist, he points out that Crystal Cove survived the Great Depression, and predicts it will survive this financial crisis, which he sees as a short-term problem.

It’s a chief executive’s job to protect his program’s image, but his optimism is fueled by several factors. “Even in a recession people are still coming here,” Helling says. Reservations for the 14 cottages open the first morning of each month, for spaces available six months later. They are snatched up almost immediately. Corporate support has flagged, but new sources for donations have materialized, including the new Resort at Pelican Hill just across Coast Highway. And Helling, with years of experience raising money for the Ocean Institute, has a reputation and connections with grant-making foundations that Davick, as a grassroots organizer, does not.

In late spring, Helling believed Phase II of the renovations could begin sometime this fall. But the calendar turned and the grants remained frozen. By July, he believed work could start by late winter. Some educational efforts—a plein-air art program and history tours, including a film-shoot re-enactment of 1918’s “Treasure Island”—started ahead of schedule this summer. Those programs are funded through the operations budget and with money from educational organizations.

“Our program stuff will move forward at whatever speed we are able to with the support that we can get,” Helling says.
Says Kramer, the parks superintendent, who was not involved in hiring Helling: “He has the perfect experience and skill set to further the mission. We’re thrilled they found such good talent out there.”

Helling remains undaunted. And the reason is Crystal Cove itself.

“It’s hard to find people who grew up in this area and did not have an experience here,” he says. “Their girlfriends were in the cottages, or they went to the Shake Shack after surfing. It’s amazing how many people this place has touched.”

And now it has touched Helling.

“People come here and say, ‘You don’t know how lucky you are,’ ” Helling says over the low rush of breaking waves. “The reality is: I do. And all the people who come and visit here know how lucky we all are.”

For photos click here.

 

Timeline

1864
James Irvine and partners buy the massive Rancho San Joaquin—including Crystal Cove.

1918
“Treasure Island” is the first of many silent films that establish the cove as “Anywhere, South Pacific.”

1920
Prohibition begins, and the cove becomes a popular nighttime boat landing  (wink, wink).

1926
Pacific Coast Highway extends through Orange County, and the county’s burgeoning car culture makes the cove a popular weekend camping destination.

1930s
Tents give way to 46 cottages cobbled together with flotsam from the beach. One still has a kitchen converted from the galley of a broken-up ship.

1944
The cove becomes Martinique for Bogey and Bacall in “To Have and Have Not.”

1970
Over martinis, the Crystal Cove Yacht Club is established. (See “The Tinhorn Commodore” [August 2009], a Legends profile of founder Jim Thobe, available in our archives at www.orangecoastmagazine.com.)
 
1979
The Irvine Company sells about 3,000 undeveloped acres—including Crystal Cove—to the state for $32.6 million, and the Laura Davick-led resistance forms to fight evictions from the cottages.

1988
Release of the Bette Midler chick-flick “Beaches,” the last big movie filmed in the cove, which immediately makes “Wind Beneath My Wings” a runaway hit as a wedding song.

2001
The resistance movement fails, and the Covites are evicted.

2006
The first restored cottages open for public rental.

How You Can Help
On Sept. 26, the Crystal Cove Alliance will host its seventh annual fundraising gala. The organization plans to convert a section of Crystal Cove beach into a 1920s-era open-air speakeasy—complete with live jazz, period cocktails, vintage cars, and a rumrunner boat to drop off the hooch at the surf line. Past galas have included an art show with paintings for sale, but that will be held as a separate event next spring. Tickets are $300. For more information, visit www.crystalcovebeachcottages.com/gala2009.


Scott Martelle is an Orange Coast contributing writer.