JERRY PERSON -- A Look Back

It’s hard for newcomers to imagine that at one time a portion of our

beautiful coastline was considered a filthy, degrading slum and a

disgrace to Southern California.

This week, we’ll look at this unsightly strip of coast known as Tin Can

Beach.

This beach extended three miles south of Sunset Beach’s southern boundary

at Warner Avenue to Huntington Beach’s city limits at Goldenwest Street.

Today the area is known as Bolsa Chica State Beach, with its pristine

sand and motor home campers.

People have been camping on our beaches for thousands of years, but it

was only recently that the problem of people, and the trash they made,

would create what we know as Tin Can Beach.

During the Depression years of the 1930s, jobs were scarce, and people

lost their homes and began camping out in makeshift structures on our

beaches. But as time went on, those same people became very protective of

their little plots of sand and would stake out their plots with anything

available.

They would use discarded bottles, driftwood, rocks or, more commonly,

beer cans -- hence the name Tin Can Beach. But, as time went on, these

shacks became more permanent, and the garbage and tin cans began to turn

the beach into a filthy mess.

Huntington Beach resident Loretta Wolfe said her aunt lived in Sunset

Beach, near the site where Jack in the Box at Warner is today. Wolfe

mentioned how her parents would camp there, and at one time even camped

on the Red Car’s tracks.

I can remember riding down Coast Highway as a kid with my parents and

seeing this little shanty town on the sand.

I remember coming down here to the beach in the late 1940s and being

careful not to walk across someone’s plot to get to the ocean. If you did

and they caught you, they would yell and scream bloody murder for

trespassing on their land.

By 1950, the people changed. It was no longer just a shantytown of wood,

cardboard shacks and tents. Now there were teens coming down from Los

Angeles and Long Beach on weekends to have beer busts. That would lead to

fist fights, and that brought the law.

Part of the problem was that the land belonged to more than 150

shareholders of the old Bolsa Chica Gun Club, or their heirs, and their

organization, the Bolsa Land and Water Co.

In 1954, the county set up a committee to study turning the three-mile

section into a county or state beach. The committee was headed by Harry

E, Berg. After several months of study, they came up with the Bolsa Chica

and Vicinity No. 1 or as it was known “the Berg Plan.”

This plan called for creating a marina, dredging the swamp lands, and

removing the squatters and their shacks from the beach. But everyone was

not in favor of the plan.

Pacific Electric leased or owned a right-of-way along the beach and

didn’t want to relinquish its lands. There was also Signal Oil to contend

with and their tideland oil royalties.

But, as we know, the bulldozers came in and leveled those shacks and

tents, and erased the eyesore that many remember as Tin Can Beach.

* JERRY PERSON is a local historian and longtime Huntington Beach

resident. If you have ideas for future columns, write him at P.O. Box

7182, Huntington Beach 92615.