Hansen: A school, a dump and a church speak to lost opportunity

Perhaps nowhere other than Huntington Beach can an elementary school, a large trash dump and a shuttered Japanese Presbyterian church from 1934 be unhappy neighbors.

Huntington has always been a little shaggy — in a salty, frontier kind of way. For decades, its dusty, wide streets have filled in like drawers of mismatched socks.

And here on Nichols Lane off Warner Avenue, there is a good — or bad, depending on your point of view — example of this mixed-use hodgepodge of residential, industry and culture that is not making the cover of the city’s monthly newsletter anytime soon.

If you drive by quickly, you just might stay oblivious if not for the graffiti-stained church. A rainbow “Jesus Lives” adorns its sun-drenched western wall like something out of a 1970s cult TV show. But this long-dormant church represents something much more than that.

It’s symbolic now mostly for Historic Wintersburg, a small agricultural community of Japanese Americans that occupied this spot starting in the late 1880s.

Now, however, the history is being jeopardized by current landowner and neighbor Rainbow Environmental Services, which bought the nearly 5-acre lot in 2004.

In a complicated history of land ownership, poor planning and residential encroachment, an Orange County judge recently ordered the city to change the zoning back to residential from commercial and light industrial.

It’s unclear whether the order will actually save the six structures on the site. Preservationists have been working to perhaps move the most important buildings to another location. The buildings, which are in bad shape, include the church, a 1910 Japanese Presbyterian mission and parsonage, a 1912 bungalow and barn, along with a 1947 post-World War II ranch house.

Meanwhile, the Ocean View School District is mad at the dump and the city. It won a lawsuit in early June against Huntington Beach because of the city’s failure to draft an appropriate environmental report to justify the 2013 commercial rezoning, which would have made it easier for Rainbow to expand operations.

School officials have complained for years about the conditions at the beleaguered school because of the waste facility, which is directly across the street.

Large blue trash trucks rumble past at a consistent pace just yards away from the school playground. Plastic grocery bags fly out of the trucks and cling to the school’s chain link fence.

The smell can be overpowering, according to teachers, who have complained of respiratory symptoms.

Rainbow officials have said they plan on enclosing parts of the facility to try to mitigate the conditions.

But as anyone who has been near a waste facility knows, it’s nearly impossible to get rid of some things.

Amid the debris and excessive seagull excrement, the school is a reflection of its unfortunate environment. This is not tony Turtle Rock Elementary in Irvine or Acacia Elementary in Fullerton.

Oak View Elementary School ranks at the bottom of all elementary schools in its district, Ocean View, with a 772 Academic Performance Index. Top schools in Orange County have APIs in the mid-900s.

If you stand on the mottled grass of the schoolyard, you realize that it was brown and pot-holed long before the drought.

It’s similar to the long-suffering demise of the adjacent Japanese site. Somewhere over the years, people forgot to care.

Historic Wintersburg is now one of America’s 11 most-endangered historic places, according to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. It’s where memories and people are lost, like James Kanno, who went from internment during WWII to becoming the first Japanese-American mayor of a mainland U.S. city and the first mayor of Fountain Valley.

He went to Sunday school in Wintersburg. But it’s a long way from the goldfish farms of old Wintersburg.

Nearby now now dime-a-dozen strip malls with muted hues straight off an approved color palette. In this area, Huntington goes from Starbucks to squalor in a matter of seconds.

Across the street from the dilapidated Japanese church is a modern church with a designer logo whose buildings have faux Spanish-style architecture. On the site is a gym and a bustling student center. The white church vans have surf racks.

The size of the church grounds forms a nice natural barrier to the smell of the dump. It’s doubtful that any of its parishioners were picked up by the FBI during WWII.

Some histories don’t repeat themselves because the circumstances are lost. And on this random, speckled corner of Huntington Beach, the loss is ongoing.

DAVID HANSEN is a writer and Laguna Beach resident. He can be reached at hansen.dave@gmail.com.