October 4, 2007

If the stars line up right, the Encinitas boathouses, the kinky epitomes of 1920s vernacular – very vernacular – architecture, will be preserved forever in the amber of public ownership.

“It's not a done deal,” reminded Peder Norby, the city's Highway 101 czar.

Here's what the Encinitas City Council will ponder in public session Wednesday:

In concert with the Downtown Encinitas Mainstreet Association and the Encinitas Historical Association, Norby has helped negotiate an agreement in which a newly created foundation would buy the landmark boathouses – and the four apartments behind them – from current owners John Deters and Mark Whitley.

Fortunately, Deters and Whitley proved to be painstaking custodians of the boathouses, constructed in 1929 with unusually short pieces of wood salvaged from a dismantled dance hall and bathhouse at Moonlight Beach.

Builder Miles Kellogg, a maritime engineer, was nothing if not resourceful. He had odd recycled materials to work with so he handcrafted quirky abodes that reflected his – and his town's – love for the ocean.

A humorless newspaper editor blasted the eccentric design, but Kellogg responded with his own published broadside, “The building of these boats helped the building up of Encinitas as much as any editor that has come to town.”

Whitley's father, who died in 2001, expressed to his son a desire to restore the landlocked boathouses as a gift to his city.

Mark Whitley and Deters made good on that wish, carefully restoring the much-photographed tourist magnets that for decades could be viewed from Highway 101.

  

During the most recent real-estate bubble, the boathouse partners were approached by several potential buyers hopeful of making a killing, Deter told me recently.

Deter and Whitley wouldn't consider a sale of their rentals without a deed restriction precluding their destruction or removal from their Third Street perches.

“Our long-term vision was that the boathouses should be a museum,” Deters told me. “This is such a historic property.”

Enter Norby & Co.

For a current appraised price – somewhere in the $1.5 million range – a newly created Encinitas Preservation Foundation would purchase the boathouses and the apartments, Norby said.

Ironically, the four courtyard apartments, built at the same time as the boathouses, could prove to be the financial key to the quietly negotiated deal.

If the council agrees, the apartments would be converted to government-subsidized affordable housing, a valuable commodity in a city with runaway land values.

The city of Encinitas could cover more than half of the purchase price, Norby estimated.

The foundation then would raise roughly $600,000, whereupon it would turn at least one of the boathouses into a museum.

In the meantime, the boathouses would be entered into the National Register of Historic Places, for which they are eligible.

In a statement, Supervisor Pam Slater-Price, a former Encinitas mayor, telegraphed her strong support for the boathouses as architectural treasures well worth preserving – and promoting – as a tourist draw.

  

After a long tenure as director of the Downtown Encinitas Mainstreet Association, Norby was hired this year to shepherd the development of the city's whole Highway 101 corridor, from Leucadia (which until 1960 featured a hilariously funky facsimile of Noah's Ark and animals as its welcoming public art) to Cardiff (which now has the statue of a boyish surfer to serve that purpose).

“I could wind up with egg on my face” if the boathouse deal falls through, Norby said.

As a former pastry chef, I guess he knows how that feels.

Still, Norby has shown he can spellbind to raise public and private money, raise awareness of North County's coastal heritage and raise the economic pulse of downtowns.

He is Highway 101's pragmatic poet laureate, its booster emeritus.

Thanks to Norby and a legion of backward-looking zealots – most memorably, the late Ida Lou Coley – no city in the county cherishes its heritage more than Encinitas.

Whether it's the surfing culture, the flower-growing industry or the car-driven mystique of Highway 101, the reverence for the past is a sort of civic religion in the three beach towns, and in Olivenhain.

For going on 80 years, the 20-foot SS Encinitas and the SS Moonlight, two-story nautical domiciles (with a slight starboard list), have been dodging developers' bullets. La Paloma Theatre and the Self-Realization Fellowship are their main rivals as Encinitas' iconic architectural statements.

It's a North County miracle that, after all the ups and downs in the real-estate market, the whimsical boathouses still overlook Third Street, dry-docked on their steel pipe braces.

And now they may be preserved forever, shipshape sentries for a vintage bank of affordable housing.

Pretty cool.