It’s official – the world’s largest collection of surf history and memorabilia is moving to Laguna Beach.
Escrow closed Monday, Dec. 15, on the deal that will move the Surfing Heritage and Culture Center from the hills in San Clemente to a vacant building in downtown Laguna Beach and much closer to the ocean.
Executive Director Jeff Alter said the move is a long time coming, the process spanning nearly a year of planning.
“We have a pretty big plan in place,” Alter said, just after having a celebratory toast Monday evening with board members and others who helped make the vision come to a reality. “We have the keys, it’s closed. (Tuesday) we have construction crews coming in to demo walls and the floor, and we’ll just start rebuilding it. All of our permits are in place and we’re ready to go.”
The design team will get to work, with Laguna Beach’s Tuvalu Home spearheading the look of the new space, once a drug store, Alter said.
“It just kind of happened, it’s kind of surreal to be honest,” Alter said.
The new building needed to be big enough to hold hundreds of surfboards and thousands of invaluable relics and artifacts.
In anticipation of the move, relics, magazines, photos and more have already been boxed up, Alter said, with a detailed archiving of the historic memorabilia.
“Not only is it going to be the biggest and finest collection for all the surfing artifacts than any place in the world – we’re just so excited it can be in a place where the public can find it, park in downtown Laguna,” said Dick Metz, who in 1999 founded SHACC, which currently sits in an tucked-away industrial area about 2.5 miles from the beach. “We are more than excited, I’m just beside myself.”
The space is much bigger and better for entertaining, he said.
“Everything about it is a perfect spot, you can almost throw a rock into the ocean,” said Metz, who grew up in Laguna Beach and started surfing and lifeguarding just steps away at Main Beach.
For years, the idea of moving had been floated around; at one time, a relocation to the Dana Point Harbor was looked at, but discussions for that partnership fizzled.
A new SHACC board of directors was recently formed, with several industry leaders joining its ranks with a new vision for the center. The news of the potential move was unveiled last May.
In the 1940s, the building was a Sprouse Reitz Co. store, and then for years it was a drug store. Most recently, the building has been empty for several years, with a bank using a small portion, which will continue.
The building wasn’t for sale, but when Mark Christy, a Laguna Beach preservationist who sits on SHACC’s board, saw it was for rent, he reached out to the owners to see if they would be interested in selling the property.
Christy had previously tried to purchase the building 15 years ago, in an attempt to create an entertainment and music venue, but the owners turned him down. They changed their minds when plans for the surfing museum were laid out, Christy said in a past interview.
“They made this happen because they recognized how important this was going to be for surfing heritage and for the city of Laguna,” he said when the sale was announced earlier this year. “This is going to be a game changer for the official sport of the state of California, and a game changer for Laguna Beach on a level that is going to blow people’s minds.”
The space is an expansive 12,000 square feet, with about 9,500 square feet downstairs slated for exhibits and entertainment. Offices, storage and archives will go upstairs.
Large wooden beams stretch across the 30-foot-tall ceilings, and the rustic red brick walls will remain in the building that spans between Broadway Street and Ocean Avenue.
It has large ceilings — an important factor when trying to display standing up the massive wood surfboards surfers used in the early 1900s.
There’s a vision for a temporary stage for music bands or inspirational talks, a small bar area for beer and wine and a place that can be used for large gatherings or where corporate groups can sit amongst the quiver of historic boards.
With the LA28 Olympics surf competition to be held nearby in Lower Trestles, south of San Clemente, the hope is for SHACC could become a gathering spot for production crews and meet-and-greets during the games.
Moving to Laguna Beach takes SHACC back to its roots. It’s where Metz first rented a small office in the ’90s on top of the Royal Hawaiian just next to Main Beach to keep his collection, which he has been acquiring since the ’60s.
Not long after, he met Spencer Croul, also an avid board collector with a passion for surf history, and the two joined their collections to get SHACC off the ground.
Croul found the large building in the hills of San Clemente that the center is in now, and the duo spawned what is considered to be the world’s largest collection of surf artifacts, often referred to as the “Smithsonian of Surf.”
The hope is, in the new high-traffic location, even more people can learn about the sport’s history, said Alter.
“It’s a game changer, compared to where we were in San Clemente,” Alter said. “This is going to be something – it’s going to be very, very impressive. We have big ideas.”