Costa Mesa gets busy

Paul Clinton

Back in 1949, when Edward “Buddy” Grant opened the Grant Boys at a

storefront where Triangle Square now stands, Costa Mesa’s downtown

wasn’t much more than a scraggly landscape of feed barns, pharmacies

and hardware stores.

Grant’s store, then known as Grant’s Surplus, offered rakes,

shovels, bicycles and mixed paint among the “1,001 things you can’t

use,” as was the store’s motto at the time.

More than five decades later, Grant Boys owner Randy Garell

explained his shop’s longevity with a few simple words.

“Costa Mesa is a great city,” Garell said. “We really like the

people who are our customers.”

Things have changed since those early days, as the city’s 50th

birthday celebration should serve to remind IKEA, NikeTown, Target

Greatland and some of the other commercial newcomers.

Back when Costa Mesa was beginning to outgrow its image as a

farming hamlet, after World War II, business wasn’t exactly booming.

Yet, as the 1950s wore on, the roots of the Costa Mesa’s vibrant

retail base began to take hold.

By the mid-1960s, with the city’s widening of Harbor Boulevard,

the buzz of commerce began to rise above a barely-discernable din. In

1966, Theodore “Bob” Robins Jr. moved his Robins Ford dealership to

the intersection at Harbor and Bay Street.

In 1967, the Segerstrom family opened South Coast Plaza, which now

pulls in $1 billion a year in sales.

Only a handful of the businesses that predate this mid-1960s

explosion, which was driven by a population surge, still exist.

The city’s oldest shop, H.W. Wright Co. Hardware, opened in 1932

on the same land where it sits today. Jeff Wright’s grandfather

opened Wright’s as a lumber yard and salvage business. Wright, 43,

now specializes in industrial machinery, but does still provide

salvage services.

“My granddad would get a crew and either move a house or the good

parts back to the yard to sell,” Wright said. “In those days, they

reused everything.”

In the 1960s, a string of shops opened along Harbor and Newport

boulevards.

On Harbor, H.J. Garrett Furniture opened in 1963. It’s still there.

Red-e-Rentals, with its faded-yellow bulldozer-shaped mailbox and

bluish A-frame roof, moved in at the time. General Transmission

opened up next door in 1966.

General Transmission owner Dale Tanner, 62, remembers a Costa Mesa

with more than a few vacant lots dotting the landscape.

“Most of [Harbor Boulevard] was vacant,” Tanner said about the

city before the building boom. “Then came more traffic, which makes a

big difference.”

Tanner’s building was used, before he moved in, to manufacture

Wizard ski boats in the 1950s.

Cal’s Camera opened near Triangle Square in 1962. Cal and Helen

Stilley still own the business. Cal’s son Mark Stilley, now the vice

president of sales, handles the day-to-day operations.

“The city has been well run [during] the past 40 years,” Stilley

said. “We’ve had an influx of new businesses.”