MAILBAG:

Blogger moonbandito contends that “downtown” Costa Mesa has moved up to South Coast “Metro” and will never return to Newport Boulevard.

Granted, if downtown is considered to be only the retail strip along Newport Boulevard, worn by years of water-on-the-rock from hundreds of thousand of vehicles zipping by only 20 feet from their doors, it doesn’t sound like much of a downtown worth saving.

And, no argument, the South Coast Metro north of the 405 Freeway is a successful center of retail, residential, office, hospitality and entertainment activities.

But must a city have only one locus of economic success?

I picture Costa Mesa, when it gets its act together, as being a city with two successful concentrations of multifarious civic life, one in the north and one in the south.

There is more to south Costa Mesa than just Newport Boulevard. Consider, if you will, the booming businesses along East 17th Street to the east and West 19th Street to the west, the eclectic joys of eastside residential, the growing number of health-related businesses creeping northward from Hoag Hospital, the thriving industrial area in Westside, and the increasing gentrification of Westside.

In this southern portion of Costa Mesa, I foresee a very successful concentration of human activity.

I’ll call it, for convenience, “southtown.”

Southtown is worth fighting for.

Southtown needn’t be “the other side of the tracks” for both Costa Mesa and Newport Beach. Southtown is muscular and has what it takes to succeed on its own merits, as long as Caltrans doesn’t continue to dump its toxic freeway into the middle of it.

We are not a sewer for our neighbors.

We simply must run the SR-55 freeway out of southtown.

TOM EGAN

Costa Mesa