A standing joke among auto aficionados is that if you drive down 16th Street off Superior Avenue, by the time you get to the end you may be sitting in a naked chassis.
There are dozens of automotive repair, automobile detailing and auto body shops straddling this street along the border of Newport Beach and Costa Mesa. There are even unofficial auto-storage areas: an Idahoan who summers in Orange County trades odd jobs for a parking space for his bus in the autoshop complex behind Wickham Havens Auto Care. (“He earns his keep,” said Havens.)
The street seems to be a necessary anomaly for a wealthy town,a string of light-industrial buildings housing experts in high-end car care. Tourists may stop for a burger at the Carl’s Jr. off of Newport Boulevard before hitting the beach. Locals turn at the Carl’s (where the street is designated Industrial Way before it becomes 16th) to bring the Benz to “Wick.”
Havens is smack-dab in this “Industrial West” or “Auto-Care Row” part of the two cities. It’s a place with no official trade associations or Chamber of Commerce meetings, but where long-time denizens can rattle off who their neighbors are, by first names.
They function like a corporate Neighborhood Watch group, looking out for ways to drum up business for each other. For example, a professional recently dropped off his 300Z with Havens just before departing on a week-long vacation. By the time he returned, the car was checked and tuned, the radio didn’t howl, dents were tapped out and the car had been detailed.
“We’re all specialists,” said Havens, who handled the person’s mechanical repairs and farmed out the audio and body work to his buddies at Vinco Car Stereo Doctor and Steve’s Auto Detailing.
A recent morning visit to Havens’ shop found it bumper-to-bumper with cars, including a Rolls Royce. A “No Soliciting” sign was in the window. The decor was standard for a place where men battle machines and get dirty on purpose: pro wrestlers popular during the Bush administration, an Angels poster and complimentary tool company calendars, also out of date, featuring frozen-in-time bikini-clad blondes bearing socket wrenches.
Wickham Havens was wearing flip-flops. And he was expressing a partiality for other views.
“This is Newport Bay from the air,” he said, pointing to a calendar. “I love this picture.”
He also has a poster of Mont St. Michel, a citadel city connected to the French mainland by a single causeway, except when the tide rushes in and isolates it from the rest of the world.
Sixteenth Street is a little like that.
Surrounded by Growth
A grouping of small businesses that grew slowly as like-minded entrepreneurs gathered, the area has been surrounded by a flood of growth. Today those that remain have a much smaller connection to the rest of the city. In fact, Havens described Auto-Care Row as the last bastion of an industry that is dying in coastal Orange County:
“Forty years ago when this area was developing there were lots of repair shops. The cities zoned them out.” The first garage he worked at was in Corona del Mar. Now, he said ruefully, it is a place “where they make new furniture look old.”
“It’s much more retail now,” he said, referring to his early stomping grounds. “Much less industrial.”
Havens, 53, has been a car nut since childhood. His first car was a 1957 Studebaker. He began fixing them in 1966. Havens was born in Tustin, became a “Corona del Moron” at 6 months old, and now lives in Costa Mesa.
As an employee backed the cars out of the shop, Havens noted that a majority of the area’s shops are individual operators such as himself.
“There used to be a Firestone, but it went out of business,” he said. “No personal service.”
Havens said his shop does about $150,000 a year. One of his neighbors, he said, does, “more than a million.”
There are at least three Mercedes-only shops in the area, and Havens likes the label, too, saying it constitutes 40% of his clientele.
Havens states with certainty that, as of a few years ago, there were at least 5,000 Mercedes-Benz owners in Newport Beach. He said he knows this because he used to try reaching them with direct mail.
“I’ve tried advertising,” said Havens. “But the best I can do is break even.” Now he works only for “sweetheart customers,” he said.
Havens’ more-eclectic efforts are directed at a 1950 Woody and a 1960 Austin-Healey.
“These are cars that are parked a lot of the year,” said Havens. “The owners want to get them going again for the summer. If I do work on them a couple times a year, I end up seeing the same car 25 or 30 times. I see repeat generations of the same family.”
The march of progress continues nearby. Hoag Hospital seems to be ever-expanding, and the upscale Banning Ranch, comprising up to 1,750 homes, has been proposed on 400 acres of unincorporated land just to the west.
Little Area Gets Developer Interest
But Auto-Care Row’s long-time mixed-industrial status and checkerboard of ownership has directed developer interest elsewhere. Local property owners said they expect 16th Street to stay the way it is in the face of surrounding growth, and Newport Beach director of planning Patricia Temple, who has been with the city for 25 years and its planning director for the past four, agrees.
“The bottom line is we get very few inquiries about properties in those areas,” she said. “We get virtually none.”
The building complex housing Havens, for instance, is controlled by a family-owned limited liability corporation, members of which have owned it as an investment for more than 30 years.
They cite the fact that Costa Mesa, directly across the street from Havens, would also have to change its zoning for the area. Besides, the businesses here are filling a demand.
“It will stay infiltrated with automotive shops,” Havens said. “People need us or they’d have to go to a gas station to get their cars fixed. They have to put us somewhere.”
