You’d have won bets in the ’90s backing a padlocked, degraded piece of land overlooking the ocean in Dana Point to be built out, with local-to-coastal commission blessing. Twenty years and 120 of the priciest lots in OC later—you’d be sitting on a parlay.
OCInsider learned The Strand at the Headlands in Dana Point is down to final parcels, just sold the last oceanfront lot on a high, $45.3M/acre. If you can get one of the 5-6 parcels left, you’d have interesting neighbors, among them a 2021 NBA Hall-of-Famer, already a resident in Newport Coast. To refresh, the famed Chandler family forever vied for entitlements to develop The Headlands, got nixed by referendum. Gave up after 50 years. Sanford Edward received the Coastal Commission approvals in three years and “saved the Headlands,” now a 30-ac Conservation Park.
A company doesn’t ascend to OC’s most valuable by accident—leadership one essential—and on quiet display this week as Edwards Lifesciences celebrated the one-year transformation of its dowdy lobby into The Atrium, a warm, quasi-high school basketball gym of a lobby-and-event space with a few trimmings ala Jerry Jones’ Cowboys Stadium. Full credit to everyman boss—Gary, Ind. native Mike Mussallem, a CEO as concerned with OC as he is with his $25B heart-valve manufacturer. “I’m concerned Orange County’s prosperity is not sustainable over the long term,” Mussallem told our table after the Atrium celebration. “We need more high-paying jobs, clusters to keep young people here.”
Jerry Lewis—won’t see his like again. Daughter attended ChapTown and graduated. Doti, Musco and Augie Nieto all called the comedian/philanthropist friend. Told Doti on his TV show, “with a tear in his eye that he was still in awe of Dean Martin.”
Inspiration Point: If you’re in OC journalism, civic or political life, you know the OC Forum. Nancy Dooley was founding exec of OC’s premier nonpartisan discussions of things important. Reg’l, state, nat’l, and int’l figures cruised before The Forum. Civil discussions on uncivil matters. I recall the GOP primary debate with the late Congressman Sonny Bono in ’92 and a fiery exchange between Cuban exiles and steadfast Castro statists, but mostly I recall Nancy and her late husband, Jim, and tales of how they put a trampoline in her son’s backyard at 7, and 20+ years later the El Toro Charger, Logan Dooley, made it to Rio last year as the sole US Olympic trampoline athlete. I promised Nancy I’d get a crew and properly tell this story—not the first time I didn’t deliver. Nancy, thank you for the friendship and encouraging conversations in the middle—the ‘porous middle,’ as author Michael Lewis coined. All the best.
