Ideas for a More Perfect Long Beach

With Long Beach debuting on Prime Video in the eight-episode police series “On Call” on Jan. 9, here come the inevitable suggestions for further shaking things up, without the usual Richter scale reading.

Roundabout Grand Prix

The Long Beach Grand Prix started out in 1975, and in 1976, it was a Formula One race over the rowdy strip of Ocean Boulevard. By the late 1980s, Long Beach ceased being a Navy town. There’s no doubt that the race’s impact on national TV led to upgrades from seedy storefronts to upscale hotels and new condos.

As the Long Beach Marathon changed routes several times, perhaps the Grand Prix might decide on a new route it could upgrade by being there. Not in Naples, not Belmont Shore, not Signal Hill, but wait for it, the Traffic Circle and the arteries into which it feeds; certainly designed for competitive driving, which all of us who avoid it know all too well. Or officially, the Long Beach Roundabout Grand Prix.

Bollards or Diets?

Wide-open Studebaker Road has them; so does the death-defying blind curve at Bellflower Boulevard’s right lane next to Park Estates. Bollards, barriers that separate vehicle traffic from bikers began at Broadway and Temple in 2017, then went on a road diet, reducing two lanes each way to one lane, halving previous parking. Parking dieters must find a space, then make sure they don’t meet a biker before the sidewalk, the hard way. No diets for bollards.

Who’s Hiding the Football?

With UCLA and USC joining new football conferences, either Big 10 or Big 12 or pick your number and similar schools earning Midas-level football bucks and with the talent-rich Long Beach area with Poly, Wilson and other public and parochial high schools, the question is: Why not football at CSULB? Can’t ask legendary ex-NFL and 49ers Coach George Allen, who died after a cold Gatorade bucket shower one year before the school gave up football in 1991, nor can he say why it’s Long Beach State in sports, CSULB in education.

Going Postal

Robert Garcia and Shaun Lumachi founded the LB Post in early 2007. Since then, Garcia gave up the Post for a political career and Lumachi died in a tragic traffic accident in late 2011. Garcia’s career took him from the City Council, to that of mayor and for the past several years, Long Beach’s man in Congress. In that most recent incarnation, Garcia has been an outspoken policy advocate on cable news, mostly on MSNBC after his predecessor, Alan Lowenthal kept a much lower profile, though he got early political recognition on local cable.

All of this as prologue, two circumstances are evident: Garcia is a natural to take over an MSNBC slot if and when he ends his congressional stint and MSNBC is in trouble, having been shorn from the NBC family like Pluto, demoted from planet to space rock. In 2008, Lumachi mused about the LB Post acquiring the Press-Telegram, which was in free fall at the time. Never happened. Would it be too much to ask of future MSNBCer Garcia to take Lumachi’s lead, suggest the LB Post acquire MSNBC as a West Coast home to what’s considered East Coast liberal bias?

Imaginary Hotels

One of the most asked questions by of out-of-towners is “can I get a reservation at one of those hotels out in the water this side of the breakwater?” or something like that. Answer: “You can’t.” Why not? They are out there to extract oil, not to extract reservation money from tourists. “There are no hotels on the water, they just have palm trees and pastel painted structures to not look like ugly oil wells.” What if we answered the same queries this way: “Those are cottages for the homeless,” then actually build structures like that for that purpose, just not with an oil derrick theme.

Breaking the Breakwater

The feds have turned down converting Long Beach into a surfer’s paradise by nixing the removal of the breakwater, which would impact structures on the peninsula and beach-facing apartments, condos and hotels along the Ocean Boulevard corridor and not in a good way. It also nixed the plan to piece out the breakwater for profit like parts of the Berlin Wall or moon rocks. After all, having a rock of breakwater on your mantel next to an East German wall rock could amount to a complete set, unless your address is near the water.

Destination Unknown

When JetBlue was the primary air carrier at Long Beach Airport, non-stop service was available to New York’s JFK and Boston’s Logan. Current non-stop out of LGB is pretty much limited to Vegas, Oakland and Phoenix via Southwest. Even Boise has a connecting flight. Forget JFK, it’s Southwest to a connecting city to LaGuardia, wherever and whatever that is. Want to fly JetBlue? That’ll be LAX. Still harder to be ex-LAX.

The Orange Curtain

Finding out the hard way, if a freeway-blocking accident happens just below the southbound 605 on the eastbound 405, it’s gridlock for the trio of roads leading onto the freeway from Long Beach, meaning Seventh Street, Willow Street and Carson Street. A bad thing. The occasional horrendous eastbound traffic jams are today’s Orange Curtain, a political term coined decades past.