To:The Seal Beach City Council
2211 Eighth Street
Seal Beach, CA 90740

From: David R. Westcott, AICP


April 29, 2004

Dear Seal Beach City Council,


I am not a resident of Seal Beach.  In fact, I'm on the wrong side of the continent to enjoy the pleasures of your fine City.  However, I recently read of the proposal to tear down the Parasol restaurant and felt compelled to write to you about it.  All over our nation, structures with character and warmth are being destroyed and replaced by mundane shopping centers, all of which look the same.  These shopping centers, characterized by chain stores and restaurants, provide a boring uniformity of appearance that James Howard Kuntsler (author of "Geography of Nowhere") has termed "crudscape". 

In many parts of the east, it is already impossible to tell one community from another.  The landmarks that provided a sense of place have been destroyed and the chain store plazas in one town are indistinguishable from the chain store plazas in any other town.  Please don't let this happen in your community. 

Even if you don't think of the Parasol as an historic structure, I hope you will recognize that it is a landmark that adds to the character of your community and helps distinguish Seal Beach as a place different from any other.  It is also one of the few surviving symbols of a type of architecture that was once a paradigm, but is no longer practiced in our nation.  Please consider the important contribution that this structure makes to Seal Beach and encourage the developers to find a way to preserve and re-use the structure. 

I urge you to save the character of your community while you still can.  Once the interesting and attractive features of Seal Beach have been destroyed, and the landscape looks the same as any other community anywhere else in the U.S., it will be too late. 

Thank you for taking the time to consider my opinion, even though I am not a constituent. 

Very truly yours,
David R. Westcott, AICP
Land Use Planner




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