This 4th of July, I remembered why I really don't go into Huntington Beach. Of the Orange County beach cities, it's the trashiest. Yeah, there are some resort hotels there, it's now officially known as Surf City, USA, blah blah blah... but there's definitely a white trash element to Huntington Beach. I think it's a vestige of when the city was an oil-producing town, and many residents were blue-collar workers who worked in the oil industry. The Huntington Beach High School sports team is called the Oilers. According to the 2010 census, Huntington Beach has a population of 189,992. The racial makeup of Huntington Beach is 145,661 White, 1,813 African American, 992 Native American, 21,070 Asian, 635 Pacific Islander, 11,193 from other races, and 8,628 from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 32,411 persons.
My partner and I decided to go to Huntington Beach on a whim for the 4th of July. There used to be problems on July 4th in Huntington Beach, with riots, arrests, public drunkenness and even assaults and some deaths. But we haven't heard about this on our local news in a while, so we decided to check it out for the 4th.
What a culture shock; as soon as we started approaching the center of town, we started seeing huge monster trucks with big American flags on them. We also saw houses decorated to the hilt with American flags and red white and blue bunting. I'd never seen white people drinking and barbecuing in their FRONT yards before; I felt like I was in another state-- but oh yeah, this is Orange County.
This was actually a decent neighborhood, but I'd never seen so much patriotism in California before.
Lots of megachurches in Huntington Beach, too; lots of them in Orange County in general.
One of the more subdued ones.
After walking through that residential neighborhood, we started walking into the downtown, on Main Street; a few blocks of it was closed to vehicular traffic for the holiday. Downtown is right near the beach and pier. At first it looked OK, but then we started passing people who smelled of liquor, people with slurred speech, some people who couldn't walk straight, and it was only around 6:30pm or so. It was still interesting to watch people and their behaviors, though.
Notice the out of state plates, the car on the left has Arizona plates; it's common to see those (as well as Nevada and New Mexico plates) in the summertime in SoCal, I assume those Arizonans wanna get out of the hot desert summer heat. It's actually common to see lots of out of state plates in SoCal during the summer, as well as Canadian and Mexican plates. The Jeep has Connecticut plates, I believe.
I think this picture sums it up:
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the people who own Alta are friends of a friend, love sitting outside having a coffee on a warm evening.
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