garrison beau scott

Having practically grown up on Balboa Island, I’ve been all over that chunk of man-made land. Most, if not all, of my memories are bathed in the golden sun that shown down on my childhood. The sand and warm concrete of the bayfront, droplines off the public piers, and shaved ice rivers running down our arms, staining our forearms an alien blue to match our tongues.

Back then, the camera was just something that my dad carried around. Now that it is my camera, when I take it back to Balboa Island, I have a hard time finding those memories, so I’m making new ones. These however aren’t awash in the glow of day, rather they’re cloaked in the shadows of night.

This is a Balboa Island I rarely saw as a snot-nosed kid. No matter how far we were allowed to travel on our own, even as 8 and 9 year olds, we always had to be home before dinner, that is to say, before dark. The Island is a completely different place at night, one I look forward to exploring.

For anyone growing up a skateboard away from Balboa Island in the late 70’s and early 80’s, there were a few iconographic places along Marine Ave. Sugar n’ Spice, Dad’s Doughnuts, Hersey’s Market and Island Records, the Persimmon Tree, the Jolly Roger and of course the Firehouse. Hersey’s is still there, though it’s owned by a corporation now and Island Records is long gone, having gone through a variety of incarnations, and currently a interior design shop where you can buy very expensive lamps and the like. The Jolly Roger is still a restaurant but it too has gone through more name changes than I can remember. The P-tree is still going strong and under the longest tenure of ownership of any business on the Island.

Since the Fire Department moved into new digs down the street quite a few years ago, the old Firehouse had been left abandoned. The word was it was structurally unsound. It’s finally getting a retro-fit and under new ownership and direction and will become a new business this year. But for the longest time it was just an empty memory of the old Island. A place where at Island Records you could buy the new Plasmatics album, play a few games of Missile Command, cross the street and get a Cactus Cooler at Island Liquors and drop a few more quarters into Dig-Dug before heading down to Balboa Beach Co. to blow the rest of your paper route money on a pair of Quicksilver board shorts.

This was taken in 2004 and in every subsequent trip I made to Balboa Island in the years that followed, the same picture was available, with the exception of a few leaves. It’s nice to know, that for a variety of reasons, this image is no more.