After the Irvine Co. won approval in 1989 to fill pristine canyons surrounding Laguna Beach with expensive tract homes, a shopping center and a golf course, nearly 8,000 protesters swarmed the roads and hillsides on foot, bicycles, skateboards and horseback, carrying signs that proclaimed "Greed Can't $ucceed."
The show of force, known as Laguna's Last Stand, succeeded in blocking the development. And it typified the spirit of a bohemian beach town dubbed the People's Republic of Laguna, a liberal outpost of environmentalists, hippies, artists and gays in conservative Orange County.
Fifteen years later, the community is learning that the lavish Montage Resort & Spa, wanting to expand beyond its South Laguna bluff top, is quietly laying groundwork to build a championship golf course and villas in brush-filled, creek-fed Aliso & Wood Canyons Wilderness Park.
And local environmentalists and other activist are distressed because, they say, this is not the same community where city leaders once stood arm-in-arm with residents to preserve open space.
Elizabeth Pearson, a councilwoman who is now mayor, was unabashedly chauffeured to a Beverly Hills City Council meeting last summer to extol the virtues of the Montage, while her fiancee was a consultant on the golf course expansion.
Other decision makers who once fought hillside development are now working with -- and in some cases are on the payroll of -- the resort owners.
In a sign that their influence may be waning, environmentalists and other stakeholders for months have been left out of the planning talks.
And one of their strongest allies lost his City Council seat after being targeted by a campaign committee partly bankrolled by the Montage.
Given the town's changing political climate and increasingly affluent demographics, opponents wonder if they can block the Montage expansion. If part of a wilderness park can be commercially developed, they say, nothing will be held sacred in Laguna.
"I remember seeing my mom up on the stage, inspiring and empowering the people," Chris Campbell recalled at a recent tribute for his late mother, Lida Lenney, who protested development 15 years ago. "It's just big money [now]," he said. "It's not about saving the wilderness."
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Laguna Beach, a town of 24,500, is known for its storybook village atmosphere of beach cottages, art galleries, shops and bistros, framed by soaring hillsides and a jagged coastline. With its Mediterranean feel, it's often called California's Riviera.
Laguna is equally famous for embracing an eclectic cast of characters and lifestyles. Actors Rock Hudson and Charlie Chaplin called it home. So did counterculture icon Timothy Leary. The country's first openly gay mayor was elected there.
And it has a storied reputation for protecting its environment, highlighted by the Nov. 11, 1989, march to save Laguna Canyon. Lenney, a former councilwoman who died in October, rallied the community to save a ribbon of rolling wilderness lacing the city's outskirts from the designs of the Irvine Co.
The developers ended up offering the city an option to buy the 2,175 acres, and residents approved a $30-million bond to pay for it.
To this day, it remains open space.
By some measure, Laguna's transformation from a quaint village to an upscale resort town was triggered by disaster.
In 1993, wildfires destroyed nearly 400 houses -- ordinary, decades-old homes owned by the likes of city firefighters and teachers.
Sympathetic to the needs of residents to rebuild without time-consuming reviews, the City Council loosened building standards to simplify the process.
And the hills overlooking downtown sprouted with an altogether new crop of homes -- including mansions of all shapes and sizes.
Upscale developers had established their foothold, and old-timers said the community was losing its rudder.
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The Montage was already on the drawing boards as scarred hillsides were morphing into new, fancy neighborhoods. Following years of intense public debate, the $200-million project opened in February 2003.
Some critics conceded that they were impressed with how the architecture, styled after turn-of-the-century California Craftsman bungalows, blended with the seascape and captured the artsy roots of the community.
Its financial benefits to the city are undeniable: $2.5 million in annual bed tax revenue and $300,000 in sales taxes. But the hotel, where a standard double starts at about $450, is scorned by slow-growth advocates as the epitome of the type of upscale development that is changing their town. Until the Montage, tourists were served mostly by mom-and-pop hotels and inns. The fanciest hotel in town had been the Surf and Sand, with roots in the Richard Nixon presidency.
