An Orange County Icon
To gauge the influence that Henry Segerstrom and his extended family had on Orange County, it might be best simply to take a drive.
On Costa Mesa’s north end, the Segerstrom Center for the Arts boasts the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall — and Segerstrom Hall next door. Nearby South Coast Repertory puts on elaborate productions on the Segerstrom Stage. At the south end of Santa Ana, Segerstrom High School resides a block or two from a street named Segerstrom Avenue.
An unknowing traveler who wandered into the area might guess that he or she had stumbled upon a city called Segerstrom, California. And considering the influence that the Segerstroms had in shaping the region as a metropolis, there would be less appropriate names.
“Henry Segerstrom is an icon in Orange County’s history,” said Lucy Dunn, president of the Orange County Business Council. “The whole transformation of Orange County from rural-agricultural to the sixth-largest county in America, where we have more population than 20 states in the union, can be directly attributable to the work of Henry Segerstrom.”
That work began in the fields of what later became Costa Mesa and Santa Ana, where the Segerstrom family — soon incorporated as C.J. Segerstrom & Sons — settled as farmers at the turn of the 20th century.
Henry, the grandson of patriarch C.J. Segerstrom, received a Purple Heart in World War II and returned home to earn
an MBA at Stanford University. Taking a post with the family business, he saw potential for development in a county where new endeavors, from the freeways to Disneyland to UC Irvine, had begun to relegate the orange groves to history.
From there, the milestones rolled out one by one. In 1967, South Coast Plaza gave Orange County a landmark retail spot. South Coast Repertory, which had bounced from one home to another for years, settled nearby in 1978. The Orange County Performing Arts Center, since renamed the Segerstrom Center for the Arts, opened its doors in 1986.
On Feb. 20 this year, Segerstrom died at age 91. In this special section, the Los Angeles Times takes an extended look at the man and his legacy — one that continues to build, as the Orange County Museum of Art readies to move to Costa Mesa and the Segerstrom Center for the Arts prepares to turn 30 next year.
As business magnates go, Segerstrom was far from a reclusive Howard Hughes, but he wasn’t a limelight-obsessed Donald Trump either. In a 1987 profile, The Times labeled him an “intensely private man who nevertheless uses his photogenic looks, quietly charismatic manner and myriad business connections to draw hefty donations.”
Segerstrom, for his part, was more than willing to carry some of that heft — and often laid the groundwork, literally, for the donations to pile up. The dirt under South Coast Plaza, South Coast Repertory and the Segerstrom Center once grew lima beans rather than high-rises. Segerstrom, whose family moved to Orange County from Minnesota in 1898, made a point of keeping that legacy in sight.
The California Scenario sculpture garden, which Segerstrom commissioned from artist Isamu Noguchi and set near the performing arts complex, features a 28-ton granite installment titled “The Spirit of the Lima Bean.” Sometimes, Segerstrom gave out small bags of lima beans as gifts. And the farm, despite being much smaller than in its heyday, still produces the vegetable.
Did Segerstrom’s heart, to some degree, always remain with that soil? Sean Saint-Louis, a documentarian who has worked with the family for years and helped create the website Segerstrom Media Lab, suspects that it did. Segerstrom, in his estimation, used his name recognition as means to an end and would sooner be in the audience than the spotlight.
“He did it out of necessity, not out of a desire to be, for lack of a better term, famous — or to be ‘that guy,’’’ Saint-Louis said. “He did it because somebody had to in order to spearhead this vision, and I think he would have preferred to have been behind the scenes and not really the public gentleman that he was.”
But a public gentleman is what he was, precisely. And, in the end, it was Orange County’s gain.