A New Look in Store for Brash and Bawdy Strip

At the foot of the towering orange Chicken Kabob sign, where El Cajon Boulevard swoops down to ford 52nd Street, Art Richardson and Bobby Roth have found the vein in San Diego’s biggest, brashest, most notorious strip.

There, the two men peddle discount socket wrenches, ET calculators and pencil sharpeners shaped like fruit to young Vietnamese boys. They talk about politics and women with the old man who wheels by on weekends with an oxygen tank.

When business slows, they pop open lawn chairs and look for low-rider Cadillacs. They watch for the guy with 13 children, and the car pieced together from two taxi front ends, and the hookers walking dogs to confuse the police.

“If you can’t get it here on the boulevard, it can’t be had,” Roth ruminated last week, squinting into the heat shimmering off the asphalt. “ . . . People got to survive. They’ll do anything they can. I mean, you can’t eat beans every day.”

From Park Boulevard east to the La Mesa line, El Cajon Boulevard plows through San Diego’s vast Mid-City--nearly seven miles of used cars, Cambodian coffee shops, psychics, stereos, discount dinettes and wholesale wigs.

It was once the aorta leading to San Diego’s downtown heart. Coming or going, nearly everyone seemed to run its length. But freeways, shopping malls, and 1960s suburbanization played a nasty trick: El Cajon Boulevard became a place from which people fled.

Now, city officials have big plans. They envision a boulevard lined with sweet-smelling eucalyptus, punctuated by urban centers peopled by happy pedestrians. They want to rezone the area to lure in developers with ambitious and expensive ideas.

Old-time businessmen along the boulevard welcome revitalization. But the planners and their tidy drawings make them edgy. They fear the city is going to change the rules on them, subordinating their economics to the city’s aesthetics.

For them, El Cajon Boulevard has been the land of opportunity--whatever you can make it, something for everyone, a commercial Wild West.

Wallace T. Featheringill’s family came from Kansas City. He and his father saw the traffic on the boulevard and bought a lot. They opened Featheringill’s Mortuary in 1962. Now, Featheringill says the lot alone has quadrupled in value.

Twenty blocks west, Minh and Mylan Lee from Cambodia are trying the same thing. They’ve opened a coffee shop where young Cambodians cluster in the dim booths in early afternoon. Nearby, Jeong Cho from Korea set up shop in May selling melons across from Hoover High.

Featheringill worries about the planners’ big ideas. He wonders whether they will inadvertently destroy the little man’s opportunity--the opportunity to do what he and his father did.

“That’s what you take away from these small business people when they have to rent from these shopping centers and developers,” Featheringill said. “Making a living is what you (earn from) the business. But the opportunity to get ahead is what you make on the appreciation.”

El Cajon Boulevard begins suddenly where Washington Street ends, between University Heights and North Park. Flanked by the Genghis Khan Furniture Company and a car lot full of used four-wheel drives, it plunges east into its first, most glorious stretch.

Here, tall spindly eucalyptus trees lean languidly over six black lanes. Buildings are big and nicely kept. The road rises and dips in gentle waves, past the American Bartenders School and the Slender Lady Health Spa.

But at the Interstate 805 overpass, the trees stop. The boulevard flattens out into a naked strip. The Honda sign with its symbol of atomic power hovers over the street. Used cars wait in hot lots with their hoods flung open, like the mouths of panting dogs.

Then the signs on the low storefronts turn into Oriental ideograms. Young Cambodians in the Mai Thy ice cream parlor lean into the pinball machines. In the Pho Hoa Restaurant, the entire lunchtime crowd seems to be wearing white short-sleeved shirts.

Later, low hills and palm trees begin again, rising into the thriving stretch around College Avenue and San Diego State University. Birkenstock sandals and brioches proliferate. The first bookstore not for Adults Only is at 63rd Street.

Finally, the boulevard barrels across the La Mesa border toward the foothills of Mount Helix. It’s true to its image to the last: The eastern gateway is Elvira’s Taco Shop and the Automobile Club of Southern California.

Richard Bentley Woolley, whose grandfather ran an ostrich farm on nearby Adams Avenue, remembers picnicking beside the boulevard when its eastern reaches were still dirt. He remembers sailing paper boats in a redwood flume that ran by carrying water to San Diego.

The boulevard grew into the major highway through the city. It became the classic American strip, developed and zoned almost solely for commercial use. Men like the Featheringills set up business there for the traffic. For nearly seven solid miles, the car was king.

There were drive-in liquor stores, drive-in movies, drive-in dry cleaners. There are still auto schools, auto tuneup shops, auto upholsterers and auto insurers. One company, open from noon to 4 p.m., deals exclusively in auto clocks.

But suburbanization and Interstate 8 stole El Cajon Boulevard’s thunder. It became the slow route out of town. Giant furniture stores fled, motels hit hard times. The boulevard ceased to be a regional shopping mecca. It became simply Main Street, Mid-City.

Meanwhile, in the neighborhoods, income growth slowed. The population polarized into the very young and the very old. Side streets off the boulevard became a first stop for new immigrants. Less than half of the Mid-City elementary school population is white.

“Twelve years ago this area was poor and all white,” said Art Richardson, settling in under his makeshift awning beside a folding table of discount tools. “It’s becoming more of a melting pot--more Orientals, more blacks. It’s becoming more relaxed.”

These days, Mike Nowling, behind the counter at the 7-Eleven, admires the blue hair and Mohawks from the punk club next to Church’s Fried Chicken. He chats with the insomniacs who drift in at 2 a.m. to riffle listlessly through the magazines.

At Jim’s House of Guitars, Raultney Blue says he barters with the Vietnamese. He says he even barters at the liquor store for bottled water. Jim Greenwood, at San Diego Yamaha, remembers a hooker who tried to get financing for a scooter.

“You meet a lot of characters--street people, religious freaks, people talking to themselves,” Greenwood said. “Sometimes you just kick back and watch a drug bust at Hoover High, if it gets real boring.”

Last year, the police began cracking down on the prostitutes. They trailed them down the boulevard in squad cars and encouraged store owners to kick them out. Businessmen printed up window stickers: a stocking in a red circle with a red bar through it.

Some people say the hookers are gone now. Others say they’ve only gone under cover. Richardson and Roth say one trick is to appear to be grocery shopping--only the milk and egg cartons in the big shopping bags are empty.

After all, there’s plenty to shop for in six miles of stores.

There are sets of three tungsten steel Black Widow darts for $117.50, and rental cars for $7 a day. Boulevard Tuxedo and Bridal shares a stretch with Pied Piper Pest Control. The House of Treasure Hunters specializes in metal detectors.

A person could get educated on the boulevard. There are schools of acupuncture, dance arts, business and nursing. There’s a special school for contractors, and financial aid available at the School for Truck Driving and Diesel Mechanics.

“It’s got soul,” says Raultney Blue. “People are out trying to do the best they can.”

“It’s dirty,” says Beth Morgan. “You can dust three times a day and it still gets dusty.”

To an urban planner, it’s Hercules’ Augean Stables.

The planners entered the act in the early 1980s. With downtown redevelopment under way, the city turned to Mid-City. Local businessmen had asked for help. Economic consultants argued that downtown could not be completely renewed without addressing the periphery.

Last year, the city hired a San Diego landscape architect, Andrew Spurlock, to study the boulevard and recommend improvements. He teamed up with another architect and a color consultant, studied the strip and submitted a plan the city is now reviewing.

Spurlock wants to work with, rather than against, the peculiar character of the strip. He wants to capitalize on its auto-oriented past, commercial present and multi-ethnic future, highlighting those things to give the place image and definition.

In his sketches, a gateway to Mid-City spans the western end like a giant hood ornament, all chrome and flanked by floodlights like the ones flipped on by car dealers on Friday and Saturday nights.

Blue-green street lamps, sign posts and other “street furniture” create a “veil” at the edge of the street, their bases painted varying shades of red. Businesses would gradually be repainted, perhaps color-coded by type of business.

Over time, zoning changes would reshape the street and skyline. Trees and shrubs would line the boulevard and the median, and shield the parking lots. Parking might be underground or behind buildings, where possible, changing the image of relentless asphalt.

At about five major intersections would rise large commercial and residential developments, designed as urban centers for pedestrians. Car lots and lower-rise development would still stretch in between, perhaps with three- and four-story apartments rising on top.

Where Interstate 15 will eventually slice through El Cajon Boulevard at 40th Street, Spurlock envisions a bustling “Mid-City Center” of offices and civic buildings linked to Mission Valley and Downtown.

His “Eucalyptus Center” would span the western stretch up to I-805; “College Center” would span the eastern end. Where the State Theater now stands, boarded up and crumbling, he sees a Chinatown of street fairs and sidewalk markets.

“I think it’s inevitable,” Spurlock said. “The thing we’re trying to do is make it happen faster--quicker than it would happen on its own.”

What makes some businessmen nervous is the city’s method--a new zoning ordinance that they fear would require pricey parking provisions and landscaping, and restrict their ability to use their property the way they want.

Parking has been especially sticky. Businessmen say it’s good business to have it in front; planners say it’s more human to have it in the rear. The city planners want trees and shrubs; businessmen talk about the expense of upkeep and security problems.

“It’s nice to have beautiful plans for the enhancement of an area,” said Richard Woolley, whose wife owns property on the boulevard. “But if it’s not economically feasible, or if the only thing that’s economically feasible is not acceptable to the planner, then you have a situation where nothing happens. We don’t want to find ourselves in a Catch-22.”

Another question is whether large developers would be interested in the area. The property is in small parcels, making acquisition difficult. Some say owners have already begun raising prices in anticipation of developer interest.

Meanwhile, small entrepreneurs like Richardson and Roth continue to find crannies in the capitalist bedrock. Last week, they were selling a five-piece screw extractor set for $2. A $2.98 All-Purpose Filter Dust Mask was going for a buck.

Roth went back to his panegyrics about the boulevard.

“There’s places you can get any item cleaned for 50 cents!” he marveled.

Richardson chimed in, “You can get a haircut and shampoo for $5.”

“Three dollars!” Roth retorted.

“That’s short hair,” Richardson came back. “And it doesn’t include a shampoo.”