Coming Full Circle : Oxnard Merchants Bid Farewell to Open-Air Mall, Reopen A Street to Cars

Most Southern Californians curse gridlock, but not Al Valdes of Oxnard. For the A Street merchant, the phenomenon is so new that he delights at traffic grinding to a halt outside his photography studio.

“Sometimes,” he said with a touch of glee, “I can see traffic stopped from one block to the next.”

Other merchants along a three-block strip of the street, which was once the heart of downtown Oxnard, also share his unusual enthusiasm. They remember how a misguided redevelopment plan blocked off the street, creating an open-air mall, but ended up choking off business for nearly two decades.

That any traffic would pass in front of their long-overlooked businesses is a blessing in their eyes, but that a gently winding street broken up by frequent stoplights would delay prospective customers in front of shop windows is proof that redevelopment in downtown Oxnard is finally working--thanks to the undoing of a previous generation’s effort.

It’s been a year since property owners between 3rd and 6th streets banded together to build a meandering road through the pedestrian mall that was installed nearly 19 years ago in an ill-fated attempt to stem the decay of the inner city.

In that year, 14 new businesses have opened on the street, six have expanded and four have undergone extensive renovations, according to the city’s Redevelopment Agency, which coordinated the effort. Property owners who couldn’t find tenants two years ago now have to turn them away, and property values are rising as long-stagnant property changes hands.

Although the street’s two largest sites have yet to find tenants--a former J. C. Penney store and a vacant lot that the agency hopes will become a four-story office building--the reopening has, by most accounts, been a success.

“Things have worked out better than people expected,” said Dennis Matthews, an administrator with the Redevelopment Agency.

The success is important to the agency. A Street is viewed as the cornerstone in a $24-million collection of redevelopment projects aimed at invigorating Oxnard’s depressed downtown.

Already completed projects include a bus and train station and a block of upscale apartments. Future projects include Heritage Square, a cluster of century-old homes that will be used as offices, and International Marketplace, a block of ethnic restaurants and stores.

“A Street is where the retail reputation for downtown will rise or fall,” predicted Steven Kinney, the Redevelopment Agency’s director.

Still, city officials are cautious about pinning too much hope on the street of boxy, stucco-and-brick storefronts that were rebuilt during an $11.5-million project funded by the U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in the early 1970s.

Even though the street is immediately west of busy U.S. 1 and next to Oxnard City Hall, it is not expected to attract out-of-town shoppers the way it once did. City officials, who once dreamed of a high-rise office building or a major department store locating on A Street, have lowered their sights. They hope to make it into a “neighborhood business center” with a promotional campaign financed by downtown merchants and $438,000 in low-interest rehabilitation loans.

In perhaps the most telling example of how Oxnard has lowered its sights, design guidelines call for a return to the turn-of-the-century or “early Oxnard” style of the street before redevelopment officials began tinkering with it.

“We’ve stopped trying to become something other than what we are,” Matthews said. “Now, we’re concentrating on what we’ve got . . . and trying not to get too big for our britches.”

For many, Oxnard started getting too big for its britches when the mall was built in 1969 with federal redevelopment funds. It was billed as a solution to the many problems facing downtown merchants.

By that time, the businessmen had been grappling unsuccessfully with a two-decade-old parking problem in the rapidly growing city. Many of the street’s retail buildings, which were built when the city was founded at the turn of the century, had fallen into decay. Some didn’t meet earthquake safety requirements.

And then there was the Esplanade. Downtown merchants had heard that a new, enclosed mall was scheduled to be built at the north end of town. They were afraid it would woo customers away.

The idea was that redevelopment would enable the city to raze substandard storefronts to make way for more attractive ones. By damming up traffic at the foot of A Street, the mall would encourage shoppers to leave their vehicles in nearby lots and stroll through the neighborhood, stopping not just at the store that had attracted them, but also at others they passed along the way, merchants were told.

At the beginning, the mall seemed to be the same sort of winning proposition that had enthused merchants in down-at-the-heels downtown areas across the United States.

‘Greatest Thing’

Rick Manzer, now general manager of Lautzenhiser’s Stationery, had just returned from a stint in the Coast Guard when the mall held its grand opening, which attracted more people than downtown merchants had seen in years, he said.

“I thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread,” he said.

But the glow quickly faded. In two years, the president of the street’s most venerable business--The Bank of A. Levy--was leading a movement to have the mall undone.

There are at least two versions of what went wrong.

City officials say the merchants, spoiled by government handouts, never carried out their end of the redevelopment bargain. As evidence, they point to the fact that even during the mall’s last, most difficult days, A Street shopkeepers still refused to shift the entrances to their businesses to the alleyways leading to parking lots.

The merchants, meanwhile, maintain that adequate parking was too long in coming and, by the time the city had it in place, businesses had already died and customers had fallen into the habit of shopping elsewhere.

They complain that longtime merchants were forced to play a game of “musical businesses” while old storefronts were being razed and new ones built in their place. In the shuffle, customers lost track of the some of the businesses, while others were edged out of a space on the street.

They also say the city failed to adequately police the mall. Benches, gazebos and awnings that were installed to attract shoppers ended up drawing another clientele.

The indigent set up camp on A Street and, in the summer, prostitutes congregated there.

In a six-square-block area that included A Street, 80 buildings were demolished and 115 were relocated. Fifteen businesses left and another 45 went out of business.

The odd shop, such as Kett’s Koin Kastle, offered a unique enough selection to a devoted-enough clientele that its business was not affected by the street’s closure. As one of the county’s few shops for coin and stamp collectors, it prospered, said store manager Richard Kollar.

“A coin collector is going to go wherever a store is,” he said.

Others also prospered, but only after considerable effort. For instance, Lautzenhiser’s Stationery, which moved onto A Street in the mid-’60s after two decades in business elsewhere, increased advertising, began delivering orders and expressed a new willingness to fill the unusual order, whether for a customized rubber stamp or a piece of difficult-to-find office furniture, Manzer said.

But many merchants left. Some, such as Andrew Johnston, joined the exodus to the suburbs. After 40 years in the same spot on A Street and a brief period at another location on the mall, he moved his furniture store across the street from the Esplanade in 1974.

The mall, he now says, “was the death knell of downtown Oxnard.”

Some Shut for Good

But others, such as George Graham, shut their businesses for good. After selling men’s and boys’ clothing for 25 years, Graham took an early retirement in 1978 rather than face the frustration and financial loss of doing business on A Street.

“When they closed the street, they closed the artery to the heart of business,” Graham said. “You have to have traffic, and the mall cut it off completely.”

The coup de grace came in the late ‘70s when J. C. Penney, which had been the mall’s anchor, pulled out of A Street.

It proved difficult to undo the mall’s dismal reputation. HUD said the city not only wouldn’t receive financial help for the project, but that it also would have to reimburse the federal government for the cost of installing the failed mall.

Then the years passed. Federal redevelopment funding dried up and redevelopment got such a bad name locally that the city’s agency folded.

Tune Changed

When the agency reopened under local financing and Matthews signed on in 1981, the federal government’s tune had changed. Although it still wouldn’t pay to rip up the mall, Matthews said, it was not asking to be reimbursed for its $660,000 investment.

City officials, meanwhile, still could not justify throwing good money after bad and refused to pay the $557,000 needed to undo the mall. If only the merchants would rally to pay for the improvement, it was theirs, they were told by city officials. But merchants resisted until they heard it from one of their own.

Enter Alvin Behrens, the owner of a dry cleaners who took advantage of depressed prices on the mall in the late ‘70s to buy property for a cluster of shops that he built along 5th Street.

Because his property was adjacent to the mall, his business was doing better than most, he said, but still he worried that the deterioration would continue, eventually engulfing him and the rest of the downtown.

Eight years ago, he began pressing for property owners to pool resources and remedy the problem themselves. In the early years, the suggestions were “kooky, off-the-wall stuff,” he recalled. For instance, someone proposed enclosing the three-block mall. But, eventually, consensus occurred: The mall had to go, and the only way was for the merchants to foot the bill.

“I always had the fear that, if we didn’t do something, it would affect all of us,” he said.

Now, rents in his shops have risen from 50 to 80 cents a square foot. Property on the street is selling for twice the price it was going for four years ago, at the depths of the mall’s deterioration, say redevelopment officials. And, more importantly, new blood has moved to A Street.

Take Valdes, operator of the photography studio. He broke away from his family’s business at the beginning of last year to take advantage of the rejuvenation expected along A Street. But, when he arrived, improvements were still two months away and business was nonexistent.

“I had second thoughts,” he conceded. But, in the year since the street’s opening, he has added three employees. Business is now so brisk that Valdes begins working at 5 a.m. and keeps 80-hour weeks, he said. He even considered expanding his 1,400-square-foot store by another 2,000 feet. But his landlord has told him that the entire block is rented out.

A stroll along the former mall shows how far the street still has to go. Nowhere are the rooftop gardens, sidewalk cafes and goose-neck light fixtures called for in city design guidelines.

Reflecting Pools Empty

In fact, reflecting pools on each of the three blocks lie empty; the city gave up maintaining them several years ago.

Rows and rows of parked cars sit on the vacant lot where the city hopes a developer will erect an office building.

And the street’s southernmost block still resembles, in Behrens’ words, “a ghost town.” Five storefronts near the former Penney store sport “for lease” signs.

“If a place looks like it’s a loser,” Matthews said of merchants’ reluctance to locate there, “then you’ll probably be a loser going into it.”

Such cynics as Graham, the former A Street clothier, take these as signs that the latest redevelopment project is as doomed as its predecessor.

“It’ll never be a success,” Graham grumbled. “They’ll never bring it back, no matter how much money they spend. The damage has already been done.”

But Behrens doesn’t buy that.

“Five years from now,” he predicted, “it’s going to be nice down here.”