Things Looking Up at Once Downtrodden Oceanside Waterfront

As the sun settled behind the Oceanside Municipal Pier, Giuseppi Laddomada snagged a hook into chunks of squid, and, with a whip of his wrist, cast a fishing line into the Pacific.

For the last 15 years, Laddomada has gone to the pier almost as often as waves rumble to the Strand, Oceanside’s mile-long strip of beach.

Laddomada said that a few years ago drug dealers and prostitutes frequented the Strand, sharing the turf with anglers and surfers.

“I tell you a story,” said Laddomada, a retired 74-year-old ship engineer who immigrated from Italy in 1948. “There were thousands and thousands of prostitutes and so much dope. Terrible, terrible things,” he said shaking his head.

“There are still drug dealers,” Laddomada concedes, “but the family is coming back to the beach.”

For the skeptics, who still remember the Strand as the stage where Marines and peace protesters clashed during the tumultuous years of the Vietnam War, such stories proclaiming a Strand comeback are difficult to believe.

But city officials, developers and neighbors say this fisherman’s tale about the beach can be swallowed hook, line and sinker.

The Oceanside Community Development Commission, the city’s redevelopment agency, along with developers and the city, have spent $89.5 million in the last 13 years to bring the Strand back to its glory days.

Pacific Street, which parallels the beach, was once bordered by an ugly chain-link fence, but it is now lined with palm trees. The pier, the longest in the state and once a rickety skeleton ravaged by winter storms, now stands like a bulwark. Seedy hotels that drew crooks and prostitutes are being replaced with condominiums--both high-priced and, with federal assistance, many low-income units.

This year, as Oceanside celebrates its centennial, Mayor Larry Bagley and fellow city leaders proudly tell of the pier’s restoration and its significance: the family has retaken the beachfront.

Officials concede that improving the Strand was not their original goal. Successes at the beach, however, have bolstered city leaders’ confidence to again tackle the problem whose solution has eluded them: reviving a desolate downtown commercial center.

Glamorous reviews of other booming coastal communities--Newport Beach, Carmel, Monterey--made Oceanside officials disdainful of their own image: a raucous military town catering to Marines from nearby Camp Pendleton.

Envy led the city on overambitious projects, flawed by the promise to cure downtown’s woes “overnight,” said Patricia Hightman, the city’s redevelopment director.

In 1981, for example, when the prospect of becoming North County’s office capital appeared possible after a Canadian firm offered to build two 11-story office towers, city officials hastily bulldozed two downtown blocks, overrunning several legitimate, but small, shops.

Hightman said the project failed to gain financing and collapsed. In hindsight, she added, it was clearly out of place in an almost barren downtown that lacked a retail base and customers.

“We were in such a hurry to grow, we didn’t realize that, in order to have a commercial sector, you needed a residential sector first,” Hightman said.

“Our philosophy, to lure businesses by showing them we had a residential-customer base, came about by trial and error,” she said. “It wasn’t that we woke up one morning and all of a sudden realized that we had to develop the Strand. Unfortunately, it wasn’t that easy.”

Many people, including members of the Oceanside Merchants Assn., once complained that the revival was taking too long. But such criticism has been stunted as redevelopment efforts show eagerly awaited results: a rise in tourism and a drop in crime.

“On a Thursday, Friday or Saturday night, there is in excess of 200 people out on the pier as late as 9:30 p.m.,” said Ray Duncan, aquatics superintendent for the city’s Recreation Department. “There’s no question about it, families feel safe out here even at that late hour.”

Statistics show that 10,000 people wander the sandy shores, between 8th Street and Wisconsin Avenue each weekday, he said. On weekends, that number swells to 30,000 a day. Such crowds, double the numbers recorded five years ago, are drawn in part by the improved beach.

To correct erosion of its precious commodity, the city, with a $3-million appropriation from Congress, hauled 1-million cubic yards of sand to the beach in 1983 from nearby San Luis Rey River Valley.

And, since $5 million was spent two years ago to rebuild the 1,942-foot pier, crowds have increased from 1,000 daily to 3,000-5,000 this summer.

“The comeback of the Strand is your typical example of the overnight success that takes 10 years,” said developer Rich Cicoletti of Oceanside Beach Partners. Cicoletti, along with partners Ken Himsvark and Jim Watson, were recruited by the city in 1981 to plant residential seeds along the parched sands of the Strand.

The seeds sprouted.

“No financial institution wants to be a pioneer and enter an area that has an image problem,” said Cicoletti, recalling the difficulty he had in pleading with more than 25 financial lenders before finding one that backed him for his $55-million condominium project.

All 293 units of the San Miguel and Sea Village condominiums are slated for completion by the end of 1989. More than 100 units, ranging in price from $170,000 to $260,000, are already occupied.

Seventy more will be occupied in September, after selling out within two weeks.

A Different Picture

Cicoletti, 41, remembers firsthand the crime, drug-dealing and prostitution that plagued the beachfront. On weekends during the Vietnam War, Cicoletti drove from his Long Beach home to fetch cousins stationed at Camp Pendleton.

“Back then, Oceanside was a place where you picked people up and then got out of in a hurry,” he said.

Other developers, deterred by such “unsavory elements,” failed to see the advantages of what Cicoletti says is clearly spelled out in the city’s name. “Every other city near the ocean had developed into a nice community. I saw the changes in Long Beach, and in Santa Monica, and they had their share of problems, too. I knew, someday, Oceanside was going to be nice, too.”

The sheer numbers of families and tourists swarming to the Strand are pushing drug dealers and hoods--who like to operate in isolation--away from the beach, said Sgt. Tom Bussey. The Oceanside native heads the Police Department’s beach detail, which became a full-time, 10-member unit two years ago.

“When you have a lot of good folks around they won’t tolerate the crimes of the past,” Bussey said. “When someone is smoking dope and drinking beer, people come and tell us. We don’t tolerate that. We won’t even allow people to blare their (radios).”

About a month ago, police presence on the Strand was made more visible with the opening of a district office--across the street from a new children’s park equipped with swings, spiral slides and wooden ramps.

Once flooded with illegal activity, the Strand district reported the lowest incidence of crime of the city’s 31 police districts in 1987. In 1986 and 87, there were a scant 22 drug-related arrests along the Strand.

The transformation, however, is far from over.

Just several blocks inland--along Hill Street, Oceanside’s main thoroughfare--dilapidated stores and crime coexist, troubling residents and city officials.

“If we bring in all these tourists to the beach but have no place to send them to do their purchasing, we’ll lose them,” said Shell Conway, president of the Oceanside Merchants Assn. “It was a long time getting started, and now we’re showing good progress, but we can’t stop now.”

Hightman, the redevelopment director, agrees, and believes it’s time to strike downtown. The agency has signed an agreement with Bank of America allowing Oceanside commercial property owners to obtain low-interest loans for exterior improvements.

“It’ll give them the opportunity to paint, put up new signs or redo their facades,” she said.

Hightman said such projects, designed to instill pride in community ownership, will also enhance the city’s major project--a new civic center.

The $20-million complex, now under construction and scheduled to open in fall, 1989, will occupy a 170,000-square-foot area bound by 3rd, 4th, Nevada and Hill streets: the heart of downtown.

“We’re all betting on that one,” Hightman said.

Back on the pier, Laddomada agreed that the city’s bet was a good one.

“I tell you a story,” he said, recounting his youthful days with the Italian navy when he came to port at many of the finest cities in the Mediterranean. “Everywhere there . . . Greece, Italy . . . the cities on the coast are beautiful. I know what makes a beautiful city.

“Trust me,” Laddomada said. He wiped his hands on soiled pants, pushed back his cap, and with a wink, predicted: “Oceanside will be beautiful, too.”