As much as the Franciscan plant shaped the old Atwater business strip, the new shopping center will reshape it.

More than four years have passed since the Franciscan Ceramics plant in Atwater shut down, and still a ghost town timelessness hangs over the earthen-colored factory on Los Feliz Boulevard.

Narrow alleys between its 1920s brick office buildings are deserted. Half-finished plates and broken chips of clay still lie on assembly lines where workers left them after the last shift. The honeycomb kilns that fired the popular Franciscan lines of dinnerware stand listlessly--deformed by the October earthquake.

Now change is bearing down swiftly on this relic of American industry.

Shurgin Development Corp. of Los Angeles, which has been negotiating to buy the 45-acre property, has cleared the last of many obstacles and expects to close the deal next month.

Toxic Cleanup Planned

Almost immediately, the company will begin a $6.5-million toxic cleanup to remove lead from a dump where kiln slag was discarded for decades.

Then, what remains of the factory that led the American ceramics industry for 60 years will be summarily dismantled.

Its memory will be carried on in a museum Shurgin has promised to build somewhere among the theaters and clothing stores of a new shopping center planned for the site, said Emmett Albergotti, vice president for acquisition.

In photographs, product displays and written histories, the museum will tell the story of Gladding, McBean & Co., a ceramics firm that bought the plant in the 1920s and parlayed its own production breakthroughs, a homey but solid design and a name borrowed from an order of monks to fashion America’s pre-eminent lines of dinnerware.

Hatheway & McKenna, a Mission Viejo historical consultant hired by Shurgin, described the factory as a historical resource of worldwide significance that should be listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Since a shopping center obviously wouldn’t qualify as a historic place, the firm recommended that a Historic American Building Survey precede demolition. The survey, including 100 archival photographs of the plant, was completed this summer.

As much as the Franciscan plant shaped the old Atwater business strip--a collection of small, specialty and family-oriented shops--the new shopping center will reshape it.

At a meeting last week, residents divided evenly in their opinion of the change, said Ed Waite, president of the Atwater Residents Assn.

Those in favor saw the development as a source of jobs and business, those against as a source of unwanted traffic and urban ills, Waite said.

As for the Franciscan dinnerware lines, the future is also cloudy, said Delleen Enge, for many years Franciscan’s in-house historian.

Three Famous Lines

The three most illustrious Franciscan lines, “Desert Rose,” “Apple” and “Fresh Fruit,” are still being manufactured in England by Waterford, the Irish crystal maker, Enge said.

Waterford got the line by buying out Wedgwood, the British china maker, which bought out Gladding, McBean & Co. and closed the Franciscan plant.

Enge, who owns 40,000 pieces of Franciscan and supplies thousands of collectors around America, won’t touch the new stuff.

“Nobody who is a collector of Franciscan or has a collection of the original wants it, because it is so poorly done,” she said.