NORTH COUNTY COMMUNITY PROFILE : Escondido Hangs On to Its Charm : Downtown: Vintage homes and storefronts, waitresses who call you by name, and a weekly open-air market are all reminders of the past.

Here is perhaps one of the finest snapshots of North County at the turn of the century:

Of stately Victorian homes, of shade trees lining the boulevard, of children romping in the playground of the elementary school with a name no more fancy than “Central.” A couple of blocks away, a wheelwright bending steel in hot coals and farmers coming to town to sell their fruits and vegetables and their wives’ handicrafts in an open-air market along the main street.

It is a scene as authentic in Escondido today as it was 90 years ago. Sure, new climate-controlled shopping malls and gated country estates provide an upscale tone to this 102-year-old town, but a decidedly different era reigns proudly in the heart of town.

Whoa, world, slow down! What’s the hurry?

Here’s a neighborhood--with streets named Fig and Grape and Birch and Juniper--where homeowners are more worried about refinishing wooden floors and repairing wood-pane windows than they are about where to put a spa or park the RV.

Consider folks like Robert and Joanne Conley, who purchased a Queen Anne-style home known to the local historical society as the Bandy-Conley House.

“We had a new home in Mission Viejo, but we’re both from Illinois and were born in homes like this,” Joanne Conley said. “We came to Escondido on vacation once and found this house. It was for sale and had been vacant for a year.

“We looked past the disrepair and saw a lot of charm,” she said.

So the couple moved here nine years ago, bought the three-story, 3,250-square-foot house with its 11 rooms for $125,000 and began renovating it.

Today, total strangers stop at their front door, knock and ask for tours. They get them. “We allow strangers into our home because we have a piece of history,” she said.

“If people don’t buy these kinds of homes and renovate them, they’d be lost to apartment complexes,” she said with a sigh.

The Conley home, built in 1891 and formerly owned by such people as former Iowa state legislator Abraham O. Garlock and San Diego City Councilman Ed Struiksma, is not the only historical home in Escondido.

On West 8th Avenue is the Culp House, another Queen Anne Victorian home built by brothers Reuben, Luther and Morris who moved to Escondido in 1890 from Gettysburg, Pa.

Three blocks away is the John Lloyd Wright house, a prairie school home constructed in 1913 on East 5th Avenue by the 19-year-old son of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, based on his father’s Ladies Home Journal house of 1906.

While these two- and three-level homes on their manicured square lots are clearly the historical standouts in this older neighborhood, other homes are classics in their own rights--including old California bungalows and some homes built from packaged kits sold through a Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalogue.

The charm of old, central Escondido is not limited to its residential stock. Grand Avenue, once the hub of North County’s historical agribusiness, is hanging on valiantly as a retail destination, even though it has withered badly in the face of new-age competition from the North County Fair regional shopping mall a few miles away, on the city’s south side.

What kind of businesses do you find on Grand Avenue? Ones like Champions, a coffee shop where waitresses call their customers by name and dish up gooey-sweet cinnamon rolls.

A few storefronts away is a collection of antique dealers, each in a separate booth--the kind of a place where you walk in planning to buy absolutely nothing and leave with an old washboard to hang in the laundry room, or a turn-of-the-century baby crib for your granddaughter’s Cabbage Patch doll.

Even some of the stores are old--like The Wardrobe, a men’s clothing store founded in 1905, and The Mercantile, a women’s fashion store that was spawned by the Wardrobe, and Ken Roberts, a men’s store that’s downright contemporary with a 1948 birth date.

“North County Fair is to downtown as Disneyland is to Carmel,” says Alan Krichman, co-owner of The Mercantile. “People who want to be entertained go to the shopping center. People who are serious about dealing with old-fashioned merchandisers come downtown.”

The downtown retailers would like more foot traffic in front of their stores, and City Hall--the very one that has promoted the development of freeway-frontage shopping malls--has tried to help the old-timers downtown by using redevelopment funds to rebuild sidewalks into “pedestrian pathways” with planter trees, as well as brickwork in the roadways and free parking.

The newest gimmick to bring folks back downtown is actually a throwback to Escondido of 1900: a weekly, open-air farmer’s market where local growers pitch their avocados and kiwi fruit and lettuce, and ladies emerge from their home workshops with embroidered wall hangings and home-made jewelry and hand-crafted dolls.

The scene sometimes smacks a bit more carnival than farmer’s market, what with the marinated beef sticks and purple cotton candy, but it nonetheless draws a crowd and, at least for a few hours every Tuesday, Grand Avenue reverts to an earlier time.

You don’t have to watch for cars.

DOWNTOWN ESCONDIDO Population Total (1989 est.): 7,496 Total housing units: 3,068 Average Household size: 2.4 Median age: 29.7 Racial ethnic mix White, 62.4% Latino, 31.9% Asian/other, 5.9% Black, less than 1% Sex: 51.8% female; 48.2% male Median household income: $22,157 Income distribution: Less than $25,000, 57.3%; $25,000-$49,999, 33.6%; $50,000+, 9.0% Education: College graduate, 15.3% Some College, 21.4% No high school diploma, 32.5% High school graduate, 30.7%