In Eden Gardens, Paradise Regained Could Be Lost to New Temptations

Alice Granados sat at a concrete picnic table in sunny La Colonia Park, recalling the darker days in Eden Gardens when the drugs, stabbings and prostitution made her neighborhood anything but a garden of eden.

Those were the ugly times, when the hookers used to service a dozen men each in an afternoon from the stalls of the park’s public restroom. There were days when the drug dealers were so thick in the largely Latino neighborhood that timid residents couldn’t drive past without one of them pushing his wares against their closed car windows.

That was 1988, the year, Eden Gardens residents proudly say, when they took back their streets, their park and their neighborhood from the pushers, the pimps and the prostitutes.

They formed a community action group to report drug sales--sometimes alerting authorities to their own family members--and successfully lobbied Solana Beach officials to have the county Sheriff’s Department begin foot patrols in the area.

But now the neighborhood finds that its success comes at a price: Suddenly, when no one was looking, Eden Gardens became hot property.

Recent real estate purchases in Eden Gardens, homeowners say, are threatening to dilute the distinctive Latino culture residents have spent more than three generations cultivating.

These days, residents are less apt to be on the telephone reporting a drug deal than they are fending off the offers of up to half a million dollars that have begun pouring into their newly revitalized community.

One by one, Mexican families are selling their homes and moving out of Eden Gardens. Some have been driven out by higher taxes. Others have decided to cash in on lucrative offers for their properties.

The result: Charming haciendas are being replaced by apartment buildings and pricey new condos, locking out the newest Eden Gardens generation from buying homes in the community where they grew up.

“There was a time when Hispanics owned all this,” Alice Granados said, looking up at the red-tiled roofs that dot the hillside just west of Interstate 5 near Lomas Santa Fe. “You get a little heartbroken when you see your neighbors, your relatives, packing up to leave.

“You want the place to stay the same, like it always has. But you can’t talk them out of it. It’s just sad to sit by and watch as a community loses its spirit and its soul.”

For years, Eden Gardens has been recognized as a sort of North County anomaly, a close-knit Mexican barrio sandwiched between some of the most expensive real estate in Southern California: Rancho Santa Fe and the Pacific coastline.

Settled in the 1920s by Mexican laborers who tended the huge estates of nearby Rancho Santa Fe, Eden Gardens quickly became a neighborhood with distinct boundaries and family ties.

Unlike surrounding Solana Beach, a city with no real downtown or community center, it was a community with a there there.

In Eden Gardens, everyone was either a son or a daughter, a cousin, nephew or niece to his or her neighbor. Residents took pride in their cluster of authentic Mexican restaurants, including Fidel’s, Tony’s Jacal, and the Bluebird and Market cafes.

They were especially proud of the streets with Latino surnames, named for the original settlers; of the occasional mailbox painted the red, green and white of the Mexican flag, and of tiny St. Leo’s Mission, the church they built from the ground up, where most services are still said in Spanish.

In fiercely guarding its Latino heritage in the midst of Solana Beach’s affluent white-collar suburbia, Eden Gardens has repeatedly tapped into its deeply rooted community spirit to combat crime, drug use and citizen apathy.

“The place has turned around,” said Norm Berg, a Solana Beach real estate agent. “While some people still see it as a Mexican barrio, others look at Eden Gardens and see opportunity. Properties are changing hands there.”

Now, not a week passes when Martha Castallanos doesn’t receive a letter, phone call or unsolicited visit from investors eyeing her tiny one-story home on Hernandez Street.

“There was a day not too long ago when parents would tell their daughters, ‘Don’t you dare go to Eden Gardens, they’ll rape you and steal your car.’ And they weren’t far from the truth,” said Castallanos, who moved to the neighborhood in 1927.

“Now we get calls all the time from people who want to buy our property. It’s funny, our pastor told us 25 years ago, ‘Hold on to your little pieces of land. Some day they’ll be worth a million dollars.’ And he wasn’t too far from the truth.”

Sensing the neighborhood’s comeback, the city of Solana Beach is ready to begin investing in Eden Gardens.

This fall, the city will begin constructing an $800,000 neighborhood center in La Colonia Park that officials hope will continue to lure local residents back into the area.

In the years to come, officials say, Eden Gardens--with its popular restaurants and Latino flair--could become a draw for both residents and tourists alike.

“It’s another step to bring Eden Gardens into the mainstream,” said Solana Beach City Manager Michael Huse. “The neighborhood represents Solana Beach’s past, the way this city used to look. Who knows, one day Eden Gardens could become the Old Town of Solana Beach.”

But some residents--and some City Council members--aren’t sure they want Eden Gardens to become like San Diego’s Old Town.

“I don’t think there’s any real Mexicans living in Old Town anymore, are there?” said Councilwoman Celine Olson. “Unlike Old Town, we don’t want to drive out the real Mexicans just to bring in the pseudo-Mexicans. We like the restaurants just the way they are--owned by real Mexicans.”

Even Olson isn’t sure how long Eden Gardens can retain its original character. Like others, she has seen the new apartment buildings multiply and the oversize, newly built homes and condos beginning to crowd out the quaint red-roofed homes built 60 and 70 years ago.

“Anglos are buying in by the droves,” she said, “and so the character of that neighborhood will inevitably change. But I’ll tell you one thing: There will be a great resistance on this council to any new development that would spoil the character of Eden Gardens.”

That character--indeed, even the neighborhood’s very name--was instilled early. Martha Castallanos recalls the late 1920s, when her father worked in the groves of Rancho Santa Fe, when no one owned a car and few people cared about having one.

“It was like paradise, everyone was like a family,” she said. For years, she said, she was related in some way to every single person on her street. “That’s when people started to call it Eden Gardens.”

But there were troubled times as well. In the 1930s, Mexican schoolchildren in the neighborhood were segregated from whites. “We didn’t care,” Castallanos said. “We’d rather have been with Mexican children from our own neighborhood anyway.”

Vera Rodriguez, another longtime neighborhood resident and Castallanos’ aunt, said the young were blind to the racism they encountered when they left Eden Gardens.

“We always had to sit in the balcony at the La Paloma Theater in Encinitas,” she said. “I always thought it was because we could see better up there. Now I realize they didn’t want the Mexicans sitting down below.”

Eventually, things changed in Eden Gardens--for better and worse. The pool halls either closed down or became restaurants like the Bluebird Cafe. In the 1960s, I-5 sliced through the heart of Eden Gardens, shrinking it to its present one square mile.

Then, in the 1970s and ‘80s, Eden Gardens got hooked on drugs.

Cocaine and heroin were regularly dealt out of houses, apartment buildings and right on the street, by locals and later by illegal aliens who moved into the neighborhood. When La Colonia Park was built in the late 1970s, it became the focal point of the neighborhood’s drug scene.

But the worst of it, Alice Granados said, was the refuse the druggies and their kind left behind. On some mornings, local children would use the syringes and used condoms they found in the bushes and on the sidewalks to mimic the illicit activities they witnessed day after day in the Solana Beach neighborhood.

“You’d see these little children holding hypodermic needles, trying to imitate the people they saw using drugs,” said Granados, a grandmother of five. “They’d stumble around, their eyes half-closed, their speech slurred. You didn’t have to know the children to be struck with how sad the situation had become.”

“It was terrible,” recalled resident Al Gonzales. “You kept asking yourself, ‘Who’s next? Who’s going to start using now?’ ”

In 1988, Gonzales was among two dozen citizens who gathered at St. Leo’s Mission. The meeting eventually led them to form Eden Gardens Against Drugs, and residents went to work on their telephones, reporting drug deals.

No longer was Eden Gardens a scared and silent little community, too timid to turn in one of its own. Sons and cousins went to jail, Granados now says, so that on this bright weekday morning, she and her neighbors could again enjoy the suburban beauty of La Colonia Park.

“You hated to point the finger at a relative,” she said. “But we just got tired of seeing people shoot up in our back yards. And we realized that to get the job done, we had to do it together, not alone.

“We had to pick up the telephone and report people we knew well. And we did it. Our kids can play soccer in this park again. Families can have picnics here. It’s a lot sunnier around here these days.”

While the dealers have moved underground, problems remain.

Last fall, a sheriff’s sting operation made numerous drug arrests at an apartment complex near La Colonia Park. And uniformed patrolmen walk neighborhood streets, looking for tips from residents who watch for a new drug flare-up.

But signs of new life abound in Eden Gardens. Residents like to say they’ve reestablished Eden Gardens’ reputation.

That’s the way Doug DeJardine likes it.

DeJardine, a sergeant for the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department, was assigned to patrol Eden Gardens in the early 1970s. He soon fell in love with the strong-shouldered ethnic neighborhood, which he says reminded him of his upbringing in East Los Angeles.

“It’s my kind of place,” said DeJardine, who has since been reassigned. “Sure, there were some dark years. But Eden Gardens is family. The people there are authentic folks.

“Even though it’s still a barrio of sorts, it’s got soul. It’s a recognizable place with distinct boundaries. I mean, you know you’re in Eden Gardens the moment you set foot in the place. Where else in North County can you say that?”