Corona Has Ambitious Plans to Bring ‘the Circle’ Around

Old-timers love to tell stories about out-of-towners exiting the Riverside Freeway, turning onto Grand Boulevard and circling the city as many as a dozen times before realizing they were not getting anywhere.

While a source of amusement, most longtime residents say this three-mile boulevard that surrounds Corona is what makes the city unique as it wends its way past quaint, tree-lined neighborhoods, small industries and grand Victorian homes.

More importantly, Grand Boulevard, known as “the Circle,” defines the center of town, a place where everyone used to live, work and shop, and is proof that the city is more than a mere bedroom community of Orange County.

During the late 1980s, Corona was one of the state’s fastest growing cities, and urban sprawl sent its neighborhoods in all directions. But many newcomers from Orange County and elsewhere don’t even know what the Circle is, and they often end up bypassing downtown for their own neighborhood shopping centers.

Now business owners in the Circle want to revitalize the area and return some of downtown Corona’s former glory to a number of city blocks now blighted by drug activity, vagrancy, graffiti and prostitution.

Some long-neglected homes and businesses need to be razed or repaired, and, if nothing is done soon, business owners and tenants fear the situation will only get worse.

“We’ve got the same problem a lot of cities in Southern California have--new development outside the core area and neglect on the inside,” said Kent Hansen, a Corona attorney and a leader in the Downtown Business Assn.

Many of the problems are around East 6th Street, which bisects the Circle east to west and was once home to a movie theater and a J.C. Penney department store. City officials have targeted several transient hotels in the area, which they believe contribute to urban decay.

“This is the cheapest place to live without any money,” said Robert Keith, 37, standing in front of the Victoria Hotel, a white-painted structure that rents rooms for $90 a week. Muggings, prostitution and drug sales are common in the area.

At the Mission Apartments next door, paramedics were removing the body of an elderly man with emphysema who had died early Thursday morning. Neighbors said the old man’s son had been arrested the night before on a drug charge, and no one was around to help. Several women crowded a narrow hallway shouting, “The old man is dead!”

“This is the last place they come before they’re on the streets,” said Ben Gonzales, 33, the manager of the Mission Apartments, where he lives in a tiny, two-room apartment with his wife and two children.

As he walked through his living quarters, he pointed out code violations, a lack of adequate ventilation and moldy walls. Dirty clothes were stacked in a corner.

“I do the best I can without being cruel” to the tenants, Gonzales said. “I’m no Motel 6, that’s for damn sure. But I give people a chance.”

Police, who have focused some effort on the downtown district, are applying for federal grants to open up a crime prevention office in the area, said Police Chief John Cleghorn.

“We want a community-oriented approach,” Cleghorn said. The city wants to open the office “because of the frequency of the activity and the business groups that are applying pressure in the area.”

According to police, drug activity and graffiti are no more frequent in the area than anywhere else in Corona, albeit more noticeable. In 1990, police made 36 arrests for prostitution, and the majority were in the downtown area, said Capt. Larry Lewis. The homeless are also more likely to be found in the area than elsewhere, he said, because it is close to a soup kitchen and a local armory.

“It ebbs and flows,” Cleghorn said. “If we crack down on prostitutes, they leave for a while and then they’re back.”

Even with homelessness and crime, many residents and business owners say those conditions are isolated and do not represent an accurate picture of the Circle. Many old Victorian homes and quaint bungalows, known for their intricate woodwork, line Grand Boulevard and have been restored.

New office buildings and factories have gone up near the freeway, and the city library and a major hospital within the Circle are being renovated and expanded.

Even the Corona Mall, a local shopping district at 6th and Main streets, has had some success in attracting shoppers on special Thursday night promotions started last year. Most of all, the Circle still has a small-town feel, even with a city population of over 70,000.

“You can still walk down the street and speak to strangers and say ‘Hi,’ ” said Jim Pauly, the co-owner of Emerson-Pauly Men’s Wear, which has been in Corona since 1914. “The mall has kept the small-town atmosphere alive. It’s sort of a nice feeling.”

But big-city problems were unavoidable, and many retail business owners admit that it was a lot better once. In the 1940s and 1950s, 6th Street was the main east-west thoroughfare, and traffic from all over Riverside County made its way through the Circle.

Auto-oriented businesses such as car lots, drive-in restaurants and motels thrived. At the time, Corona had a steady population of about 10,000 people, and many residents were tied to the city’s prosperous citrus industries.

“We used to be open from 8 a.m. to 9:30 or 10:30 p.m. on Saturday,” Pauly said. “That was their day off. Whenever the customers stopped coming in, that’s when we closed.”

In fact, the city was so provincial up to then that there was an “unofficial code” to restrict Mexican and Italian families to the north half of the Circle, and whites to the south half, according to city historians.

But the opening of the Riverside Freeway and the decline of agriculture in the early 1960s began to change Corona, which was once known for its packinghouses and the Sunkist lemon processing plant. Traffic was rerouted from Grand Boulevard onto the freeway, forcing many businesses to relocate or close.

In response, business owners and city officials made a controversial attempt to redevelop the area, including realigning Main Street, tearing down old businesses and putting in an open-air mall.

But the mall failed to attract a major department store and by 1980 was dominated by professional offices of lawyers, realtors and insurers. Even in the past year, several businesses in the mall have either closed or moved out of the Circle, leaving many vacant slots in the shopping center.

Last month, vacancy in the mall was 8.13%, the highest in about three years, said John Yasment of Sierra Vista Realty, whose firm manages an office complex at the site. In 1988, the rate was 2.74%, according to city officials.

“We had someone try to start an upscale women’s clothing store, but it just couldn’t make it,” Yasment said. “. . . Here we have a situation where we are situated at Main Street and the (Riverside) Freeway, and we have difficulty getting people in.”

He said some business owners want to convert the mall and surrounding area into a million-square-foot development that will include several anchor retail stores and an office complex.

But that might not help the Circle overcome the fact that it has become an odd mix of new buildings and unattractive, decaying businesses, such as old motels, defunct car dealerships and drive-in restaurants.

“We have just about every combination we can think of,” said George Guayante, Corona’s director of redevelopment. “You name it, there’s at least one of them in the area.”

Further, many have complained that mini-malls, which sprung up on several corners in the Circle in the 1980s, will make it more difficult to plan redevelopment projects.

“All of the prime corners are being gobbled up by mini-malls,” said Bill Miller, who owns a business in the Corona Mall specializing in buying and selling historic documents. “That makes it hard to find a site for an office building.”

Taking the first step toward comprehensive redevelopment, Corona officials are assessing the existing conditions downtown, including all land and property uses. The entire process could take a year and a half.

Redevelopment talk has gone on since the mid-1980s, with little success. Local skepticism about redevelopment dates back to the city’s previous urban renewal projects and the prospect of the city taking over property by eminent domain.

“I remember one man suggested that the best thing that could happen is if someone dropped a bomb at 6th and Main and wiped out some of those supposed experts on urban renewal,” said A. J. (Dutch) Velthoen, a former mayor of Corona.

Velthoen made the remark at a recent “Coffee Clatch” meeting, a weekday morning ritual of more than 50 years in which veteran business people and city leaders get together and chat.

“You can’t just do it piecemeal,” he added. “You have to do it all at once. I don’t think Corona is ready for that yet.”

Michael Fields, the owner of an auto body shop on the Circle and a co-founder of the Business and Property Owners’ Assn., said he opposes redevelopment that does not account for the costs to the small business owner.

“A lot of people who promote some of these ideas, they’re new here,” he said. “They say, ‘This is nothing like Laguna Beach where I’m from.’ ‘This is nothing like downtown Orange.’ ‘We need to change it and get high-rises.’ ”

Still, he conceded, he sees the need to attract people downtown.

“If you drive down our beautiful freeway, when you get to Main Street, what do you see? Nothing,” he said. “There’s no reason to go downtown. We have to give them a reason to go downtown.”

Most recently, the Downtown Business Assn. proposed assessing a new surcharge on business licenses to clean up the Circle. But it failed before the City Council when another group, the Corona Business and Property Owners’ Assn., said that it would lead to an even higher burden on small businesses. But for the first time, both groups have since agreed to form a committee to create a unified redevelopment plan.

That could be difficult. While some hope that downtown can capture its former pre-eminence, others say it would make more sense to make it a hub of professional office space, such as real estate agencies, banks and insurance offices. At least one local realtor sees great prospects for the area because it’s close to the Riverside Freeway and Interstate 15.

“In the past (the Circle) has lost some of its luster but the potential of the area is the greatest in its history,” said Ken Calvert, a lifetime Corona resident who owns his own commercial and residential real estate firm.

Already, Calvert is planning a two- or three-story office building that would replace an old metal garage that houses a filter manufacturing plant on Main Street. The building, built in the 1920s and one of the oldest remaining industrial facilities left in the city, is rusted and covered with graffiti.

In addition, some members of the Corona Historic Preservation Society are advocating an area with a Spanish Colonial Revival style, including buildings with red tile roofs, arches, courtyards, fountains and ornate facades. Under the plan, professional and service-oriented businesses would be clustered around specialty shops.

The society recently hired an architect to study the possible preservation of the Corona Landmark Theatre and an adjoining office building, which were built in 1929 and are two of the few remaining examples of Spanish Colonial-style architecture in the city. The owners of both structures have taken out demolition permits for the sites after their buildings were determined to be unsafe in an earthquake.

In any case, city officials warn that the Circle could face worse times if a major regional mall is built elsewhere in Corona. Such a prospect has been discussed with developers for the past several years.

A city needs “a sense of place,” said Guayante, the redevelopment director. “We’ve all heard the expression ‘there’s no there there.’ That’s not Corona now. But we could lose that sense of place if we don’t do something to keep it.”