Birthday Party No Piece of Cake : Oxnard: Few people attend a celebration for the city’s 88th year. Officials admit that the $15 charge may have been too expensive.

Eighty-eight years ago, on farmland just southeast of a sugar beet factory, the city of Oxnard was officially established around a central square called the Plaza.

The town named after Henry T. Oxnard filled up with the stores of merchants--Jewish and French immigrants--catering to the 700 mostly Japanese, Mexican, Chinese, and Filipino residents who worked at the factory.

Today the city has grown to a metropolis of 142,000. But the town square that once served as the center of the community has fallen on some difficult times.

Now known as Plaza Park, it has become a gathering site for the city’s homeless and unemployed. It is surrounded by a Social Security office, thrift shops and social agencies.

On Monday, the city celebrated its 88th birthday with a $15-a-plate barbecue at Plaza Park.

About 50 invited guests, most of them city officials, were on hand for the celebration, which featured a veteran country music quartet outfitted in cowboy hats and leather boots.

And watching them were an equal number of uninvited guests: homeless people and unemployed workers who registered some mild complaints that they were not allowed to join in the festivities.

Nicolas Alfaro and Alejandro Salazar were among those who watched from a distance, tapping their fingers on a worn picnic table to the beat of the music.

“We weren’t invited,” said Salazar, 39, who arrived last month from Michoacan, Mexico, and sleeps in the nearby Rescue Mission.

“The songs are nice and the smell of the barbecue fills our stomachs, but parties are always nicer when everybody can come,” he said.

Alfaro said he wanted to join the celebration. He walked up to a registration table but was told that it would cost him $15.

“Where are we supposed to get that kind of money?” he asked. “There’s not much work in the fields and the contractors only hire their friends.”

In fact, part of the reason for holding Monday’s celebration at Plaza Park was to draw some of the city’s non-homeless residents back to the blighted downtown area.

The community’s first birthday celebration in eight years was organized by the city Redevelopment Agency to raise funds for promoting downtown, and the agency promised that the event will become an annual tradition.

But officials conceded that the turnout was disappointing and that the cost of attendance may have been too high for many residents.

One goal of the celebration was to attract, as guests of honor, retirees who were children when the town was founded.

But although the city advertised free lunches to any 88-year-old who cared to attend, only Rose Carlson, a 12-year resident, accepted the invitation.

“It was a good effort,” City Manager Vern Hazen said, “but we need to extend more direct invitations. Also, I think $15 a pop is a little too much for the old-timers.”

One old-timer who did attend was Mayor Nao Takasugi. For the last decade, he has spearheaded the city’s efforts to breathe new life into the downtown.

On Monday, he blew out the candles on the city’s birthday cake.

Takasugi’s parents opened Asahi general store in a fledgling Oxnard in 1907. The Asahi store, which Takasugi no longer owns, still operates on the corner of 7th Street and Oxnard Boulevard.

Back when it opened, it anchored a three-block strip called China Alley that housed many of the city’s Japanese and Chinese families. Laundries, restaurants and saloons occupied the storefronts, and families lived behind and above the stores.

Takasugi, 69, was born on the second floor of the Asahi store, and he remembers playing baseball and football with his friends on 5th Street.

“Downtown was an exciting place. It wasn’t dead after 5 p.m. like it is now,” Takasugi said.