Downtown Merchants Recall Better Days and Fear for Their Future : Oxnard: Once the city’s thriving core, the business district is now a hodgepodge of struggling retailers and abandoned stores.

Louis Salinas often thinks of returning to downtown Oxnard.

He didn’t want to leave in the first place. But as the downtown continued to decay, as merchant after merchant fled the sputtering business district, the jeweler felt that he had no choice.

“I’d like to move back, but there is no incentive,” said Salinas, who relocated his jewelry store to a north Oxnard strip mall in 1983 after three decades of working downtown. “There is no reason for me to believe that downtown is going to prosper, that it is going to make it.”

There are a lot of merchants, who have stuck it out and sunk their life savings into downtown businesses, who wonder the same thing.

Once the thriving core of the city, downtown Oxnard has become a hodgepodge of struggling retailers and abandoned storefronts. Like downtowns across America, Oxnard’s central business district has lost customers to indoor malls and strip retail centers and television shopping channels.

But it also has been hurt, merchants say, by bungled redevelopment schemes and the city’s desire to lure tax-generating businesses out near the freeway.

“The city fathers are going after the big money, and they are stepping on the little merchants,” Salinas said. “They went after those dollars and destroyed downtown.”

Over the years, downtown revitalization has been studied and restudied at a cost of about $200,000. There have been blue-ribbon panels and revitalization committees established to help jump-start the troubled area.

Now, city officials have launched an ambitious program to consolidate the old plans into a master plan for the 50-square-block area aimed at attracting millions of dollars of private investment over the next two decades.

The $45,000 study also will serve to guide the city’s redevelopment efforts.

Many merchants see the master plan as the best chance, and perhaps their last opportunity, to restore the downtown to prominence.

“Downtown is supposed to have some kind of major attraction. It’s sad to say but there’s not enough down here to make people want to come,” said Maria Balderrama, manager of Anita’s Bridal Shop on A Street. “Whatever plan they have, I hope it works.”

Downtown Oxnard stretches from Wooley Road on the south to 2nd Street on the north, and from C Street on the west to the Southern Pacific railroad tracks on the east.

There are about 450 downtown businesses, said Dennis Matthews, administrator of the city’s Redevelopment Agency. The area has a vacancy rate of only about 10%, Matthews said, primarily because downtown rents are the least expensive in the city.

Much of downtown is a ragged collection of pawnshops and discount stores and one-room eateries. It has a couple of churches and a funeral home.

Small, sit-down patios, anchored by fountains that no longer work, line a stretch of A Street where an S-shaped road snakes along for three blocks.

At the center of the business district is Plaza Park where the homeless gather and wait out the day. Nearby, the old Vogue movie theater has been converted into a thrift shop.

Dirt lots, cleared over the years by redevelopment, sit empty and waiting for development.

But in pockets of this business district there are signs of rejuvenation.

The newly constructed red-brick city library and transportation center are jewels in this rugged landscape. The Redevelopment Agency performed a face lift on an old building in the 500 block of A Street, creating a stucco facade that contrasts sharply with an abandoned retail strip on the other side of the street.

In the last seven years, Matthews said the city has poured about $25 million in redevelopment money into efforts to improve downtown.

“We’re trying to lead by example,” Matthews said. “Our role is not to replace the private sector, but to prime the pump to get the private sector process working again because it left downtown years ago.”

At the heart of those redevelopment efforts is the $10-million Heritage Square project at 7th and A streets, 13 turn-of-the-century farmhouses that have been redesigned to accommodate an assortment of businesses from lawyers to insurance agents to a hair stylist.

About 70% of the project’s 50,000 square feet of leasable space is occupied. The agency, which owns all but two of the houses, is trying to sell the antique buildings to private investors.

Oxnard Councilman Andres Herrera moved his business to Heritage Square when it opened in late 1991.

“I wanted to come back to downtown so I could see it grow and develop,” Herrera said. “I think this can serve as a good catalyst for future development. I really see the possibility of regaining what we used to have in the downtown.”

Downtown used to be the place to shop in Oxnard, recalled Chuck Johnson, owner of Johnson’s Television and Video.

The store that Johnson’s father founded in 1937 thrived side-by-side with shoe stores and upscale clothiers. Then, merchants built their trade on personalized service. Shop owners knew their customers by name.

For downtown merchants, Johnson said, that kind of service never wavered.

“Where else can you get that today?” he asked. “I don’t know or understand the one-time sale. Here it’s a lifetime investment.”

But in the 1960s, Johnson and others say two things happened to seal the fate of downtown Oxnard. Joining the popular development practice of the time, the Redevelopment Agency blocked off A Street, between 2nd and 5th streets, and turned it into a pedestrian mall.

That alone served to choke off customers and drive business owners away.

But even before that project was completed, the Esplanade Mall was opened on the outskirts of town, causing customers and merchants to abandon downtown for the convenience of one-stop shopping.

Property owners eventually persuaded the city to reopen the street after agreeing to pay for the work. That project cost merchants nearly half a million dollars and was completed in 1987.

By then, business owners say downtown Oxnard was a virtual wasteland.

“I don’t know if I can afford them to have another fiasco,” said Johnson, who continues to make monthly payments on a $10,000 bill for the street work.

For the old-timers such as Johnson, who have staked all they own on a comeback for the downtown district, the current city practice of promoting development along the Ventura Freeway remains a sore point.

The city’s booming northeast area--home to the Oxnard Auto Mall, a Price Club and, coming soon, a Walmart--is expected to generate millions of dollars in sales tax revenue each year for the cash-strapped city.

Oxnard was so hungry for those tax dollars that it agreed to return a portion of the sales tax receipts to the developers.

“They do that so they can get more tax revenue and then they’ll throw us a bone every once in a while,” said Steve Otani, who manages Otani’s Seafood Restaurant near Heritage Square. “We’ve had all of these committees and consultants and nothing has ever happened.”

Still, those who have been in the area over the years can’t see themselves leaving. For them, doing business downtown is a commitment, passed from one generation to the next.

“I grew up in downtown, it’s family,” said Vince Behrens, who took over American Drive-in Cleaners from his father who started the business in the 1940s. “I just can’t turn my back on it.”