Santa Clarita Faces Daunting Task of East Newhall Overhaul : Redevelopment: City officials want to recapture the area’s Western glory days, but many obstacles stand in the way.

The last attempt to revitalize east Newhall more than a decade ago gave birth to the Walk of Western Stars, an attempt to lure tourists that draws a modest crowd once a year to honor silver-screen legends, but is otherwise ignored.

But that was before the area, a mixture of commercial and service businesses, low-income neighborhoods and senior citizen housing, became incorporated in 1987. And now, it’s in Santa Clarita, and it’s the city’s turn to try to resurrect an area pocked by thrift shops, pawnshops and a tattoo parlor into the thriving downtown it once was.

Between 1976 and 1987, the year the city was incorporated, Los Angeles County “easily spent $4 million,” said Santa Clarita Councilwoman Jo Anne Darcy, who also is the area’s field deputy for Supervisor Mike Antonovich. Since then, she said, several hundreds of thousands more has been spent on physical improvements to the area.

“It’s an expensive hole,” said Darcy, who supports having a Western theme for downtown Newhall. “It’s going to take probably another $5 million or $10 million to do it right.”

A Santa Cruz consultant hired by the city just completed a six-month study to find out what the community wants in a revitalized Newhall, and the city plans to draft a master plan from the results of the study.

The strip along San Fernando Road near Lyons Avenue at one time had been the political, social, cultural and economic center of the Santa Clarita Valley, blossoming along with the ranching and oil industries, says local historian Jerry Reynolds. Founded in 1876, Newhall hosted the railroad station, county administration, library, sheriff’s station and the area’s largest shopping areas.

“Once upon a time, people would come in from the wilds of Acton and Castaic to do their shopping and everything else,” Reynolds said. “At one time, in two blocks of town they supported four saloons, so there were probably lots of thirsty people there too.”

But in the 1960s, Reynolds said, the master-planned Valencia community was started, the Southern Pacific railroad closed down the train station, and the county moved its offices north to Valencia.

“Newhall got bypassed, and now it’s sort of a backwater,” Reynolds said.

It’s Newhall’s glory days as a Western town that the city wants to recapture, but it’s a history to which this now mostly Latino neighborhood seems indifferent.

Several Hollywood actors made their homes in and around Newhall, including early Western screen actors William S. Hart, Gene Autry and Harry Carey.

“Cowboys? Whatever. It doesn’t matter to me,” said Alfonso Arriaga, owner of a jewelry and appliance store on San Fernando Road that caters almost exclusively to Latinos. “This part of the city is more for Latino people.”

And the presence of a large Latino population is the reality that some say the city and businesses are ignoring in their revitalization efforts.

“It kind of smacks of racism,” said Alfredo Vasquez, director of the county’s community service center in Newhall. Vasquez said the revitalization efforts are in large part a response to people uncomfortable with the large number of Latino residents.

But store owners see it as a matter of attracting people with money to spend.

“If we want to attract the same amount of businesses as the malls, we’re going to have to do more to encourage the Anglos to come here,” said Susan Davy, who, with her husband, owns an antiques store on the strip.

Like other businessmen in Newhall, as well as residents, Arriaga is concerned about crime, although he feels it has died down recently. His jewelry and appliance shop, one of the largest Latino-owned businesses in the area, has been robbed three times in the last year, forcing him to spend more than $3,300 in security measures, such as bars on the windows and doors.

But mostly it’s the economy that has Arriaga down.

“Before, it was a good business,” said Arriaga, who opened his store five years ago and also owns a video rental shop a block away. “It’s just not the same now; people just don’t have the money to buy anything.”

Other business owners along San Fernando Road echo a complaint heard more than a decade ago: The strip won’t attract pedestrians until cars slow down. As it is, drivers race down San Fernando Road on their way to the Antelope Valley Freeway, ignoring the posted 30 m.p.h. speed limit and trying to hit every green light.

“Right now, it’s just not conducive to foot traffic,” said Davy, whose family has operated F.U.N. Inc. in Newhall for more than 50 years. “The women get out of their cars and the wind blows up their skirts and nobody wants to cross the street.”

It’s a complaint familiar to Steve Dukett, the county’s director of economic development in the early 1980s, when county officials last attempted to revitalize Newhall.

While the county spent $1.5 million on improvements to the area such as signage, crosswalks, sidewalks, streets and gutters, it was only a fraction of the $9 million that a study had estimated would be needed.

Although the business owners enthusiastically participated in discussions of plans to revitalize the area, Dukett said, few took advantage of marketing incentives, such as loans and rebates, the county made available to improve buildings.

“I wouldn’t suggest that anything went wrong,” said Dukett, who now works for Lancaster as the city’s redevelopment director. “It’s just that there wasn’t any ongoing effort. As soon as the area incorporated in 1987, the county weaned itself from it.”

Others, including Darcy, blamed the onset of a recession for the county program’s dissolution, and the same economic constraints that smothered the previous revitalization could hold this one back.

“This program is going to weigh heavily on what we have in the budget,” Darcy said. “If the block grants are limited, then so is the program.”

The revitalization also will depend on how much local businesses participate in the program, Darcy said, and how well they can act as a group, instead of independently.

For a revitalization to succeed, however, commitment by local business is important, but not enough, officials said.

“The prime ingredient is real market demand,” said Dale Beland, senior principal of Pasadena-based Cotton/Beland/Associates Inc. “If there is no economic demand to generate new development, revitalization is extremely difficult.”

Businesses have to conduct market assessments to find what community needs are not being met by the other strip malls and shopping centers in the area.

They have to develop a unique quality “that can’t be destroyed by someone coming into town and building a Wal-Mart,” Beland said. “It’s got to have some kind of draw to make people go there, and they have to be able to get service that they can’t get at a big, impersonal mall.”

To do that, businesses must be willing to make meaningful, and often dramatic, maneuvers, Beland said, not just “cosmetic storefront changes.”

Often, buildings need to be torn down, parking structures need to be built and commercial areas expanded, Beland said, and that means consolidating properties and displacing businesses.

“It can be painful, and that’s the bottom line,” Beland said.

A so-called historical area such as Newhall has an uphill climb to compete with its newer neighbors in Valencia, which last year opened the area’s first shopping center. While malls can force their tenants to advertise in blocks or adopt similar storefront facades, a downtown area has no power to do so, unless the shops agree to form a business improvement district.

But even with such an alliance, the current economic climate can severely hamper progress, with businesses being loathe to spend large amounts of money on marketing and capital improvements during a recession.

“This is the toughest time in the last several years to try to pull it off,” Beland said. “But that doesn’t mean it can’t happen.”