Dana Point Study Puts Downtown Front and Center

Seventy years ago it made sense, at least on paper.

Build a thriving resort community along the pristine coastal bluffs halfway between San Diego and Los Angeles and they will come.

Today in Dana Point, however, only part of the promise has come true.

This coastal community named for 19th-Century explorer and author Richard Henry Dana has nationally known hotels and a bustling harbor that attracts thousands of tourists every week.

But most people hustle right past the bluff-top town center laid out by the 1920s-era developers, leaving Dana Point, one of the county’s newest and smallest cities, suffering from the ills of a large, aging inner city.

Vacancy rates in the town center district are 35% overall and much higher in some of the newer commercial buildings that sit embarrassingly empty despite rents that have decreased by as much as 50%, city officials say.

Shoppers, especially local residents, have virtually deserted the downtown along Pacific Coast Highway for newer centers in neighboring communities where movie theaters, restaurants, trendy coffee shops and boutiques are accessible, centrally located and thriving, according to Chamber of Commerce estimates.

“We need to make some major changes,” said Ed Conway, a well-known real estate broker who specializes in commercial and residential properties in Dana Point. “And we need them done today, before we lose two or three more businesses in the meantime.”

Local officials are studying how to rejuvenate the downtown and correct an experiment that, despite lofty intentions, just didn’t work.

The approximately 80 acres of commercial property that are considered the downtown of Dana Point were designed by an early Laguna Beach developer, Anna Walters.

In 1923, Walters subdivided the then dusty bluff top into 60-by-100-foot lots that started at $1,000, came up with the still-existent “lantern” theme for the street names, built half a dozen homes and put in sidewalks, curbs, light poles and six buildings.

When Dana Point failed to take off quickly--largely because of lack of coastal access--her resort plan was taken over by Los Angeles developer Sid Woodruff, noted for erecting the famed Hollywood sign on a Los Angeles hillside. Evidence of their efforts, though ultimately unsuccessful, remain partially intact, said Ed Knight, Dana Point’s director of community development.

“If the city had ever been built the way it was planned, it would have been an interesting place,” Knight said. “There was a grand resort that looked like the Hearst Castle planned for the Headlands, movie theaters at the La Plaza center, a high school and elementary school. But it never happened like that.”

By the time Dana Point incorporated in 1989, it had expanded into Capistrano Beach and parts of what was originally Laguna Niguel--far beyond what Walters envisioned. But it is the bulk of the original bluff-top area, today called the couplet or town center, that has become the focus of a new city study.

To compile data for what the city calls its Town Center Specific Plan, Knight and Lance Schulte, a senior planner, have hit the streets during the past several weeks, walking door-to-door to businesses throughout the town center in search of the proper formula for a prosperous, 21st-Century downtown.

“This is a typical cycle for a downtown,” Knight said. “It works as the functional center for a community until other opportunities, perhaps due to competing centers or better roads, cause people to go elsewhere.”

Knight and Schulte offered downtown San Diego as another example of a city that began to suffer when suburban College Grove, Mission Valley and the Grossmont Center started pulling away shoppers and tax dollars. San Diego countered the outgoing tide with, among other things, building Horton Plaza and redeveloping the historic Gaslamp District to draw visitors and local residents back downtown.

Dana Point would be well advised to do something similar, if not on such a grand scale, many downtown businessmen argue.

“We need to have an anchor. There’s no real draw here,” said Conway, whose office sits directly above Street of the Golden Lantern, the busy main artery to the harbor. “We have a whole lot of small strip centers, but it’s very hard to create a major draw with a lot of small centers.”

The scattered centers tend to create a disjointed downtown, business owners say. But government mandates that force an unnatural design on a community, such as the city’s recently discarded Cape Cod theme, aren’t always successful either, others claim.

“This city needs to decide what it wants to be when it grows up,” said Dan Heredia, a former Los Angeles policeman who came to Dana Point six years ago to escape the big city and start a small lingerie business, which he admits is struggling. “We have a beautiful coastal community, but it lacks any identity.”

That identity could come in the form of a friendly, proverbial “Main Street,” attractive enough to lure people--tourists and residents alike--out of their cars to stay, shop and congregate, said Alex Lake, a downtown businessman for 32 years. Lake suggested the city follow the successful downtown formulas reminiscent of Seal Beach, Balboa Island, Laguna Beach and Del Mar.

“The most beautiful parts of our city are behind locked gates, you can’t get into them,” said Lake, who has been touring the California coastline in search of answers for Dana Point. “We need to create a small-town atmosphere, like Disneyland’s Main Street.”

The one thing that has won nearly unanimous agreement is the need to change the current one-way status on Pacific Coast Highway or Del Prado Avenue, the city’s two main boulevards. Caltrans’ mid-1980s decision to make the two streets one way in opposite directions to alleviate the traffic flow through Dana Point has worked too well, rushing visitors in and out of town too quickly.

“One of the first things you want to do in the downtown is solve the circulation problems,” said City Councilman Mike Eggers. “You might have the greatest store in the world there, but nobody can see it, they’re moving so fast. It’s wonderful for transportation but not very good for economic development.”

The other point of virtually unanimous agreement is the need to link the successful harbor and hotels like the Dana Point Resort and the Ritz-Carlton with the downtown.

“We need to convince the people who come to the harbor that there is something of value on the bluffs as well,” Schulte said. “The South County is not only the harbor, the San Juan mission and Laguna Beach.”