A Sign of the Times : Once-Quaint Oxnard Community Strives to Weather Transition

It was once the heart of one of the most idyllic, picturesque neighborhoods in Ventura County--a sycamore-lined strip of spacious bungalows where Oxnard’s original merchants, builders, financiers and professionals settled during the turn of the century.

For the old-timers who have chosen to remain and the baby boomers who have sentimentally bought into the community en masse, throwing thousands of dollars into the homes in repairs, it will always be that place.

But everywhere around the large, lazy porches and exposed eaves of the neighborhood known as F Street, with its quaint hitching posts and remodeled carriage houses, change is present and refuses to be ignored.

Graffiti now mars the decaying sides of some of the Craftsman bungalows. The streets are unusually crowded for single-family homes, with some people parking on lawns. Neighborhood leaders say property owners are renting out garages without toilets to migrant farm workers, and they point to instances of people found defecating outdoors as proof.

Crime in the area is increasing. Oxnard police received 2,010 calls for service in 1993--up 1,407 from 1988. Burglaries are commonplace, and “For Sale” signs are a permanent sight.

In short, the neighborhood of about 2,500 residents is in the midst of a transition, a clash between nostalgia and reality, history and the present.

“There’s all kinds of funky, little ugly places where low-income farm-worker folks are living, and they don’t have the same type of neighborhood ethic as suburban middle-class people,” said Linda Brown, former chairwoman of Oxnard’s Wilson Neighborhood Council, which includes the F Street neighborhood. “They’re not going to be living here a few months from now, so they don’t care.”

To the hard-working Latino immigrants who are a growing part of the neighborhood, located between 1st and 5th streets west of the Oxnard police station, the area’s historical character does not hold the same attraction it has for wealthier, more assimilated residents.

Instead, they contrast the more universal charms of the neighborhood--comfort, affordability and safety--to other parts of Oxnard.

“It’s one of the calmest areas,” said Esteban Morales, 35, a strawberry picker who shares a small bungalow on 1st Street with his two brothers and their families. “And there aren’t many safe places to live in this city that I can afford.”

Creation of the first neighborhood in Oxnard, like the city itself, was contemporaneous with erection of the American Beet Sugar Factory south of the Santa Clara River by the Oxnard brothers in 1897.

As word of the mammoth enterprise spread throughout Southern California, optimistic laborers and wily prospectors flocked to the area, and a boom town replete with saloons, hotels and restaurants was propped up almost overnight. Entire buildings from nearby Port Hueneme, the area’s previous boom town, were moved to the new center of activity.

“Now that Oxnard was booming, people wanted to go where the action was,” architectural historian Judith Triem said. “Port Hueneme became a little ghost town.”

With the five-story factory as an anchor, the founders knew that the town’s growth would not be fleeting, and they sought to build themselves homes worthy of anything that the future might hold for Oxnard, as the town was named in 1898.

“Oxnard is a town that was built in a hurry,” said Madeline Miedema, a local historian who moved to Oxnard in 1918. “But F Street was built for permanence, for substantial people.”

Residences were built first on C, D and E streets for some of the city’s most prominent boosters, including Murray S. Wineman, Dr. Harry N. Staire and Leon Lehmann, who owned the Lehmann Brothers Department Store in downtown Oxnard. Achille Levy, founder of Bank of A. Levy, moved to D Street from Port Hueneme in 1912, funding numerous enterprises.

But it was F Street that became THE place to live in Oxnard, and the center of the neighborhood. The agriculturists, engineers and managers of the sugar beet factory settled there, along with the original downtown doctors, store owners and businessmen.

Yet the street was not elitist, historians say. Some smaller homes, for people of more moderate means, were also built.

“It wasn’t just WASPs; there were Jewish people and Catholics,” Triem said. “It was an interesting cultural mix, I think.”

As the years progressed, many of the original settlers moved away to Camarillo and other areas, and the neighborhood became decidedly middle class.

But the legacy of Oxnard’s early years was still present in the homes, and their extraordinary quality was noticed by a new generation of family-minded professionals and entrepreneurs.

“In those days, houses were built to last,” said Isabel McMahon, who moved into the neighborhood with her husband, William, 30 years ago. “Now they’re built to sell.”

Residents raised large families in the spacious homes, in what old-timers describe as a golden era when local kids plotted mischief like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn did.

“Before they put the drainage system in, the street used to flood, and our children used to go up and down the street in a raft,” said Charlotte White, 63. “They had a lot of fun.”

Jim Lincoln, a former surgeon, moved his family to F Street in 1955. He remembers how Bill Paulman, a former football kicker for Oxnard High who went on to star at Stanford, used to carelessly boot the ball from yard to yard as a kid. No one minded, Lincoln said.

But the graffiti on Lincoln’s garage, which he recently had painted over, and the three batteries stolen from his car in the past three years, remind him that times have changed.

“It was a nice, quiet street with beautiful sycamore trees,” said Lincoln, now 74 and living alone. “Individual-type houses, not a tract. Back then, the houses didn’t have these additions, people living in garages. . . . Not many people know each other at all now.”

White has lived on F Street for 33 years, and her 69-year-old husband, Wendell, has lived in the neighborhood his entire life. Her mother and father and one of her sons all live within a few blocks.

“You didn’t have to lock your door on this street,” said White, whose house was robbed twice in the past 10 years. “I wouldn’t think of going out here after dark now.”

While she acknowledges that “it’s a different world” and business people have to be wary, she regrets the way the neighborhood’s old penny store, the Towne and Country Market, is being run. Its current owners, the Kim family, aren’t friendly enough to neighborhood children, she said.

“They don’t want you to come in unless you’re buying something,” she said.

That’s a charge the Kim family denies. A Korean couple who bought the market 10 years ago, the Kims have been robbed several times. But B. S. Kim praises the efforts of his neighbors in setting up a new Neighborhood Watch that has been helpful in cutting down crime in the community.

“If they see anyone around the business at night, they call police,” Kim said.

And he has no problems with the children of the neighborhood, he added.

“We let kids in. They’re customers, too,” he said.

Denise Gunn, chairwoman of the Wilson neighborhood council, is one of a group of residents who have begun combing the community’s streets and alleyways with walkie-talkies and spotlights, looking to curb crime.

“My guys go out until 2 in the morning painting over graffiti just so the kids don’t get the satisfaction of seeing their tags when they wake up,” Gunn said. “I think it’s working.”

But the neighborhood’s more deep-rooted problems will be hard to eliminate, she said.

“Over on E Street, a family was using the alley for a bathroom,” Gunn said. “I spotted a guy with my flashlight during one of my walks. We figured they were living out of a garage and, sure enough, they were living out of a garage on F Street.”

Gunn and other Neighborhood Watch leaders have begun a new joint project with Oxnard’s code enforcement division to make better use of the city’s limited personnel.

Under the new “empowerment agreement,” residents who spot what they believe to be code violations in the neighborhood can post warnings to the suspected offenders and fill out detailed complaint forms for code enforcement inspectors to use.

Oxnard code enforcement official Richard K. McIntosh said crowding problems in the F Street neighborhood are typical of Oxnard as a whole--the neighborhood’s older residents just never thought that they would have to confront them.

“There’s some folks that say: ‘I bought into this single-family neighborhood 40 years ago. Now you’re telling me it’s legal for 12 to 15 people to live back there?’ They’re absolutely livid,” McIntosh said.

“I’m sympathetic with their situation, but this is happening all over Southern California.”

The home that Achille Levy built for himself on D Street in 1912, an imposing, two-story shingle-style Craftsman home, has been converted into an apartment building. Wilfredo Romero, the apartment manager, had no idea that Levy once owned the decaying home, which now has “For Rent” signs stapled onto the exterior.

“People are just looking for a place to live, period,” said Romero, who lives in one of the apartments with his wife, two daughters, mother and brothers. “It’s not because of the area’s history that they land here.”

Farm worker Roberto Baeza, who lives in the Levy house, said many immigrants have problems finding a place to live in Oxnard because they are undocumented and have large families.

“People want to keep everything the same, keep Mexican immigrants and their families out,” Baeza said. “But we have to live somewhere. The problem is that there is not enough housing that we can afford.”

The community’s newest arrivals say they are unfairly accused of bringing gangs, crime and other problems to the area--ills from which they also suffer.

“People break our windows and flatten our tires too,” said Levy house resident Antonio Gomez, 28, gesturing across the street toward the Oxnard police station. “What security?”

But some neighbors said the new immigrants simply do not look after the neighborhood the way those with a lifetime investment do.

“They just don’t have the same feeling for the neighborhood that I have,” Linda Brown said. “I hear a lot of people say, ‘It’s the Mexicans,’ but it’s not that at all. It takes a while for people to assimilate and become part of the program.”

Brown, who said she has to pick up trash from her yard virtually every day, said that after strawberry season, the surrounding alleys are littered with mattresses and furniture--signs that there are more migrant workers living in the neighborhood than many realize.

“Too many people in a building means that people end up parking on their lawns, which is ugly,” Brown said. “The city has been relaxed about code enforcement, and what it means is that we’ve had to suffer for the degradation of downtown.”

After watching a couple ditch a mattress in a nearby alley, Brown knocked on the door of their apartment and confronted them. Embarrassed, they went back and disposed of the mattress properly, she said.

For the neighborhood’s new baby-boomer contingent, which began moving into the neighborhood about 15 years ago, F Street’s quaint flavor is something that money can’t buy. But as some have learned the hard way, a lot of cash is needed to maintain that timeless feeling.

Priscilla Zarate, who works at Oxnard College, and her husband, Daniel, a research chemist for the Navy, moved to F Street in 1984. She treasures the quiet feel of the neighborhood and thinks that it is an ideal place to raise her two young boys.

But living in the house can be taxing--literally, Zarate said. They bought their home, a single-story Colonial Revival bungalow built for dentist F. C. Lee in 1921, for $237,000. After spending $30,000 to remodel the home, it recently was valued at $185,000.

“There was a time when we first moved (to Oxnard in 1978) where it was impossible to find a home here,” said Zarate, 36. “We would drive down this street and not see a single ‘For Sale’ sign. Now there are many homes for sale.”

“Nobody wants the burden of a big lot anymore.”

Caroline Guillen has lived in the neighborhood for 25 years, moving into a house on G Street, one of the community’s best-kept areas, in 1989. A real estate agent, she has sold four homes in the neighborhood in 18 months.

“I’ve seen houses go up and houses go down, but I really think this is the jewel of Oxnard,” said Guillen, 48, who raised three children in the neighborhood. “It seems like we’re an island. It seems like this street and these houses have a character of their own.”

Nevertheless, the changes on the nearby streets have affected Guillen.

“One day, I feel it’s perfectly fine,” Guillen said. “Another, I feel like it’s time to move out.”

After evaluating homes in the neighborhood for three years, Roger and Peggy Kroner moved to D Street in 1989, into a large, pristine bungalow with Colonial Revival features built in 1903. Like Guillen, the Kroners placed imitation hitching posts in front of their home to further the old-fashioned feel.

Since the Kroners settled in the neighborhood, the friendly old ladies who lived in the nearby houses have passed away or moved, and new people are constantly moving in and out. Parking has become a problem, there is a lack of neighborliness and the fine old houses are falling into decay.

But the Kroners are optimistic.

“You hope that someday they’ll get cleaned up,” Roger Kroner said. “Maybe it won’t happen, but we like to believe that it will.”