Shop Owners Looking Forward to Downtown Remodel : Ventura: Merchants say the temporary chaos will be worth the addition of old-fashioned street lamps, expanded parking and widened sidewalks.
Looking into his store’s future, Ed Elrod sees strife, upheaval, disrepair--and ultimately, sidewalk space for little cafe tables.
“Hey,” said Elrod, the owner of Ventura Bookstore on Main Street, “the way I figure it, no gain without pain.”
The pain for downtown merchants is scheduled to begin this February. Under a $3.5-million plan approved by the City Council on Monday, workers will tear up sidewalks, uproot bushy trees, reconfigure parking, replace street lamps and toss out existing garbage cans.
In their place, the downtown blocks will get new trash cans, old-fashioned street lamps, more street parking, towering palms, and expanded, scored-brick sidewalks.
Officials say the improvements--stretching along California Street from City Hall to the Ventura Freeway, and from Figueroa Street to Fir Street on Main--should spruce up the aging downtown and attract more visitors to its mom-and-pop shops and restaurants.
In the meantime, though, merchants expect some degree of chaos.
“I’m always concerned about things that inconvenience people,” Elrod said. “We’ve found people are so lazy that they don’t want to walk two more steps (around a construction project).”
But Elrod also knows that when the crews and bulldozers finish disrupting the street and his business this spring, he will be left with wider sidewalks, more space for parking and, hopefully, a more attractive look for the whole area.
Perhaps, he theorized, the new ambience and sidewalk room would even lend itself to cappuccinos and some outdoor seating.
“I love change,” he concluded. “I’m not opposed to it at all.”
The city plans to spend nearly $2 million on the California Street construction work alone. The Main Street improvements--which are planned on a contingency basis, assuming the California Street project does not run over budget--have been projected at $1.5 million.
Bids will go out on the project in January, and construction is scheduled to stretch from mid-February through early June, city officials say.
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The project includes the most controversial redecorating proposal before the city this year: the decision to rip out California Street’s mushroom-looking ficus trees and replace them with palms.
Letters in support of the leafy ficus, penned by residents with fierce attachments to the aging flora, flooded City Hall last spring and summer. But the council voted to march ahead with the palm plantings, reasoning that they would not obscure store signs as the ficuses do and that they would make Ventura look more like the oceanside city it is.
That decision still makes Kris Pustina, the owner of Franky’s Place restaurant on Main, smart from frustration. “To me, palms are not user-friendly trees,” she said.
Pustina hopes she and other business owners can hang on during the spring construction months, when some customers will invariably avoid the downtown because of all the hassles.
Otherwise, she said, she is looking forward to having her street spiffed up to attract more of the tourist trade. “Once it’s done, it’ll be really great,” she said.
