Two-Way Street : Some Say Main Street Is an Economic Drawback for Ventura, but Staid Downtown Strip Has Its Supporters

Today, no one would build a city’s business district to look like East Main Street, Ventura. No developer would bunch so many small storefronts along sidewalks so utterly devoid of pedestrians, put in restaurants without plenty of off-street parking or choose to anchor a corner strip shopping center with a cocktail lounge instead of a 7-Eleven.

This old-fashioned, 3 1/2-mile-long slice of California commerce, where the one- and two-story shops still have revealing names like Lynn’s Jewelry, Mike’s Clothiers and Sonia’s Silk Plants, is an anomaly in an era when Main Streets all over the country have supposedly been replaced by regional malls. But it represents the crossroads of what the beachside county seat used to be and the widespread uncertainty over what it is becoming.

For decades now, Ventura’s Main Street has been a quirkily effective incubator for locally owned businesses. A place where few franchises have gone to dwell, it is home to at least 30 beauty parlors, but only one of them is a Supercuts. A Target store opened on the edge of Main in 1987, but someone in search of low-priced clothing also can choose from among 12 thrift stores and seven consignment shops. The fast-food outlets include Tacos Jalisco, Bobbi’s Mexican Food and Super Burrito No. 2, but nary a McDonald’s or El Pollo Loco.

“It’s not a place for the average store” that needs a heavy volume of sales, “but it’s a great place for stores that offer service,” said Ventura Deputy Mayor Gary Tuttle, 47, who has owned a Main Street running-apparel store called The Inside Track for 18 years. “Anyone can sell shoes, but I spend 45 minutes with someone making sure they find the right pair. Sure, a Foot Locker has more shoes than I do and a Sport Chalet may be a dollar or two cheaper, but what do they give back to the community?”

*

Practicing the sort of small-town, owner-operated trade that was popular when Main Street’s Art Deco, mission- and bungalow-style buildings first went up a half-century ago, these shops and services have endured in a neighborly, low-rent environment while playing a key role in the local economy. Recently, however, competition from Camarillo, Oxnard and Thousand Oaks, land-rich neighbors to the east, have challenged Ventura’s decades-old rein as the economic engine of Ventura County and its leaders’ commitment to quiet quaintness.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, those adjacent municipalities aggressively courted nationally recognized mass merchandisers and warehouse-type chains like Wal-Mart, Home Base and Office Depot that draw penny-pinching shoppers onto freeways with the promise of bargains. In 1994, Thousand Oaks finally outpaced Ventura as the county’s top sales-tax generator. Oxnard, which welcomed a 150,000-square-foot factory outlet mall last summer, appears to be gaining on Ventura for the No. 2 spot.

“Ventura is really one of the weakest retail markets in Ventura County right now, if not the weakest,” noted Mark Schniepp, director of the UC Santa Barbara Economic Forecast Project. “It may be nice and aesthetic to have a Main Street free of Tacos Bells and Wal-Marts, but that is not the 1990s. There are costs and one of the costs is the lack of revenue to fund government services that are in constantly growing demand.”

Ventura officials have responded to these economic threats with revitalization plans for the city’s tourist-oriented downtown and the 33-year-old Buenaventura Mall, the two landmarks that flank Main Street. They hope that, by maintaining the mall and downtown as destinations, traffic will continue to flow along the long strip in between without the lure of big chains.

“I don’t think we are going to grow out of our problem by building more things. We need to work with what we have and be creative,” said City Council member Gregory L. Carson, who owns a garden supply store in Ventura.

In some ways, it is surprising that Main Street has been able to remain defiantly retro for so long. The western end encompasses Mission San Buenaventura and the old downtown, an area that has gone from fashionable--longtime residents still mourn the passing of shops like Hunt’s China Shop and Great Eastern linens--to a funky blend of used-furniture shops and bookstores, pay-by-the-week hotels and gift shops. The newer side bordered by Telephone Road on the east is typified by Poinsettia Plaza, which with ubiquitous discounters like Strouds, Petco and a Barnes & Noble bookstore among its tenants, stands in stark, neon-lit contrast to the rest of Main Street.

Yet nowhere is the small-town spirit that distinguishes Main Street from other shopping districts more evident than in the eclectic collection of ultra-specialized stores at the mid-town intersection of Main and Seaward Avenue, the street’s geographic and psychological center.

Here, you’ll find Althea’s Corset Shop, a 47-year-old fixture that specializes in undergarments for hard-to-fit customers. At Althea’s, a woman can get a bra custom-tailored for under $10 and know that her measurements will be on file the next time she comes in. Down the street is Darts and Things, which opened six months ago with an inventory consisting solely of darts and dartboards, and where the owner will gladly stay past closing time if someone calls with a last-minute request. There is also Gallagher’s Service, a garage that has been on Main Street for “49 years and four months,” according to Pete Gallagher, 73, the repair shop’s owner and sole mechanic.

Ventura native Cindy Jones, 38, is the new kid on the block. Through her month-old establishment, Cindy’s Throws, Jones sells colorful cotton novelty blankets and nothing but. She and her fiance, Mark Bronner, 33, got their start in the business two years ago after Jones visited a throw factory in North Carolina and fell in love with the merchandise. Soon, funded by a $1,000 loan from Jones’ mother, the couple were busy hosting home parties featuring the throws, taking their cat-themed throws on the road to pet shows and making deals with local soccer clubs that wanted to sell sports throws in fund-raisers.

*

Last year, after selling $105,000 worth of blankets, Jones and Bronner decided to move the business from their 10-by-20-foot guest room to a 1,300-square-foot retail store. Jones said she was attracted to Main Street not only because of its low rent--80 cents a square foot as opposed to the $5 a square foot she would pay at a shopping center--but because her landlord was a retired portrait photographer who was willing to consummate the deal with a handshake.

The couple have taken a decidedly anti-big-business approach to retailing. Jones furnished the store with hand-me-down chairs and chests. They do not advertise in newspapers or even the telephone book, preferring to rely on word of mouth to make themselves known. Stylists at the beauty salon next door send customers over to browse at Cindy’s when they’re running behind schedule, Jones said.

“It’s like old home week around here because we know everybody,” Jones said. “A lot of women want to work here part time for barter, to get free throws.”

Like Cindy Jones, John Arnold, the owner of Darts and Things, does not worry about competition from large retailers. He figures he can offer two things the Wal-Marts and the Big 5s of the world cannot: namely, selection and personal service. Before customers buy anything, Arnold insists they try it out on one of the four dartboards he keeps mounted on the wall just for that purpose. A darts champion himself, Arnold spends most of his Saturdays at the store offering pointers to amateur shooters.

*

“Darts is like everything else. If you have the variety, the customers will come to you,” Arnold, 41, said.

Not that he leaves everything to chance. Some days are admittedly slow, with no more than one or two customers coming in all day, Arnold said. So as added insurance on his $20,000 investment, he has installed display cases filled with his wares at 14 bars around town where darts are played. After closing his shop for the night, he drums up additional business by sponsoring dart leagues and tournaments.

“The store is self-sufficient,” said Arnold, who estimates his monthly sales of $3,500 to $4,000 are enough to keep his business afloat. “But if you didn’t love it, you couldn’t make it.”

The story of Ventura’s Main Street, both what it is and what it is not, is largely a story of physical limitations. Like the city as a whole, Main Street is long and thin, buffeted by the Pacific Ocean on one side and the hills on the other. Residential neighborhoods erected during the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s are usually no more than an alley away from the commercial properties, leaving little space for parking or larger buildings. Height and water restrictions have further limited development possibilities.

“The biggest problem in that corridor is it’s not big enough” for any anchor stores, said Ron Polito, who has sold real estate in Ventura for two decades. “You don’t have the population densities that your national retailers like to see.”

The conspicuously absent large chains have sought greener pastures in the once-abundant farmland on Ventura’s far east side, which also now houses a majority of the city’s 95,000 residents. The County Government Center on Victoria Avenue, an auto mall off the Ventura Freeway and the Ventura Harbor area have become development centers while Main Street has remained unchanged.

“On Main Street, people would have to buy several lots and combine them for a Target or a Wal-Mart and that is more expensive than building on vacant land,” said Karen Bates, a senior planner with the city.

Whether one sees Main Street’s existing crazy quilt of commercial activity as a strength or weakness depends a lot on who is doing the looking. Some observers note the high business turnover and the vacant, rundown storefronts that dot every block as a sign of troubled times and an indication that developers have gone to communities they consider more business friendly.

“I fear that without some direct involvement by the city, forces could turn against Main Street,” said William Fulton, a Ventura resident and professional planner who edits the California Planning and Development Report. “I think residents like it the way it is. But if you took two or three key businesses out of there, it would be a lot more dismal.”

“There are businesses who call us up, law firms and accounting firms, and they say: ‘We would like you to show us some places in Oxnard because we can no longer assume that if you are in Ventura you are the hub,’ ” said real estate agent Polito. “Companies that have been here for generations are saying: ‘We don’t want to move, but we have to at least look at it because five or 10 years from now, we want to be where the action is.’ ”

But when Sandy Smith, 45, looks at Main Street, he sees something else. The third-generation Ventura resident, who opened Main Street’s popular Rosarito Beach Cafe nine years ago and chairs the city’s planning board, is encouraged by the vitality of places like 30-year-old Heck’s Music Center and the Classic Carrot, a health food restaurant that last month relocated to new, bigger quarters on Main Street. Smith himself is considering opening a second restaurant downtown.

In Smith’s view, Ventura’s economy has a healthy future, if the city invests in its stock of small old buildings and resists the siren’s call of discount retail chains. A City Council-approved plan to refurbish the downtown area with greater housing density, city-built parking and looser building codes will enable Ventura to play on its strengths without sacrificing its small-town character, he said.

*

“It is the things that make downtown and Main Street different from other parts of the county, the walkable neighborhoods where you can shop and live in close proximity, the specialty retail, that need to be preserved. Otherwise, we kill ourselves,” Smith said. “It’s a diamond in the rough, but it is a diamond and you don’t want to let just anyone cut it up.”

Althea Godfrey, the 79-year-old founder of Althea’s Corset Shop, agrees. After witnessing the decline of the girdle and the rise of the Wonderbra, Godfrey has concluded that, instead of worrying, Main Street merchants just have to be smarter and more flexible than their better-funded competitors to survive. In her own case, that meant concentrating her business on specialty medical garments--support hose, mastectomy prostheses and the like--when department stores started stealing her customers.

“Main Street will survive if they stay on their toes. You have to give people something to come for and people will come to Main Street if you offer your customers good service,” Godfrey predicted. “They can go to K mart or any of those stores, if they are looking for cheap.”