ON THE ROAD: Journeys Along Ventura County’s Highways

It wasn’t built for beauty. Just a way to get from one place to another as fast as possible. Although the Ventura Freeway lies over old stagecoach routes and the footprints of mission priests, it was built with speed in mind, not romance.

Constructed in stages during the Eisenhower-inspired building era of the 1950s, the One-Oh-One was meant to funnel travelers painlessly through Ventura County, 44 miles of concrete linking Los Angeles and Santa Barbara counties and nothing more.

But with a little time to explore, the Ventura Freeway serves quite a different function.

It reads like a book, telling the story of Ventura County--past, present and future. It isn’t a complete story, but it is a rich one, full of vivid details and plots that change on an almost daily basis.

In 1950, when Caltrans was beginning the vast freeway construction project, the population of Ventura County was just 114,000, and crop fields and orchards spread from the mountains to the ocean across the Oxnard Plain. Over the next four decades, the freeway helped remake the county, bringing the Los Angeles suburbs into the Conejo Valley and introducing bedroom communities and shopping centers to the west county.

Now the freeway opens up the county like the backside of a dollhouse. Revealed is a cross-section of terracotta-capped housing tracts and shopping centers facing off against farmlands and fruit stands.

The California Department of Transportation estimates that an average of 155,000 vehicles cross the Los Angeles County line into Thousand Oaks every day. They drive through Thousand Oaks, where the Santa Monica Mountains heave up to the left of the freeway, and over the Conejo Grade, a summit that both physically and psychologically divides the county. They drive along the Oxnard Plain, drawn by the twin points of the county’s two high-rises in Oxnard, and onward, over two rivers and up past the beaches of Ventura into Santa Barbara County.

Entering the county from the south, the first thing most motorists see is a half-mile-long tribute to the horseless carriage itself, the Thousand Oaks Auto Mall. With 40 franchises, it is the world’s largest auto mall, a fact trumpeted on a monumental sign facing the freeway.

This size thing is something the auto mall is very proud of.

“We’re about to celebrate our 29th birthday,” said Jerry Smith, who oversees operations for Nesen Motor Car Co., the mall’s luxury car dealer. “We’re going to have the world’s largest cake.” How big that cake has to be to set the record is still under research, Smith says. “We’re trying to find out,” he said. “It goes in pounds.”

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Begun in 1967 on a dirt lot between the freeway and Thousand Oaks Boulevard, the auto mall sells cars ranging in price from $8,600--a Geo--to $315,000--a Rolls-Royce. With its freeway visibility, it lures car shoppers from all over Southern California. Like the time a professional golfer on his way to a tournament in Ojai stopped by and just had to have a Land Rover that minute. “We’ve sold a lot of cars like that,” Smith said.

Although the freeway is good for business at the auto mall, it complicates Linda Stone’s job just a few miles down the road past the Civic Arts Plaza. Ensconced in a model home at the new, upscale Cortina development, Stone is trying to sell $400,000 homes next to the freeway, with no sound wall between.

“Usually we tell them [prospective buyers], if the freeway is a problem for you, then don’t buy,” Stone said. While selling, Stone concentrates on the big lots, views of the mountains, the beauty of the Arroyo Conejo below--anything but the noise of the cars humming by her head. A credit to her salesmanship, only five of the 17 homes are still available.

Across the freeway, Stagecoach Liquors owner Jim Barker isn’t the slightest bit fazed by the sight of yet another expensive new community pressed up against the traffic. At 55, he is already an old-timer in this young city. When he opened Stagecoach Liquors 31 years ago, there was no offramp at Ventu Park and the freeway was just a highway two lanes wide.

“I knew this end of the county was going to grow,” said Barker, a Santa Paula native. “You just buy things and set. Everything builds up around you.”

He gave the place its name in a tribute to the Stagecoach Inn, which used to sit there before it was moved up to its current site on Ventu Park Road. Outwardly, the store hasn’t changed much over the years--the facade is the same as in the days when Dean Martin would wander over from his Hidden Valley home to pick up a few necessities. The distinctive sign above the door is the original, Styrofoam covered with epoxy. It would be easy to sell out and retire, but Barker says he isn’t leaving.

“I’ve got no reason to get rid of this,” Barker said. “They can bury me under it, I guess.”

Three miles past Barker’s store, the freeway climbs to the top of the Conejo Grade. Trucks peel to the right for a required visit to the California Highway Patrol weigh station, a niche blasted into the rock when Caltrans replaced the steep and tortuous Conejo Grade crossing in 1958.

Motorists are still cautioned to watch downhill speeds, but the 7% slope of the grade is nothing compared to what it used to be. A Ventura County Historical Society publication quotes one of the first ranchers in the Conejo Valley describing a typical trip down the original grade:

“You locked your wheels with a chain and tied a big limb of a tree behind the rig and went to the bottom,” Joe Russell wrote.

Just after the turn of the century, farmers like Russell and his family raised $1,800 toward the $3,000 cost of putting in the first grade. It was improved in 1937 and again in 1958, when Caltrans spent about $4 million and used about 500,000 pounds of blasting powder to widen and straighten the road.

As the freeway swoops down from the grade through Camarillo, it passes vivid examples of how rapidly Ventura County is changing and how the road itself has fueled that growth. The sight of farm workers laboring in the fields has been replaced in many spots by construction crews building the ubiquitous Spanish-style shopping centers. For-sale signs dot other fields, calling to eager developers.

“Available--Commercial Real Estate” says a sign next to the Adolfo Camarillo House, former home of Camarillo’s first family. With only a line of eucalyptus trees separating it from the freeway, the 1890 ranch is surrounded by blocky office buildings in the Mission Oaks Business Park.

But even though the farmland around it has vanished, the barns and buildings are mostly intact, retaining the magic of an old California ranch. An ancient fig tree spreads over a circular driveway before the white Victorian house. At twilight, a litter of gray kittens piles out of one of the barns to inspect the remains of a small animal, oblivious to the whizzing traffic.

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Across the freeway stands the St. Mary Magdalen Chapel bell tower, built by the Camarillo family as its private chapel in 1913. Almost in the shadow of the tower, longtime Camarillo resident Bob Kildee stands at the nearby Metrolink station and explains what things looked like before the freeway came through.

“There was a gas station there,” he said, pointing under the freeway. “And a grocery store there,” pointing at an antique store with the faded imprint of an ice cream and soda sign clinging to its walls. “Downtown has always been moving, it has always been changing.”

Kildee, husband of county Supervisor Maggie Kildee, has owned and operated Bob Kildee’s Shop for Men in Camarillo since 1954, the year after the freeway was completed. The store first opened its doors a block off Ventura Boulevard, which was the heart of the city before the freeway carved it off and isolated it. Now the store is in a nearby shopping center. Kildee has moved three times, trying to stay competitive as Camarillo changes.

“People follow the freeways,” Kildee said. “Historically it is what happens. Freeways are like fingers that go out. People follow them.”

The city’s new outlet mall might offer more competition, more traffic, more headaches than Kildee is used to, but he seems unruffled. His only hint of regret comes as he drives past the posh country club and homes of Spanish Hills and looks below at the rows of strawberry fields protected by plastic, gleaming in the sun.

“This field won’t last,” he said. “This is destined to be developed.”

Kildee is right about the fields, which run in a narrow strip next to the freeway known as the Ponderosa Corridor. The land is technically outside Camarillo city limits, but is under consideration to be annexed and developed into housing and businesses.

Roz McGrath and her family own the lemon orchard and the small red farmhouse just beyond the strawberry fields. They also own Central Market and 120 acres on the other side of the freeway, part of an area under consideration for the annexation. If the annexation is approved, the family hopes to donate two acres to the Ventura County Farm Implement Museum, which does not have a permanent site. McGrath said the farmhouse, a county landmark, is safe from development and would probably be moved to the museum grounds. But the lemon orchard will probably become a housing tract.

“I would like to keep the lemons,” she said. “But I don’t think, in my lifetime, that is meant to be.”

The freeway was just a two-lane highway, Ventura Boulevard, when McGrath was a girl. The school bus would drop her off and she could run across the highway. But as the freeway has grown, and new hotels and developments have sprung up on either side, holding on to the farm has become harder and harder. In the past few months, another row-crop field has disappeared under bulldozers, rapidly reemerging as the county’s latest Target discount store.

“I guess you could say we are kind of the last of the freeway farmers,” McGrath said.

Despite her nostalgia, she said, there are undeniable monetary advantages to the location.

“Let’s face it,” she said. “There are a lot of development opportunities, being on the main artery of Southern California.”

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In Oxnard, the Ventura Freeway shows more rapid growth: a new outlet mall meant to look like an old sugar beet factory and a series of warehouse-sized discount stores peddling $2 T-shirts and bulk canned goods. Backups are frequent on access ramps that were built to handle far less traffic, and the junction of Oxnard Boulevard is the worst logjam in the county.

“That’s a major bottle-neck there everyday,” CHP Officer David Cockrill said. “You can pretty much set your watch by it.”

At Santa Clara Catholic Chapel, next to the Rice Avenue onramp, Father George Miller not only sets his watch by the traffic jam, but also sets Mass by it.

“We used to have services at 5:30 in the afternoon,” Miller said. “But the traffic is so bad, nobody wanted to come then.”

Mass was changed to 8:30 a.m. As parishioners knelt to pray on a recent morning, light--and noise--poured through the blue stained-glass windows. But even with the frenzy of traffic playing across the glass, the chapel seemed peaceful.

“Once you are in church, all other sounds are silent,” said Catherine Meryvn, a parishioner who wrote a book about the history of the Santa Clara parish.

The modest beige chapel was built in 1885, on the site of what is now The Esplanade mall. A simple wooden structure, it served the El Rio farming community on the banks of the Santa Clara River. When the freeway barreled through in the 1950s, the parish moved the church to the northbound side and remodeled it.

Across the river, Oxnard becomes Ventura and the freeway sails along next to its former self, Ventura Boulevard, once again. The boulevard is lined with businesses geared toward the traveler: truck stops, motels and restaurants. Korb’s Trading Post beckons to motorists with banners about blue-jean sales.

Korb’s was once a chain, with 15 stores around Southern California. But the Western-style building off the Ventura Freeway is the last Korb’s remaining.

“It’s not as busy as it used to be,” said Ann Held, who has been helping shoppers choose bluejeans and flannel shirts for the last 26 years. “But people still like us.”

While Korb’s uses hand-lettered sale banners to entice customers to leave the freeway, Golf N’ Stuff takes a distinctly more glitzy approach. Bulbs in Christmas colors light the two 18-hole mini-golf courses at night, while floodlights illuminate a turreted castle right out of a children’s fairy tale.

Built in 1974, Golf N’ Stuff was the third in a series of amusement parks built by an Anaheim developer, all next to freeways.

Just after the amusement park, the Ventura Freeway joins with California 126, swooping over one of the last farm fields in Ventura still visible from the road, the Lusk Property.

On some days, near the Seaward Avenue exit, a strong citrus smell hangs over the road--a fragrant reminder of Ventura County’s rich agricultural heritage that may make drivers crane their heads to look for orchards.

The source is actually the giant evaporator at the Ventura Coastal Corp. on Vista del Mar. Since 1942, the company has been producing fresh-squeezed orange juice, concentrate and intense lemon oils for several national manufacturers. Whenever the factory is pressing, some of the citrus escapes and bathes the freeway and surrounding neighborhoods in a heady scent.

“Our neighbors love us,” said Dean Ulrich, president of Ventura Coastal Corp.

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Of all those displaced by construction of the freeway throughout the 1950s, the nearby Pierpont Inn took perhaps the hardest hit in the county, losing the direct beach access it had had since it was built in 1891 and acquiring an undesirable bird’s eye view of the rushing freeway below.

Ted Gleichmann, who ran the Craftsman-style inn at the time the state declared its intent to build the freeway next to the ocean, was fiercely against the plan and did what he could to stop construction. When the battle was lost, he staged one last act of defiance, serving a formal luncheon on the completed freeway just before it opened.

Forty years later, the inn’s Rod Houck, who is married to Gleichmann’s niece, still has regrets.

“I feel it was the worst mistake the city has ever made,” Houck said. “People drive through Ventura and they see the beautiful ocean but they don’t associate it with our town. It split the town.”

He opened the door of the inn’s bar--insulated by double-glazed windows with spectacular views of the Channel Islands and miles and miles of blue ocean below--and stepped out onto the front lawn. The clamor of traffic was instantly as remarkable as the view.

“It drives me crazy,” Houck said. “I hate it.”

When wedding receptions are held on the lawn, Houck insists on a DJ or live music to counter the traffic noise. Bushes and small trees are carefully trimmed to highlight the good view (ocean) and cloak the bad (freeway). On the advice of sound engineers, Houck plans to build a series of fountains and waterfalls around the lawn.

“It’s going to be expensive,” he said. “But I’m going to overcome the freeway.”

North of Ventura, the freeway opens into a straight shot up the coast. The exclusive communities of Solimar Beach, Faria and Seacliff cling to the edge of the land. Squeezed into a narrow patch between the freeway and Faria are 15 acres of tightly packed palm trees. This palm forest is Rincon Gardens, the result of a hobby of Mark Cayer’s that got, as he puts it, “way out of control.”

He planted most of the palm plantation 11 years ago on land leased from the Faria Family Foundation. It was a long-term investment, only now starting to pay off. The trees, about 20 varieties in all, needed to grow for at least 10 years before Cayer could start to sell them.

Cayer said some of his Faria neighbors have commented that the trees give them a much-needed buffer from the freeway. But the noise doesn’t bother him. In fact, he has a debt to the freeway: Its presence actually makes his plantation possible.

“Because of the proximity to the highway and the railroad tracks and the utility lines, basically the land is not usable for anything else,” Cayer said. “That was the primary thing when I was looking, to find something where I could consider a long-term venture. This will never change. They are never going to move that highway.”

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In the final stretch of road before Santa Barbara County, with the dazzling ocean on one side and steep, crumbling cliffs on the other, motorists tend to hit the gas pedal hard.

“I don’t know what it is,” CHP Officer Cockrill said. “People just pick up their speed and go.”

Motorists slow down a little to ogle La Conchita, where rooftops of homes destroyed by last year’s landslide poke through the dirt, then they race on toward the county line, marked by the Bates Road exit. The freeway curves around toward the Rincon, separated from the ocean by just a riprap wall, constantly pummeled by waves. If the sea is stormy, a fine spray hovers over the freeway--for the northbound traveler, a final kiss goodbye from Ventura County.

Next Sunday: The beauty of California 126 belies its deadly record.