High Street Has Had Its Ups, Downs

Joy Cummings stares at the occasional car that passes her clothing store on High Street and remembers a time when shoppers filled the now-empty sidewalks.

In 1973, when Cummings and her husband bought and renovated an old gas station at the corner of Bard Street, High Street was Moorpark’s commercial heart--a thriving strip of restaurants and small stores.

“All the shops were full,” said Cummings, owner of The Gas Station. “It was where everyone shopped, because there was no other place to shop if you lived in town. It was great here.”

More than two decades later, most of the customers have disappeared, lured away to discount stores and malls in nearby cities, and the bustle of High Street traffic has faded to a sporadic murmur. Many of the street’s businesses have closed, and although the city has poured more than $360,000 into installing new sidewalks, benches and lampposts during the last three years, customers have not come back.

Moorpark officials hope a recently opened farmers market on Saturdays will help revive the street, and they have commissioned a new study to guide redevelopment efforts.

But merchants still worry that if the city can’t entice new businesses and customers into the area, their original commercial strip will continue its slow collapse.

“ ‘The downtown is nothing but a ghetto’--I’m hearing that so often,” Cummings said.

The root cause of High Street’s decline depends upon whom you ask. Dale Whitaker, owner of Whitaker Hardware, said the business founded by his great-grandfather has weathered other slumps during its 70 years on High Street.

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He blames the current downturn on the regional recession of the late 1980s and early 1990s and new commercial development in Moorpark and nearby cities. In part, he also blames the changing nature of Moorpark itself.

As the city has grown to nearly 28,000, it has attracted San Fernando Valley refugees--people who buy a home in Moorpark but still commute to work in Los Angeles County. Those people, Whitaker said, stick with the stores they have known in the Valley, bypassing local merchants.

“If they move from the Valley, they shop in the Valley,” he said.

Cummings attributes part of the street’s decline to ethnic prejudice. Many of Moorpark’s newer residents steer clear of the old downtown because they consider it a mostly Latino shopping district, Cummings said.

Although Cummings said she has met some new residents comfortable with the area’s ethnic mix, there are others who feel the downtown area is unsafe because of the dominance of Spanish-speaking residents.

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Linda Bredemann, owner of the Magnificent Moorpark Melodrama and Vaudeville Co. theater, has seen ticket sales drop substantially the past four years. Before the Northridge earthquake, she could fill between 75% and 80% of her theater’s 306 seats for a typical weekend performance, she said. The earthquake gave patrons more important things to worry about, and the 68-year-old facility has not fully recovered. Now the theater is often just half full, Bredemann said.

What High Street lacks, she said, are businesses that can feed off each other, creating more than one reason for people to visit the street.

“For me, I need some place for people to go during intermission” or after the show, Bredemann said. A new restaurant and a new bed-and-breakfast would help. “Every week I get calls saying, ‘Where can we eat, and where can we stay?’ ”

Whatever the cause of the area’s decline, few stores remain. Although well-established businesses like the Cactus Patch restaurant still draw a loyal crowd, other storefronts are empty, and vacant lots dot both sides of the street. Tiny blooms falling from immense California pepper trees dust the sidewalks, undisturbed by many browsing shoppers.

Merchants and city officials have tried several means to breathe new life into the old downtown thoroughfare, between Moorpark Avenue and Spring Road. In 1991, shop owners formed the Moorpark Old Town Merchants Assn. to lobby for revitalization efforts. Cummings, the group’s former chairwoman, said the association eventually disbanded after members grew frustrated by the slow pace of city efforts to improve the street. Members also had been unable to agree with each other on how best to attract new customers, she said.

The city, however, did put in some of the association’s requested improvements. New Victorian-style lampposts now grace the street, illuminating wooden and wrought-iron benches and smooth new stretches of sidewalk.

“The city has spent a great deal of money on it,” Councilwoman Eloise Brown said. “I can’t think of another four blocks in the city that has received that much concern.”

In 1993, the city also purchased much of the property on High Street’s southern side as part of its redevelopment effort. City officials hope to find a developer who can fill the space with new businesses, but so far there has been little interest from the private sector, said Steven Hayes, the city’s redevelopment manager.

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Although the sluggish real estate market is partly to blame, Hayes said the 4.7-acre property has inherent drawbacks. It is narrow, bounded by the street on one side and railroad tracks on the other. And some prospective tenants might not like the idea of having between 55 and 60 train trips a day rumbling behind their establishment.

“We’re not going to get a Tiffany’s,” Hayes said.

Still, the city is making other attempts to bring shoppers to the old downtown. A weekend farmers market opened in June in the High Street’s MetroLink parking lot and filled the street with cars, according to local merchants.

City officials have commissioned another study of the downtown area, analyzing the local commercial market and trying to identify strategies to bring High Street back to life. Several merchants said they are skeptical, considering that past studies of the street’s problems resulted in little action.

And Brown will suggest at the Aug. 7 City Council meeting that the city buy promotional signs directing traffic into the historic downtown.

Perhaps more important, High Street may soon see the opening of new businesses. A local investor is interested in opening a restaurant in a now-empty building adjacent to Cummings’ store, Hayes said. And on the same block, a shop selling coffee, pastry and sandwiches is set to open mid-July.

Local businesswoman Marceline Wilken-Stein has already completed much of the work on the shop’s interior, filling what used to be an ice cream parlor with new chairs, tables and glass counters for the pastries. She hopes to sell to the MetroLink commuters whose waiting cars sit just across the street.

“I’m eternally optimistic,” she said.

Wilken-Stein said she is also encouraged by the possibility of a new restaurant next door. “There’s new blood here, and it’s exciting,” she said.