Port Hueneme Searches for Its Long-Lost Commercial Core

Bob Hamilton’s Market Street barbershop is the last lonely vestige of an oceanfront community shorn of its once bustling downtown.

Gone are the carousing seamen who had packed the raucous Navy town’s card rooms and bars that lined its now-extinct three-block retail core.

Port Hueneme essentially redeveloped its shabby city center out of existence in the 1960s to make way for an expansion that doubled the size of its namesake port.

Over six years, entire blocks were bulldozed and more than 200 households and businesses relocated at a cost exceeding $10 million in the county’s first urban-renewal project.

“The way these politicians have run this town and tore it down is an absolute damn disgrace,” snorted the colorfully profane Hamilton one recent afternoon between snips of a customer’s hair.

“I’m the only business on this entire damn street. . . . There’s nothing to draw anybody down here. What the hell would a person come down here for?”

Residents and city officials concede that Port Hueneme today is a city without a center, a community without a core.

Moreover, the absence of industrial or commercial activity--Port Hueneme lacks even a car dealership to bring in sales taxes--has created a city chronically short on cash to pay for police and other services.

This problem is all the more acute because Proposition 13 and the state’s shifting of property tax revenues away from local government have made cities more dependent on sales tax.

“Port Hueneme is a very, very, very vulnerable city,” longtime City Manager Dick Velthoen said. “It has to be treated with utmost care. It has to take advantage of every entrepreneurial opportunity it can.”

Velthoen and other city officials have come under heavy criticism for pursuing a series of unconventional schemes in recent years to generate cash.

These included the nationally notorious “view tax” levied on oceanfront residents in 1991 to help pay for park maintenance. Failing with a last-ditch appeal, the city will be forced to refund about $1 million in taxes and other charges later this year after the California Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

Yet whether the loss of a downtown has harmed Port Hueneme is a matter of debate, said local historian Powell Greenland, who wrote a 1994 book considered the authoritative history of the city of about 22,000 people.

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The city has the smallest retail tax base of any in Ventura County, excepting tiny Fillmore, Greenland said. Still, he said, almost no one mourns the disappearance of the old downtown.

“I guess it was such a dilapidated thing that it wasn’t anything to lament,” Greenland said. “It was something they wanted to get rid of. They bulldozed it and didn’t build anything to replace it.”

Only a solitary downtown block survived the civic improvement effort. And now only the 72-year-old Hamilton stubbornly hangs on to the business he opened in 1946.

His neighbors are a forlorn row of shuttered stores and a historic former bank building that is itself a relic of bygone business activity, relegated to housing musty museum exhibits as well as a withered Chamber of Commerce that last year almost merged with its Oxnard counterpart.

Indeed, whereas most Ventura County cities viewed redevelopment as a tool to save aging downtowns from the wrecking ball, Port Hueneme saw things differently.

Redevelopment efforts instead focused on building about 1,250 homes near the beach, renovating existing houses and creating a network of parks, paths and bicycle trails in a village-like setting.

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The result is a bedroom community that values its tranquillity, but where no discernible retail core has meant an absence of both a gathering place and valuable sales tax revenue.

Depending on one’s point of view, Port Hueneme has either benefited from carefully making maximum use of limited resources or squandered its few economic opportunities, leaving a precarious financial municipal legacy in its wake.

Yet several geographical, historical and political factors outside the city’s control have dictated why the county’s second-oldest community is characterized more by aging neighborhoods of tract homes than by vibrant oceanfront tourist hubbub.

Port Hueneme has always been considered an out-of-the-way burg, residents say. The community, founded in 1874, turned into a virtual ghost town around the turn of the century when the railroad was rerouted to serve the nascent city of Oxnard that was sprouting around a sugar beet factory.

Surrounded on three sides by the ocean, port and the huge Navy base it is best known for, Port Hueneme remains isolated in its corner of the county.

Furthermore, it has remained in the shadow of neighboring Oxnard, which has grown into Ventura County’s largest city via a series of annexations that former and current Port Hueneme officials maintain curtailed their city’s growth.

But perhaps the most significant factor in Port Hueneme’s evolution was completion of the harbor in 1940 and founding of the naval base in 1942.

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The harbor gave the downtown a brief rebirth, Greenland said. But it also cut off the business district from the beachfront communities of Silver Strand, Hollywood Beach and Hollywood By The Sea, whose residents had shopped in the city.

Also, the Navy base that has consumed 58% of the city’s area did more than gobble up valuable land. It sliced Port Hueneme in half, fragmenting the community and disassociating downtown from the city’s growing northern reaches.

“Things began to deteriorate in downtown Port Hueneme,” said former Councilman John Hickerson, 78, who also managed a downtown hardware store in the 1940s and 1950s. “It was sort of a dead-end, so to speak. Unless you were going down to the harbor or just sightseeing, you didn’t have much reason to go to the old part of town.”

In any case, townsfolk were not particularly proud of the sights people could see downtown, officials said.

The drinking, gambling and prostitution endemic to the area perpetuated not only the city’s less-than-stellar reputation, but its poor self-image. The city also was prone to flooding because of beach erosion stemming from the port’s construction and raw sewage that occasionally backed up into streets, rendering the municipal beach unusable.

“What should have been the most valuable part of Hueneme became its biggest problem,” said 82-year-old Bill Moranda, who was city manager from 1955 to 1975.

Ironically, the final blow to the city’s downtown came in 1960 when residents voted its card rooms out of existence. What life the area had dwindled away, accelerating the downtown’s decline and leaving it ripe for redevelopment.

Nearly 40 acres were cleared and added to the 22 acres the port district already owned as part of a redevelopment project that expanded the port.

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“What has been rebuilt there since is marvelous--but it’s not a downtown,” concedes Ray Prueuter, 78, who was mayor from 1962 through 1974. “But the city has come along just beautifully--and it is a city--even without a downtown area.”

An effort to reestablish a central business district on Pleasant Valley Road in the 1960s was largely unsuccessful.

The rationale behind the failure of a business district to emerge and succeed the old downtown is similar to why Port Hueneme boasts little in the way of a commercial area in the region today, city officials said.

“The reason we don’t have a downtown is the market doesn’t exist for a downtown,” Planner Greg Brown said. “We’re living with the legacy of the Navy.”

Nevertheless, some critics contend Port Hueneme exacerbated the problem by failing to use redevelopment to revive the city’s retail core.

“It might be such a thing that some poor judgment was used, but I won’t say who or how,” said a circumspect Hickerson, who also worked in various municipal administrative capacities for about 20 years before retiring in 1980.

Local real estate agent Mark Sabo agrees with that assessment, arguing the limited amount of land to be developed in the old downtown area caused a kind of paralysis that resulted in the city missing crucial opportunities. Small bistros, art galleries and similar businesses were never encouraged, he said.

“They didn’t have much to work with and what they did have they didn’t want to screw up,” Sabo said. “They didn’t capitalize on what they had.”

Councilman Bob Turner also bemoans that in hindsight--never mind what market studies said--a modest ocean view commercial center could have enabled the city to exploit its redeveloped beach to a greater extent.

“We don’t have a central place or draw,” he said. “It’s really one of the nicest beaches around. People just seem to forget about Hueneme. People don’t wander off the beaten path to find us.”

City officials say that is precisely the problem and point out that a nearby 54,000-square-foot strip mall completed in 1991 has never been fully leased.

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Turner and others have suggested a quaint rebuilt downtown with a harbor theme--a current councilman, Murray Rosenbluth, has even proposed that cruise ships could dock at the tiny port--might bring in visitors and revenue. But city officials note that nearby Channel Islands Harbor in Oxnard, built with a faux New England fishing village theme, hasn’t exactly been a prime commercial catch.

Still, an office and retail development called Market Street Landing has yet to be built. In redevelopment plans the city adopted late last year, a pedestrian path and waterfront retail complex, which could include a restaurant, are possibilities on about 10 acres of former Navy land near the old downtown. And a prime beachfront plot adjacent to the port that a bank seized from its owner last year has often been mentioned as the site for a resort-hotel.

Such projects are years, and more likely decades, away from fruition, given present market conditions, officials believe.

Meanwhile, officials make no apologies for trying such much-maligned ideas as a 10-acre oceanfront recreational vehicle park to raise money. After a bitter battle led by outraged residents of the city’s beachfront homes, the city in 1994 dropped the proposal.

Although city officials may be correct in saying a market for a larger retail core doesn’t exist, business owners say bureaucrats haven’t been particularly accommodating to those who were willing to stay anyway.

Ann Kralick, whose florist shop was the only other business to occupy the block where Bob Hamilton still cuts hair, moved to Moorpark last year.

That decision came after she arrived at work on Valentine’s Day--her busiest day of the year--to find the city had closed Market Street for repaving.

“It was just frustration,” she said. “They have not planned for a business base and they have not been business-friendly.”

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About This Series

“Heart of the City: The Rebirth of Downtown” is an occasional series describing the efforts to revitalize the downtown shopping districts in Ventura County’s 10 cities. Today’s installation focuses on the unique plight of Port Hueneme, which bulldozed its downtown in the 1960s and is now struggling to raise tax revenue. Future stories will focus on renovation plans in other communities.