A Midlife Make-Over
The city of Stanton was having a problem. After reaching the ripe age of 43, it was beginning to look a bit frayed at the seams. So city leaders put their heads together and came up with a plan.
Like the balding middle-aged man who suddenly starts donning Hawaiian shirts, Stanton decided to reinvent itself--by planting palm trees along Katella Avenue.
“It looks more attractive in our opinion,” said Jim Basham, the city’s director of development services. “It has significantly changed our image. I think it symbolizes a new start.”
New starts seem to abound these days along Katella Avenue, one of the county’s oldest streets and one of its busiest thoroughfares. In addition to planting palm trees, Stanton will soon be host to McDonald’s latest entry in the “burger wars”--a new restaurant design set to debut on Katella.
Los Alamitos recently converted an old post office into an upscale 22,000-square-foot commercial town center including, among other things, a major bookstore.
Farther east, developers in Orange have sunk close to $100 million into various new ventures along Katella over the last five years, while the city of Cypress has two new office buildings under construction, with three more already approved.
And in the most dramatic example of civic regeneration on the street, about $5.5 billion is being pumped into Anaheim to spruce up the area around Disneyland--an effort that has had an economic ripple effect up and down Katella in places such as Garden Grove, where developers are planning six new hotels on nearby Harbor Boulevard to attract Disney-goers.
“This is Anaheim’s Main Street,” city spokesman Bret Colson said of the path that some have called a microcosm of Orange County, “and it was beginning to show its age. Even the most fabulous of Hollywood entertainers will show stretch marks after awhile, and Katella, even though she is a grand old dame, was looking a bit worn out.”
Indeed, much of the buzz along the 16-mile street has to do with the fact that many of the six cities through which it passes have hit middle age. Incorporated in the 1950s and ‘60s, they have begun to lose their luster, some more gracefully than others.
And, like all entities that reach a certain point in life, they must contend with a world that has changed enormously since their youth, a time marked by rustic surroundings and ethnic homogeneity. Today, Katella Avenue is a symbol of Orange County’s rich cultural diversity and its bustling urban future.
Nowhere is this more evident than near the gates of the Happiest Place on Earth, where newly planted palm trees line both sides of the street in stately rows. Combined with the street’s newly expanded lanes of pavement, the effect seems more evocative of Las Vegas or Miami Beach than of Anaheim.
“It used to be pretty garish,” said John Standiford, a spokesman for the Orange County Transportation Authority.
Katella is seen as such an important thoroughfare that county transportation officials have turned it into one of their marquee “smart streets” where traffic flow is improved with expanded lanes and intersections, and fewer signals to help keep motorists moving.
“It should be a big improvement,” Standiford said of the project set for completion by 2001, “and it shows the street’s importance. You can use it to get almost anywhere.”
Colson, of Anaheim, agrees. Katella Avenue is well worth the investment because of its status as one of the area’s most significant tourist lifelines.
“Katella is one of the major economic engines of our city,” he said. “We wouldn’t be making these investments unless it was for good reasons.”
If that’s true, though, it hasn’t always been apparent to merchants in the redevelopment area that the bulldozers are really their friends. Last summer, many were complaining loudly about the massive digging, blocked driveways and temporary removal of sidewalks which, they argued, was driving business away.
“They’re calling this the ‘beautification’ of Anaheim,” one said then, “but I see it as more of a scar.”
Now, a year later, complaints are more muted and opinions more mixed.
“We’re still upset,” said Doris Morrow, a night clerk at St. Germaine liquor store, which was reporting a 50% decline in customers at this time last year. Today, business is better, Morrow said, but still well below average.
“We’ve lost thousands of dollars, and losing that kind of business is like going on strike,” she said. “You never get it back.”
Mike Lam, manager of the ABC Market across the street, agrees.
“A lot of small businesses,” he said, “have just shut down. You need lots of money to survive.”
Elsewhere, though, a sense of optimism about the future is creeping back into conversations.
“Things are getting better,” one hotel manager said. “We may have problems, but in the long run it will be worth it.”
The Sir RuDimar Motel--on Katella near Harbor Boulevard--changed hands about five months ago, and the new owners report they are doing just fine. “Business has picked up,” manager Mike Dobberstein said.
And even though Zaby’s Motor Lodge is finding it difficult to compete with the newer hotels opening up across the street, at least one manager there believes in the ultimate worthiness of the establishment’s sacrifice.
“The place was going down,” Randolph Gebhard said of the street that has turned middle-aged. Its cosmetic surgery, he said, “was long overdue.”
