One for the Road : City Prepares to Toast End of $6-Million Lincoln Revamp, a Project Pegged to Create a Humming Business District
More than a mere roadway face lift, the $6-million Rediscover Lincoln, a streetscape beautification project, is essentially complete.
As workers place city seals in the gateway monuments and apply the finishing touches to a two-story, brick and marble clock tower at Lincoln Avenue and Walker Street, so signals the end of the yearlong construction project. A dedication ceremony and unveiling of the clock tower is scheduled for 10 a.m. Saturday.
City planners designed the Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired project--with its massive granite and marble gateway pillars, Victorian-style globe lamps, cobblestone crosswalks, and Coyote Creek Bridge towers--to revitalize the stagnant business district and create a “downtown” for Cypress.
“Lincoln is fundamentally one of the community’s main streets, an identity street and a long-standing thoroughfare in Cypress,” Planning Manager Ted Commerdinger said. “The project is designed to renovate and rejuvenate Lincoln and make the whole area more pedestrian friendly.”
Said Alice Ingus, community development director: “Originally, the designation for Lincoln was a state highway. The feeling of the street was a state highway where traffic goes through, without thought for design or pedestrian use throughout the street.”
Indeed, when Dairy City was incorporated in 1956 to stop an annexation attempt by Buena Park, Lincoln Avenue was inadvertently left off the map. But when the city changed its name to Cypress the next year, Lincoln Avenue was annexed along with other additional surrounding areas.
Travel down Lincoln a year ago and one would have seen a hodgepodge of retail, restaurant, lodging, automotive repair, light-industrial and residential uses. The hodgepodge is still there, but now with amenities such as the ornate bus-stop canopies and city kiosk directories, there is emerging a method to the madness.
“You get the whole spectrum of uses along the entire street,” Commerdinger said. “So the specific plan wanted to create a unified feeling.”
Rafael Rodriguez, owner of Senor Big Ed, a Mexican restaurant at Walker, has been listening to the ringing of the clock tower and can’t wait for the unveiling.
“It looks very nice, and I think it’s going to help everyone,” Rodriguez said “Now, the business owners just need to get their buildings fixed up, painted and such, to go with what the city has done.”
Ingus said the city is looking to create a funding program to help business renovate their storefronts.
But beyond improving the existing businesses, city planners are banking that the streetscape project--which covers the city’s entire 3.5-mile stretch of Lincoln Avenue, from the Coyote Creek Bridge to Valley View--will spur a revitalization of the business district.
Commerdinger said the city is working to bring more pedestrian-based businesses to the neighborhood: coffee shops, art galleries, bookstores and upscale restaurants.
“We want people to have someplace to go after work, so they can take a walk after dinner down to Lincoln,” Commerdinger said. “There’s some activity now, and were seeking to build on that.”
Chris Ceballos can be reached at (714) 966-7440.
