A Road Everybody Wants : Hadley Extension Extolled as Boon to Uptown Merchants, Salve to Traffic Troubles

Like a latter-day Marco Polo, Bruce Martin sees the extension of Hadley Street as the golden link to lure shoppers from new markets across the Puente Hills.

The executive director of Whittier’s Chamber of Commerce believes untold numbers of San Gabriel Valley shoppers are waiting for a chance to spend in Uptown Whittier if a new trade route is carved through the steep hills above the city.

That route, Martin contends, should be Hadley, a broad, four-lane street that dead-ends a few blocks east of Painter Avenue at the city limits. Rising sharply above the guard rail at Hadley’s end are the rounded ridges and grassy canyons that separate Whittier from Colima Road and the burgs of Hacienda Heights, La Puente and Rowland Heights.

30% Store Vacancy Rate

Martin, like many in Whittier, is convinced that the Hadley extension would be a boon to merchants in Uptown Whittier. Since the late 1970s, shopkeepers and city officials have spent several million dollars giving Uptown a face lift to attract consumers and new business, which is needed to reduce a 30% vacancy rate in the shopping district.

Much of Whittier’s redevelopment push, particularly on the city’s west side, also would be directly affected by the 2 1/2-mile extension of Hadley.

Besides boosting business in Whittier, regional transit experts say that connecting Hadley with Colima is one way to ease traffic in the hills, a growing problem that threatens a half-dozen communities on both sides of the ridge.

“Everybody wants that road to go through,” Martin said the other day. “But there’s a catch, a big catch. . . .”

Money. It is the same obstacle that has stymied the project since it was first drawn up in the late 1950s. Back then, buying the land, grading the road bed and paving the lanes to extend Hadley would have cost $2.5 million. Today, the price tag is $15 million to $18 million, and nobody seems ready to ante up.

The County’s Responsibility

As much as Whittier officials want the extension, they say it is a county project because it lies in unincorporated territory east of the city. County officials say they cannot afford to do it without help from the area’s three major property owners--Rose Hills Memorial Park, Chevron U.S.A. and Union Oil Co. All three said they have no plans to develop their holdings in the Whittier backcountry and have no interest at this point in financing any or all of the Hadley extension.

Nonetheless, Whittier officials in recent months have been working privately to get the project moving forward.

Mayor Gene Chandler said a small delegation of city representatives, headed by former Mayor Jack Mele and former chamber president Dave Cannon, met with Chevron officials in January and walked part of the proposed Hadley route. While Cannon said the session produced little movement on the issue, some interpret the behind-the-scenes activity as a signal the city is accelerating efforts to get Hadley extended.

Chandler has dedicated his second term of office to getting Hadley extended. After his reelection last April, he said the project would be his top priority over the next four years.

Clyde Haight, who last week retired as public works director after 28 years with the city, said the Hadley project has been the city’s No. 1 priority as long as he can remember.

“When I’m asked what are the city’s top three public works projects, I always say ‘Hadley, Hadley, Hadley,’ ” Haight said. “It would make a lot of people happy in this city.”

Particularly, it would make happy those living along Mar Vista Street between Painter and Colima. For years, Mar Vista has been a shortcut for motorists who use Colima and want to reach Uptown Whittier or the city’s west side. Rather than come south from Hacienda Heights over the hill to Whittier Boulevard, they turn right from Colima onto Mar Vista and go west through the tree-lined neighborhood. Extending Hadley would alleviate the need to use Mar Vista because motorists could take Colima to Hadley to Whittier Boulevard, an easier and more direct route.

Mar Vista residents have complained for years about traffic on their two-lane street. In the early 1970s, they organized and lobbied for the Hadley extension, hoping for some relief from the noise, exhaust and speeding. When that failed, they persuaded the City Council to put stop signs and signals along the street to slow traffic and break up the flow, making it safer to back in and out of driveways. Still, Mar Vista residents believe that extending Hadley is the only way to permanently restore quiet to their neighborhood.

“If Hadley goes through, traffic along here would drop dramatically,” said George Corporales, president of the Mar Vista Property Owners Assn.

And, Corporales is confident Hadley will go through one day. The reason, he said, “is the land in the hills is just too valuable not to develop. Soon those oil companies will want houses up there, not derricks, and the road will appear . . . . “

Most agree that the extension of Hadley will be tied to some sort of hillside development.

Governments Lack Funds

Lee Strong, a member of the Los Angeles County Planning Commission and a former Whittier councilman, said most new roads in the county are now primarily financed by developers. “For years, government provided the infrastructure, the water lines, the roads, the utilities, while the builder built the houses,” Strong said. “But since Proposition 13, government has not been in a position to do that. Now, it is up to the developer to pick up much of the cost.”

An example is a proposed 572-acre housing development above Rowland Heights and next to La Habra Heights along two-lane Fullerton Road, one of the region’s most congested--and dangerous--roads. It needs to be widened and realigned, which the county wants Shea Homes to pay for in exchange for approval of its housing development. Shea is buying the property from Shell Oil Co., and should the county approve the project, some believe it will usher in a new era of hillside building from the San Gabriel River Freeway on the west and Brea Canyon Road in Orange County on the east.

But spokesmen for Chevron and Union oil say there are no immediate plans to abandon petroleum operations in the Puente Hills. “At this point, we believe those lands continue to be viable for oil production,” Chevron’s Margo Bart said. “We are not opposed to extending Hadley . . . but it is very premature to contemplate any residential development in that area.”

Cemetery a Big Land Owner

It is also unlikely that Rose Hills, the third major property owner along the Hadley extension route, will venture into the development business anytime soon, according to Sandy Durko, the cemetery’s vice president of marketing. The cemetery owns more than 2,500 acres north of Whittier, but is using only 300 for burial plots, Durko said. “It’s true, we have a lot of land,” he said. “But we have no plans at this time to develop it. It is all dedicated for cemetery.”

Yet, Mary Hansen, president of an environmental group, Friends of the Hills, said the temptation to build on the hillsides will become too great. “Every so often a developer sees those beautiful hills and his eyes get real wide,” said Hansen, whose group twice helped defeat development proposals for the Whittier hills in the mid-1970s. “It will happen again, especially now that there is new interest in extending Hadley.”

But chamber manager Martin has seen the proposal come and go too often to get excited much anymore.

“I’ve got a map in my office from 1957 showing the extension,” he said, “and we still don’t have it . . . it’s very disappointing. It all boils down to money.”

Chance for Federal Help

Whittier came close to getting the federal government to chip in and help build the road when the city expressed interest in landing Richard Nixon’s presidential library here. The city joined the bidding for the Nixon library in 1970, offering 30 to 100 acres of land in the hills just east of Whittier College, Nixon’s alma mater. As part of the deal, the city hoped to get federal highway funds to extend Hadley as far as the library. But Whittier’s bid fell short when the Nixon Foundation decided it wanted an Orange County site, eventually settling in 1983 on San Clemente.

The loss of the library was another setback to proponents of the Hadley extension.

There was a time, Corporales said, that most Uptown merchants opposed the extension, fearing Whittier shoppers would use Hadley to cross the hills and shop at the Puente Hills Mall. Even now, Robert Griego, assistant city manager in charge of redevelopment, wonders if extending Hadley might hurt more than help Uptown businesses.

“There’s always a chance that Hadley might produce the opposite of what everyone hopes,” Griego said. “It could backfire.”

Economic Survival at Stake

But Martin, a Whittier resident for nearly 40 years, disagrees. He said access to Uptown Whittier--bounded by Hadley, Pickering, Mar Vista and Painter streets--is still a drawback and must be improved if the village is to survive economically. It is not near a freeway or along a major thoroughfare, which is one reason, Martin said, that vacancy rates in general are slightly higher than in other parts of Whittier and Los Angeles County.

“The jury is still out on whether the Uptown experiment will ultimately succeed,” said William Lenihan, a commercial and industrial real estate broker in Uptown. “Some fear the competition that Hadley might bring . . . . But I’m optimistic this is a unique place and that it can win out.”

Some say Uptown’s location is part of its charm; tucked somewhat out of the way, the area has a Midwestern look and feel with park benches, brick crosswalks and angled parking.

“It’s a good place to shop,” Martin said. “The problem is, not enough people have found it. It’s just too hard to get to for those living on the other side of the hill in Hacienda Heights and La Puente.

“Maybe, just maybe, extending Hadley would change that,” he said. “But when will it happen?”