Fear, Excitement High on Eve of Santa Paula’s Make-Over

With equal measures of fear and excitement, merchants and residents are braced for Monday when demolition begins as part of the largest civic renewal in the history of this Santa Clara Valley farming town.

Nearly six years in the making, the $3.5-million downtown revitalization project will rip up Santa Paula’s decaying streets, heaving sidewalks and aging trees that span a 22-block area.

In their place will emerge a distinctive Midwestern-style downtown meant to encourage pedestrian traffic, accentuate more than 20 historic buildings and provide a foundation for private investment to rejuvenate the wheezing retail core.

The city has concocted elaborate plans in an effort to minimize the construction’s effect on shoppers and merchants alike. But the owners of financially tottering downtown businesses worry they may not be around to reap the benefits of the long-awaited transformation.

“It’s a mix between panic and exuberance,” said downtown bookstore and art gallery owner John Nichols, who is also co-chairman of an advisory group that has labored to help design Santa Paula’s new look. “I’ve got a business to run during the time construction is going on. What’s going to happen to me? It’s kind of scary.”

No one argues the make-over is needed if Santa Paula is to remake its image from depressed agricultural center to quaint tourist attraction. Similar revitalization efforts are underway in most of the other nine cities in Ventura County.

Santa Paula, a 95-year-old community, has the unenviable distinction of possessing the lowest median income, the highest unemployment rate and the second-lowest sales tax receipts among cities in Ventura County.

City officials estimate that Santa Paula exports nearly half its retail sales dollars, and have said reducing that leakage is the “greatest single means to stimulate the local economy.”

The theory is that by making downtown appealing to tourists, then the locals--who have largely abandoned the shopping district--will also return, Nichols said.

The result is radical civic surgery to cut out Santa Paula’s diseased shopping core and transplant healthy infrastructure in its place, arresting the deterioration of the long-suffering patient before its condition becomes terminal.

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Despite the potential of better times ahead, downtown’s inexorable descent has continued unabated in recent weeks. Cauch’s Drug Store, a downtown fixture since 1888 and a business that once filled 250 prescriptions a day, recently closed after being acquired by a large chain.

“It’s been a long gradual decline, nothing abrupt,” said Nichols, who opened his business in 1984. “Depending on who you talk to, things are rosy or they don’t want to talk about any problems, and the next time you turn around they’re gone.”

By the time the project is completed in mid-November, there will no longer be the foot-high curbs, messy berry-dropping ficus trees and the generally disheveled appearance for a business district that passed its prime decades ago.

The revitalization is actually the combination of two projects.

The first is the $2.9-million redesign of Santa Paula’s Main Street streetscape--sidewalks, roads, gutters, curbs, blooming Bradford pear trees, more than 150 Victorian light standards and other street architecture.

The return of angled parking on either side of Main Street for the first time since the 1950s will trim two of the road’s four traffic lanes and give motorists a visual signal the area is a destination rather than a thoroughfare.

Welcoming visitors will be river rock monuments at 7th Street to the west and 12th Street to the east. The 5 1/2-foot tall structures will be adorned with a newly designed logo showing downtown’s distinctive clock tower, the citrus and avocado fields that surround the city and an American flag.

Plans also call for installation of a neon Santa Paula sign over 10th Street--called California 150 by the state--next to City Hall to welcome motorists exiting the freeway. The sign, however, is the subject of negotiations between the city and Caltrans, because the agency’s regulations generally prohibit such a structure over a state highway even when it does double as a city street.

The second project is a $590,000 development of the former Southern Pacific railroad right of way, which the city acquired last year.

Today, tourists disembarking from the excursion train that runs between Fillmore and Santa Paula are greeted by an unappealing expanse of gravel and dirt.

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But new platforms, brick paving, street lamps and another monument-type sign will be added around the original 1887 train depot and the recently completed farmers’ market site nearby. The improvements are intended to guide visitors to Main Street, a mere block to the south.

“The whole idea with Railroad Plaza is we’re building an arrival point for the heritage train, but we’re also building a new civic space for the citizens,” said architect Doug Nelson, who designed both projects in conjunction with the advisory committee.

Despite the projects’ scope, further refinements are planned.

The City Council gave the go-ahead last week for planning to start on Phase 2 of Railroad Plaza, which will eventually become a linear park similar to the one Fillmore is building on its railroad property.

The $824,000 second phase, due to begin late this year, will develop a 2,000-foot-long grassy area and include a gazebo, a memorial to the 1928 St. Francis Dam disaster, meandering sidewalks and the permanent closure of part of Mill Street.

Additional downtown improvements in coming months include creation of a paseo, or path, on Green Street--which will be closed to automobile traffic--to provide pedestrian access to Main Street from parking lots.

Moreover, the city plans to spend an additional $330,000 to turn a former hardware store on Main Street into a series of micro stores--a demonstration project officials hope will encourage similar downtown interior and exterior building improvements.

“I think it should have been done 20 years ago,” said Richard Garcia, president of the Downtown Merchants Assn., an organization that he helped resurrect last year.

This isn’t the first time Santa Paula has tried to revamp its downtown.

Merchants rejected an effort to establish a downtown business improvement district during the 1980s, when the merchants’ association proposed a special tax on business people to cover the cost of improvements.

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In 1991, the same architect who restored the Santa Paula Union Oil Museum--considered by some as the finest Queen Anne-style office building on the West Coast--proposed applying a similar touch to the buildings and street along four downtown blocks. But the proposed 40-foot-high wrought iron arches spanning Main Street and other accouterments never materialized.

The latest revitalization effort is moving forward partly because city officials spent years cobbling money from disparate local, state and federal sources, project manager Ken Ortega said. But the previous failures also laid the groundwork for the lengthy planning process that spawned the current version of revitalization.

“This project has been, I think, a great example of community consensus planning,” Nelson said. “The community really feels it’s their project.”

But the design by committee also led to frustration over the extended planning time involved.

Connie Reed, owner of a crafts and collectibles store, Connie’s Country Faire, decided to locate her business in Santa Paula rather than Oxnard, Ojai or Ventura because city officials said the project was imminent. That was three years ago.

“I waited and I waited and I waited,” she said. “Probably 95% of my business is people passing through Santa Paula, not locals.”

Reed, like Nichols and a few other business owners, has used creative measures to keep her business alive. Nichols runs a modest marketing and printing business that brings in the cash to subsidize his bookstore and art gallery.

In the back of her money-losing craft store, Reed has a seamstress shop.

Nobody is naive enough to believe the expensive downtown improvements will be a magic economic bullet.

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But Reed fondly remembers last summer, when the big screen remake of “Leave It to Beaver” was filmed in downtown Santa Paula. Then, people strolled Main Street even after the day’s shooting was over. The draw, she contends, was the attractive false storefronts and fresh paint applied to stores for the first time in years by the film crew.

More people walked Main Street after last summer’s filming than attended the annual Citrus Festival parade on Aug. 2, she said.

“I’m hoping revitalization will bring people downtown--people who are afraid to come downtown because of the way it looks,” she said. “It’s going to be slow growth, word of mouth.”

Nichols, however, frets that word of mouth won’t be enough. He is concerned that once the initial glow wears off, that struggling businesses--without marketing support--will remain within a bright, shiny downtown.

“It’s easy to spend money on physical improvements,” he said. “You can measure it, you can weigh it. How do we justify spending money on marketing? It’s ephemeral. It’s a rat hole.”

But for the first time in years there is an almost palpable sense of optimism downtown.

Santa Paula business people look at Ventura and see how its downtown survived revitalization in 1995 and now is reaping the benefits of continued investment with impending construction of a 10-screen movie theater. Santa Paula officials see how Fillmore has blossomed since its downtown revitalization project was completed last year. Now, they say, it is their city’s turn.

“We’re on the verge of great things,” Nichols said, “but it’s not going to happen automatically.”

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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 first installment focuses on the move to revitalize Santa Paula’s downtown area. Future stories will focus on renovation plans in other communities.