Old Town Newhall Gazette, Feb.-March 2008


		THE GAZETTE. February-March 2008 • Year 14, Number 1. A Long And Rutted Road. — EDITORIAL — By LEON WORDEN Editor and Publisher. "Santa Clarita is well on the road to becoming a premiere city of the Twenty-first Century, but its heart — downtown Newhall — is broken. It will take the combined efforts of the Newhall business community, our city government and residents throughout this valley to mend it." With those words, an extremely small group of people launched the Old Town Newhall Gazette in the summer of 1995. Victor Feany was one of them. He showed his support for the effort to "get the message out" by advertising his business in that very first edition. (At the time, he was the store manager.) Those of us who had been around town a while didn't like what we were seeing. No matter where in Santa Clarita we slept at night, Old Town Newhall — or simply "Old Newhall," as we called it — was our home. And it was hurting. This was no one's fault. It was … destiny. It was what progress left behind when the postwar baby boom brought legions of people to Southern California. Landowners did what had to be done, what made economic sense, to meet the exploding demand for affordable housing: They turned farmland into sprawling tracts of new homes — in our case, Valencia. Newhall was our historic center, but urban sprawl transported our valley's population center north and west. With it went the money. Gone was the bank on San Fernando Road. Gone was the Sheriff's Station and courthouse. Gone were the car dealerships. Gone was the gas station and drug store. They followed the money, or they followed their footloose clientele, or they went out of business all together because fewer people had to come to Newhall for shopping, dining, entertainment and personal services. There were trendier stores and movie theaters in Valencia. Even the seat of local government had left. Which was the chicken? Which the egg? It doesn't matter. What mattered in 1995, and still matters today, is what we do about it. It is a wonder — and nothing short of a miracle — that Newhall Hardware lasted as long as it did. It is a true testament to Vic Feany and his associates' love and devotion to their community that they weathered the storm that "progress" threw their way. From 1989 to 1993, before the revitalization of Old Town Newhall began, taxable retail sales throughout the city of Santa Clarita increased four percent. Meanwhile, in Newhall, they fell ten percent. Buildings stood vacant. Windows were boarded up. The original Downtown Newhall Merchants Association was literally down to two guys — insurance agent Virgil Saunders and auto parts dealer Bob Martin — and after the 1994 earthquake, even they were done. As downtown planning consultant Michael Freedman put it in 1995, "It looks like a ghost town where people are still trying to do business." The economic engine Newhall had been for more than a century had stalled out. San Fernando Road had become a strip mall for the adjacent community, with a supermarket and thrift shops and liquor stores and restaurants and video rental outlets to meet the convenience needs of neighbors within a one-mile radius — like any other strip mall in Santa Clarita. But San Fernando Road is not a strip mall. It was and is configured to be a central business district. To be successful, Newhall would need to serve the adjacent neighborhood and attract customers from outside the area who would leave some cash behind. That's what was missing from the equation: the businesses that make the difference between a strip mall and a central business district. The types of businesses that draw customers from a three-mile radius. Banks. Movie theaters. Drug stores. And a hardware store. Newhall Hardware catered to walk-in customers, but something on the order of half its business came from construction contractors all over the Santa Clarita Valley. It was a regional business. With more and more big-box competitors luring away its walk-in traffic at the same time the housing market was taking a nosedive — you do the math. In 1995 we recognized it would require a concerted effort to stanch the blight, both physical (vacancies, dereliction) and economic. Just as retail sales were falling in Newhall, so too were property values, even while they surged in the rest of the city. Newhall needed to be attractive to the types of regional, "three-mile" businesses that could make it a thriving economic hub again. It wasn't attractive — not physically or in terms of building allowances or incentives. There weren't any. It was not uncommon in the early 1990s to hear potential investors say they weren't interested in Newhall because they didn't see sufficient commitment from "the city" to turn the area around. But we had faith: faith in the community and faith in our local government leaders. As we stated in that very first Gazette, "We know that together, the people of Santa Clarita can transform our valley's historic center into a place where folks can once again meet, dine, shop, socialize and escape." In truth, the kernel of the turnaround was planted two years earlier with an initial city government study of the area. Now, in 1995, we would no longer call it Old Newhall. The late Richard Rioux came up with the name "Old Town Newhall" because it conveyed a particular vision for the area. Old is quaint and, well — old; "Old Town" has a specific meaning to people. It's alive. It's also a planning term, just as "new town" was the technical 1960s name for a planned community such as Valencia. From downtown maven Jo Anne Darcy to George Pederson and Clyde Smyth and Carl Boyer and Laurene Weste and other mayors in between and since, official Santa Clarita muscled the political will to get the ball rolling. With a (then-assistant) city manager who had experience in redevelopment — Ken Pulskamp — to lead a competent team of government planners and economists who would handle the mechanics, there was a chance that things might begin to change. And they did. Vic Feany was a natural when the City Council appointed a redevelopment committee a dozen years ago to help with downtown revitalization. The committee crafted an architectural language for the area that capitalized on Newhall's historic flavor, and it devised incentives to entice property and business owners to improve their storefronts, maintenance yards and signage. Subsidies were needed to arrest the blight. It was clear what direction Newhall was going without government intervention. Four hundred thousand dollars of public money filled Bob Martin's vacant space with the Canyon Theatre. Sixty-nine thousand helped transform the commercial building at Market and San Fernando into El Trocadero restaurant and the REP Theatre and more. This money did not come from someone else's pocket. Most was borrowed against the future increase in property taxes that these redeveloped buildings would generate — increases that would not come unless they were redeveloped. Other pots of money were tapped for major public amenities: an iconic Metrolink station for commuters, a contemplative plaza for military veterans and their families, a state-of-the-art Community Center with wholesome programs for neighborhood youth. It was a healthy start. Falling property values leveled off and slowly started to rise. Investors who wouldn't give Newhall a second thought a decade earlier pricked up their ears. But the building codes were still wrong. More work needed to be done if private developers were going to take the effort to the next level and transform Old Town Newhall into a viable, thriving, sales tax-generating destination for shopping, dining and entertainment. Official Santa Clarita again stepped up to the plate, drafting new plans that would allow developers to build the archetypal, multi-story buildings you're used to seeing in an Old Town, with upstairs residential units over ground-floor retail space. Roads would be reconfigured to create an Old Town ambience, and new government buildings, including a large library, would attract patrons who would see the new shops and restaurants. And so it began anew. Feany, long a proponent of angled parking on San Fernando Road, was pleased when customers were able to back up to his store and load their trucks from the sidewalk. (Others considered back-in parking confusing; the city soon switched directions.) The street names themselves were changed to embolden the sense of place. "San Fernando Road" through the middle of Old Town became "Main Street." "San Fernando Road" will change north and south of Old Town, as well. From Fifth Street south to Highway 14, it will be "Newhall Avenue," and by the time you read this, its name from Lyons Avenue north to Magic Mountain Parkway may be changing, too. It's a funny thing about street names. Some are quick to assume we are "ignoring our history" by losing the name, "San Fernando Road." As far as your editor is concerned, calling a street in this valley "San Fernando Road" was an accident of history. You see, Santa Clarita was never part of the Rancho San Fernando. We were the Rancho San Francisco. When the padres established an outpost of the Mission San Fernando at Castaic Junction in 1804, they called it the Estancia de San Francisco Xavier — not the Estancia de San Fernando. Perhaps we could have called ourselves "San Francisco," but that name was taken. Instead we called our town "Newhall" for Henry Mayo Newhall, who purchased the Rancho San Francisco in 1875. (Our San Francisco, named for St. Francis Xavier, 1506-1552, had nothing to do with the "other" San Francisco, named for St. Francis of Assisi, 1181-1226. Besides, that San Francisco was a pueblo, not a rancho.) In 1878, our first settlers laid out the town in its present location and named the streets. What we know today as "Main Street," they called "Spruce." (Newhall Hardware's address was 725 Spruce Street.) In August 1954, the county of Los Angeles came along and took down the "Spruce Street" signs and replaced them with "San Fernando Road" — which made about as much sense then as it does now. We're not in San Fernando. We're in Newhall, and the road name is going to tell you so — at least until somebody resurrects the name Tochanaga, the name of the original Indian settlement in Newhall prior to Spanish conquest. Today so much is happening in Old Town Newhall that it's a challenge to stay on top of it all. Looking beyond the Newhall Redevelopment Committee, the city is reaching out to broad groups of "stakeholders" to formulate and implement a marketing strategy that will bring more events and publicity to the area. The strategy includes a new Web site, MyNewMainStreet.com, designed to attract young adults who might be interested in the sporting goods stores, coffee houses, ethnic restaurants and night life that Newhall does or soon will offer. (You will still find the Gazette and other resources at SCVHistory.com/OldTownNewhall.) At the same time, we're taking steps to preserve the best of what has existed in Newhall throughout the decades. It is not a matter of "out with the old, in with the new." It is "keep the old and add the new." The Redevelopment Committee and city staff, along with the Historical Society and property owners, are actively working together to formulate a Historic Preservation Ordinance that will hopefully prevent Newhall's most important historic structures from being razed. We should have more to report in the next edition, but at this point, things are moving in the direction of a temporary stopgap measure to prevent situations like the one we reported last year when Tex Williams' house was bulldozed and nobody knew it until after the fact. Thinking back to 1995, we were certain the changes we see now would happen if the city and the community worked together — new private investment, public improvements, historic preservation, full occupancy, rising property values. Where property values rise, of course, rents are sure to follow — boding ill for businesses that are barely hanging on. We saw it in 1914 when rents were raised on Newhall's main street, Railroad Avenue. Merchants responded by realigning their shops to face Spruce Street one block to the west, making their old back door their new front door. Business owners don't have it quite so simple today. No doubt a lot of folks felt the blow when they lost the Old Town Newhall business they had known for sixty years at 725 Spruce Street. No, not Newhall Hardware, but the livery stable and feed store that preceded it (with a radio shop in between). The livery and feed store had served the needs of Newhall's equestrians from the very beginning. Now it was gone and replaced by — progress. People were driving automobiles through Newhall now. Not enough customers to maintain the old feed store. Not that the scattered ranches of the Santa Clarita Valley didn't need feed stores. They did. But by this time, other feed stores had opened in other parts of town, closer to the ranches. Newhall Hardware was just what this growing suburb needed when Don Guglielmino opened his doors in 1947. His store served us well when it was the only one of its kind, and it survived even in the face of competition by providing exemplary service and hard-to-find wares. In the end it was not enough. Like its equestrian predecessor, Newhall Hardware was crippled when its customer base moved away and newer, larger — albeit perhaps colder — competitors opened up where the people and the money were. And consumer tastes have changed. Today's shoppers are more apt to patronize a Restoration Hardware store with its fake "old stuff" than a Newhall Hardware with authentic old stuff.Today's shoppers are more apt to patronize a Restoration Hardware store with its fake "old stuff" than a Newhall Hardware with authentic old stuff. It will be interesting to see whether the owners of the building, the heirs of the man who founded Newhall Hardware, will be able to find a tenant to last the next sixty years. Thank you, Vic, Diane and all the crew we've come to know. You are our extended family and we appreciate the time and attention you gave us. ©2008, Old Town Newhall USA. All rights reserved.

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Old Town Newhall USA · Post Office Box 802993 · Santa Clarita, CA 91380-2993