Lake Forest Hoping for a Retail Renaissance

When Saddleback Patio and Fireside opened its doors on El Toro Road 22 years ago, the site near Interstate 5 was surrounded by movie theaters, fashionable restaurants and giant retail stores.

“This was the place to be in Orange County,” said store owner Bob Wood, who took over the Lake Forest business from his father a few years ago. “You couldn’t help but make money here.”

Two decades later, Saddleback Patio is among the few survivors of the congestion that has wiped out many of the businesses along the neglected three-mile strip of El Toro Road between Rockfield and Muirlands boulevards. These days, it is the place not to be.

More than 55,000 cars pass through the stretch each day. The area has become a major route for commuters heading to neighboring Aliso Viejo, Laguna Hills, Laguna Woods, Rancho Santa Margarita, Ladera Ranch and Foothill Ranch.

But most of the cars are filled with commuters hurrying to get home. Business owners complain that relatively few motorists stop in, but shoppers say businesses are hard to find, and they’d rather avoid the commuter traffic and shop elsewhere -- including the Laguna Hills Mall on the other side of the freeway, the Irvine Spectrum and the Shops at Mission Viejo.

“People come into the store saying the traffic is so bad out there that they try to avoid El Toro at all costs,” he said. “Do you know how hard it is to hear that as a business owner?”

Customer gripes about the bottleneck and the struggle to break even had Wood considering leaving Lake Forest for a more modern, upscale mall in Irvine or Newport Coast. But when he realized that the long-proposed El Toro widening project might actually become a reality, he decided to stick it out.

Like many merchants on El Toro Road, Wood worried about the effect a yearlong construction project would have on his business, that already nightmarish traffic would worsen. He voiced his concerns at a series of Lake Forest Planning Commission meetings.

Eventually, Wood threw up his hands and backed the project, which will widen the road from six to eight lanes, synchronize traffic lights, add landscaped median islands and connect shopping centers through a series of driveways.

Work is expected to begin in nine months and be completed by late 2005. More than half of the project will be funded by an Orange County Transportation Authority grant. The rest will come from Measure M, the sales tax approved by Orange County voters in 1990 to fund transportation projects, and the city of Lake Forest.

“During that year, it’s going to be tough,” Wood said. “But finally, I said, ‘Let’s just do something ... do we keep letting it wind down into next to nothing, or do we act to preserve this place for the long run?’ ”

Lake Forest officials are hoping the $26.7-million project does more than just resurrect the once-thriving strip. They are betting that the redevelopment project, which ties the strip malls into a unified retail corridor, will give the area personality. The city’s vision for retail renaissance already has a name, “The Arbor.”

“We see “The Arbor” as a place you will go to relax, spend time and money,” said Peter Herzog, mayor pro tem of Lake Forest, who has lived in the area 20 years.

Herzog, however, admits El Toro Road does not meet those criteria now.

“I think you’ll find a pretty universal opinion that the area is a disaster,” he said. “People try to avoid El Toro Road. We have to change the mentality.”

Apparently, developers believe that is already happening. Herzog said owners of Saddleback Valley Plaza, which is about 70% vacant, have submitted plans to demolish the tired shopping center in hopes of wooing large, national chain stores and trendy boutiques.

A building that housed Kmart, once the area’s anchor on Rockfield Boulevard and El Toro Road, has been boarded up since 1994 and will probably be torn down, Herzog said. Several large retailers, including Wal-Mart, recently inquired about redeveloping the site, Herzog said.

Wood, the patio furniture store owner, says the buzz of development is exciting, maybe more exciting than the road-widening plan.

“There’s no consistency to this area, no theme,” he said. “The road-widening will help, but it’s not the entire solution. The shopping centers need to get on board by modernizing the architecture. This place looks like something out of the 1970s. It’s scary.”

And sad to locals like Jim Smith, who remember the glory days.

“This was the happening place when I moved here in the ‘70s,” said Smith, 50, an electrical contractor who lives in Mission Viejo. “There were two sets of movie theaters and tons of places to eat. You didn’t think of going anywhere else. Now, I avoid it like the plague.”

Herzog said El Toro Road’s demise has had surprisingly little effect on the city’s finances. But he admits that the empty storefronts, dilapidated buildings and traffic snarls have damaged Lake Forest’s reputation.

“Our revenues are diversified and they’ve been increasing, so it hasn’t been a drag fiscally,” he said. “But you don’t want a blighted area in one of the busiest intersections in the county. It’s not the kind of image you would ever want to portray.”