A revived Oldtown Salinas creates a sense of place, even with a few prominent properties vacant.

Tired: Oldtown Salinas circa 2000.

Wired: Oldtown Salinas circa 2020 – almost, anyway.

So let’s talk about that thesis.

Go back to the year 2000, and there wasn’t a ton of life to be found in the county seat’s historic downtown. There were banks, a few white-collar businesses providing accounting and legal services and some mom-and-pop stores. There were a smattering of great breakfast and lunch places, all of which closed for the day in midafternoon. A few larger mom-and-pop stores were active too: Dick Bruhn was still selling clothes, letterman jackets and police uniforms, and Beverly’s was still selling yarn and fabric and craft supplies. The Maya Cinemas hadn’t yet opened and there was a big, mostly unused parking lot across the street from the site where it would open in 2005.

A remarkable scene would happen most every weekday. Come dusk, the people who shopped or dined or worked in Oldtown fled for their homes and the district became a ghost town. People still talked about how dangerous it was to be down there at night.

What a difference a couple of decades makes. That big dumb parking lot is now the headquarters of Taylor Farms, and the ground level contains multiple businesses. Portobello’s, located on that ground level, does a busy lunch trade, yes, but it’s also open late night, has a full bar and often features live music. There’s a Starbucks, competing for coffee dollars with the independently owned Cherry Bean and the recently opened hotspot The Beerded Bean, which offers beer and live music along with coffee. The Maya is consistently busy and features a variety of independent, Spanish-language films in addition to the blockbuster releases you can find at any mainstream movie house in the county. Also busy are a throng of new restaurants and clubs that have popped up in recent years, including Villa Azteca, Farmers Union Pour House, Dubbers and XL Public House. There’s a bona fide bookstore too, and CSU Monterey Bay has opened a Salinas outpost in the former Steinbeck Center building.

And yet, there’s still a long way to go. The former Beverly’s is empty (and the subject of a federal court case involving religious freedom laws); the Dick Bruhn Building is empty because it nearly burned to the ground four years ago (and is now the subject of a receivership action by the city over the owner’s refusal to rehab the blighted space) and another may soon be empty too (the Halltree Antique Mall, which closed without warning the week of Feb. 9 amid rumors the management owes $20,000 in back rent and owes vendors thousands of dollars). That’s three key buildings, two of which are located on prominent corners.

There’s also reason to hope. Salinas is making serious inroads to developing more housing in Oldtown. The former Rabobank building at Alisal and Main is being converted into 50 apartments with ground-floor retail. The former home of the Salinas Californian is in line to be converted to apartments as well. And the city is entertaining a proposal by a noted Silicon Valley developer, Ralph Borelli, to transform the Lincoln Avenue corridor in a multi-year, $489 million project that would bring a hotel (and maybe two), a new library, a new City Hall, useful parking, and a combination of market-rate and affordable housing. Affordable housing developer First Community Housing is connected to the proposed project.

But as Salinas also prepares to transform Main Street, reworking the streetscape through Oldtown, not everyone is happy about it. On Feb. 25, as this issue was being readied to go to the printer, a group of merchants led by Trish Sullivan, who owns Downtown Book and Sound, were preparing to go to a City Council meeting to raise concerns about what Sullivan calls the downtown boondoggle. “We’ve been trying to get portable bathrooms downtown for three years,” she says, “and a lot of us feel if city can’t keep up the cleanliness, they have no business spending millions ripping things out and putting new stuff in.”