Julian Confronts Dilemma Over Building Boom

JULIAN — A building boom of sorts is occurring here, creating a dilemma for the merchants and old-time residents of this gold rush boom town.

Just how far should this town go in catering to the thousands of tourists drawn here weekly for fresh air, pine trees, apples and pears, wildflowers, mine tours and ice cream at the county’s oldest soda fountain?

Should Julian offer more amenities to tourists, who are this town’s economic lifeblood? Or will promoting more tourism just lead to more traffic congestion, noise and trash?

The answer, of course, depends on whether you moved up here to quietly retire and get away from people, or whether you’re a merchant who depends on the tourists’ dollars.

The building boom hardly meets big-city standards, but it’s the most explosive rush of construction here in decades.

A 24-room hotel is nearing completion, a 10-shop “mini-mall” is open on Main Street, and a new fire station is almost finished. And in Julian, population 2,000, that’s explosive development.

Down the highway a few miles at Wynola, there’s another new collection of shops, and some people will lump that development in with Julian’s when they talk about what’s happening up here in the mountains.

In the view of some longtime residents, Julian has decided to be downright aggressive in going after the tourist trade.

“The trend is in that direction, but be careful how you phrase it because it upsets some of the townsfolk,” said Fred Lemly, a local property broker and vice chairman of the Julian Community Planning Group, which advises the county Planning Commission on local land-use matters.

Among the critics of Julian’s new developments is a local store clerk who, after being promised anonymity, sarcastically characterized the “mini-mall” as the “Seaport Village Annex” and who mumbled about how tourists take her parking place and how some businessmen “want to turn Julian into Knott’s Berry Farm.”

Several other residents, asked about the new buildings, declined to comment but rolled their eyes in a sign of disapproval.

“There’s been more building, and remodelings, in the past year than we’ve seen in quite some time,” said Richard Zerbe, an architect and community volunteer who moved to Julian in 1949.

“The people who cater to tourists, especially those in the food business, are interested in encouraging tourism. But some of the people who came to live in a quiet mountain town are disappointed in the increase in tourism,” he said.

“But most of us agree on one thing. There’s not a whole lot we can do about it. People have been coming here for 100 years, for the same reason.”

The Julian Community Planning Group has had some some success at tempering growth in the area. In December, for example, the group successfully lobbied the San Diego County Board of Supervisors in limiting an expansion of the private American Adventure campground, south of town on California 79.

The campground at the time had 148 spaces for members and wanted to increase the size of the park --by almost 200 spaces. But the supervisors limited the park to 250 spaces total, with then-Supervisor Patrick Boarman noting, “Julian is a gem, a fragile area, and we should all be interested in trying to preserve it.”

The supervisors then established a one-year moratorium on construction of time-sharing parks for recreational vehicles in the Julian area, after complaints from Julian town leaders. The townsfolk said the increasing number of recreational vehicles passing through was snarling traffic and upsetting the rural ambiance.

No one is predicting wholesale changes in Julian’s skyline, such as it is. Large-scale growth can’t occur here, because there’s a total reliance on well water, the roads leading here are narrow, there’s no sewage system other than septic tanks and there are not many jobs, save in the apple and pear orchards and the businesses along Main Street.

And, realizing the historical value of Julian, the Board of Supervisors in 1978 established a historic preservation district, meaning that any new buildings constructed in town must conform with the architectural style used between 1870 and 1913, Julian’s heyday as a gold-mining town.

To that point, the new hotel, called the Julian Lodge and scheduled to open this summer, is designed to look much like the old Washington Hotel, which was built in 1885 and torn down about 1960.

The mini-mall on Main Street features a dress store, a florist, a deli, a jewelry store, a toy shop, a cutlery store and some gift shops.

The man who built both the new hotel and the mini-mall is Frank Helmuth, a local resident and member of the planning advisory group. Helmuth also has built motels in San Marcos and Ramona.

He doesn’t apologize for creating the building boom, and he says he has not received criticism of his two projects.

“There was a need for both. I’m not the only one who could see that,” Helmuth said. “As the population of Southern California grows, more people will be coming up here. You can’t keep the tourists away.”

Julian, while always popular as a getaway, experienced its greatest growth in tourism in the 1970s when, with less gasoline at higher prices, Southern Californians--and San Diegans in particular--looked for places closer to home that still offered a change of scenery.

The autumn brings the popular apple harvest, winter brings snow bunnies, spring offers the wildflower festival, and summer attracts campers to the score of public, private and youth campgrounds that dot the surrounding hillsides. In addition to the seasonal draws, there are, by local count, no fewer than 44 bed and breakfast inns in and around Julian.

So, on any given weekend, tourists clog Main Street, parking is at a premium and the townsfolk stay home, or grumble about fighting the tourists for a place to park. In recent years, tour buses have begun to appear on weekdays as well.

France Keresztury, president of the Julian Chamber of Commerce, talks of the dilemma that faces Julian.

“A lot of us came up here to get away from the rat race. That’s why I came here in 1968,” Keresztury said. But it’s inevitable that we’re a tourist town. We can’t put a gate at Santa Ysabel (to the west) or at the bottom of Banner Grade (to the east). So it behooves the merchants to say, ‘OK, if the tourists are coming, we’d better provide for them.’ ”

The fact is, though, that there isn’t much space for development. Local real estate agents say the largest single parcel available for commercial development is 13 acres, but it does not have highway frontage. Perhaps the most attractive and available piece of property is a 1.7-acre parcel just a short distance out of town.

“But you have to add a big note of caution,” Lemly said. “Everything that happens in the backcountry is subject to a lot of county rules and regulations because of the water and septic problems.”

Before Helmuth’s development, the last commercial development in the area occurred two years ago with the opening of Wynola Springs, a collection of six stores.

“With the growth at Warner Springs and Rams Hill (at Borrego Springs), this kind of growth around here was bound to happen,” said Jo Wendt, who built the complex.

But even she acknowledges that tourists are both boon and bane.

In December, she said, a tourist in search of a Christmas tree found just the perfect one--and didn’t mind walking into someone’s front yard to cut it down.