STREET WISE: / New Directions : A Byway That’ll Take You Nowhere, Yet Everywhere
It’s a street that refuses to grow up. It’s resisting suburban encroachment all around it, hanging on to its rural roots like some stubborn old homesteader refusing to sell out to the real estate development company.
It goes by two names, this street that crosses the Escondido city limits into the county. Citracado Parkway is its highfalutin city name. It’s less-pretentious Gamble Lane in the county.
It’s an eclectic street, Citracado-Gamble. It goes to church and vegetable stands, to a toxic dump and boarded-up homes, to mansions and fixer-uppers, to avocado groves and ponds.
Only 2 1/2 miles long, it’s just two lanes except where it fans out to four lanes below Interstate 15, where it crosses Felicita Road at the four-way stop.
At its eastern end, Citracado is anchored by a one-time hotel that now is a senior citizen’s retirement home, at Centre City Parkway. St. Timothy’s once rented the place for a poolside luau , and the old folks seemed to enjoy the diversion.
Head west and you go up a hill so steep they put a stop sign at the crest so people don’t go flying over it.
Down the other side of the hill is a vegetable stand and across the street is a church. It’s not the classic little church with steeple and belfry--it looks more like a place computer parts would be assembled.
Resting atop the street light just down from the church the other day was a barn owl, appearing almost ghostly under the full moon. My family sat mesmerized in the car for 10 minutes before the owl finally flew off, silently.
As it crosses beneath I-15, this street goes by the name Gamble Lane. Motorists who get off the freeway at the Felicita Road off-ramp actually exit onto Gamble Lane--but the sign says Felicita because it’s the grander thoroughfare.
The Gamble-Felicita intersection is country-commercial, with fellows in pickups selling avocados and a peddler selling flowers. Barely-legible cardboard posters tacked on to the stop signs here promote garage sales, the closest thing to billboards hereabouts.
A huge vacant lot at the corner will probably be a neighborhood shopping center some day. God knows developers have been trying for years to plant the place in concrete. But it’s still just tall grassy field for now, with an old barn off to the side, and it could remind a person a little of Nebraska if it weren’t for the palm trees along the street.
Across the street from the vacant lot are some folks who breed Arabian horses. Every spring two or three long-legged babies appear in the corral, teetering about while trying to keep up with their moms. One year my wife and I were invited into the stable to watch a birth. Incredible.
Two blocks down the street, the through traffic turns left, onto Bernardo Avenue. The center stripe even makes the turn to the left. If you head straight, on Gamble, the road narrows and a sign warns, “Not a Through Street.” Not many people venture this way because it doesn’t look very promising.
It’s here, at the corner of Gamble and Bernardo Drive, that this street makes its claim to notoriety: the Chatham Brothers toxic waste site, where for years dry cleaning solvents and oils were reprocessed and the residue simply poured into the ground. County officials blew the whistle 10 years ago and have tried their darndest to clean it up, but it seems the crud is deeper into the ground than they first figured.
On the property there’s a neat little pond encircled by reeds. It was once a popular fishing hole.
Just up the street are some small old homes for rent, and one that’s boarded up. One of the Chatham brothers still lives on this stretch of road.
A little farther down the road, but before you get to Orange Avenue, there are avocado groves along the right--a lot of possums crawl out of there. On the right is a huge two-story house on an acre or two of property. Everyone calls it The Mansion. Head up that side street and you’ll see custom homes on estate lots with manicured, expertly-landscaped lawns.
Across the street from The Mansion is the place where, years ago, an old man lived in a tiny little stucco shack. The new owners have redone the place inside and out. It looks now like a three-story home, with dormer windows poking out of the steeply-pitched roof. They’re still working on it--you can see the stepladder through the window at night when the lights are on.
Gamble Lane soon cuts through two steep embankments. Years ago, the road went over this crest of earth like some roller coaster. Kids would joy-ride at break-neck speeds and literally go airborne over its crest. One boy died doing that. Finally, the county flattened the hill. No fun anymore, but safer.
Gamble Lane heads uphill again, barely wide enough for two passing cars, surrounded by open fields with estate homes tucked inside avocado groves. Upscale new tract developments have been planted on the hills above the Gamble Lane valley, where the city is closing in. Gamble Lane finishes with just a few scattered homes before it dissolves at the next crest line.
City and county maps show someday how this road supposedly will continue over the hill and connect to West Valley Parkway as a major four-lane shortcut through this part of town. Some people think it already goes through, so they pull over to the side of the road in frustration, poring over their Thomas Brothers maps, when they realize they’re stuck on a dead-end.
For now, Gamble Lane remains a two-lane road, no street lights, no curbs, as it literally melts into the sunset, dissolving into an avocado grove at its western terminus.
Some say it’s hodgepodge and doesn’t know what it wants to be when it grows up. I’m with those who want it to stay what it is: a quirky little street with as many blemishes as beauty marks, a street that seemingly goes nowhere.
It takes me home every night.
