Allie Kay Spaulding/Looking Around

Laurel Avenue has a distinctive personality. For one thing, is a meanderer. At the east end of town, it begins at 12th Street, takes a dog-leg north at North A Street to North E, where it dog-legs back south. For another thing, much of it has railroad tracks down the middle. These train tracks become a roadblock in places. You can/t drive straight through Sixth Street, Daisy, Poppy, or Lupine because there are no street crossings across the tracks there.

At the west end of town, Laurel Avenue dog-legs once more at North V to come to its end at the fields beyond North Z Street. From east to west, much of the avenue goes through industrial areas.

A lot of people probably avoid Laurel Avenue when they can.

Early last December, people driving through the intersection of O Street and West Laurel noticed some unusual activity in La Chiquita Plaza, a small mall on the northwest corner of the intersection. A plain wooden façade was put up over the entire length. Then scaffolds appeared, cement mixers whirred, and a coating of plaster covered all the wood. As soon as the plaster was dry, came men with buckets of &#8220Pure IvoryC paint, closely followed in a day or two by men with buckets of light blue paint who painted a narrow blue stripe down the length. Next came some light green paint on the bas relief diamond shapes. La Chiquita Plaza took on a very pleasant new look.

On March 1, big piles of rubble appeared at the corner of North V Street and Laurel, where the Lompoc Lumber Company used to be. In a blink there were no more buildings, just growing piles of sand and gravel and cement chunks.

Questions arise. What/s going on with the little Mexican mall? What/s going up where the Lompoc Lumber Company came down?

First stop: the mall.

Ismael Langara was on the scaffold plastering, but he graciously took time to steer the writer eventually to Mr. Sergio Zepeda, marketing director for Sanchez Properties, Inc., owners of the mall for the past four years. It seems that this coming December, La Chiquita Market in the Plaza will have a 15th anniversary, so the owners decided to spruce up in time for an anniversary &#8220bashC 7 exact date and nature of festivities to be announced.

This writer had visited this mall before on a couple of Saturdays to have some &#8220tortas.C A large hunk of pork rotates on a vertical spit, slowly roasting on the outside. Thin slices of cooked meat are shaved off by the cook. He holds a tortilla or a slice of bread in his left hand and tosses the meat through the air to the waiting tortilla/bread. When the Greeks cook this way, they call it &#8220gyro.C Mr. Zepeda fine-tuned my Spanish by explaining that if it is meat in a tortilla, it is called &#8220taco al pastorC; if it is meat on bread, it is a &#8220torta.C Whatever you call it, you are likely to call it more than once. The way it works: You go into La Chiquita Market to order and pay, then take your ticket to the man outside at the spit for your food.

Believe it or not, the folks at the Whistle Stop Café next door don/t mind if you go inside there to eat, so long as you buy a pitcher of beer or so to wash things down.

Since I was there, I wandered in to the Whistle Stop to get some background on the place. I had heard that it had a colorful history. I couldn/t have chosen a better time. When I told Charlie, the bartender, that I was interested in knowing more about the Whistle Stop, three men at the bar all spoke up at once, each one pointing to the other as the one I needed to talk to.

It turns out that the three men were J. D. Smith, former mayor and former chief of police; Frank Hilley, whose father was involved in the construction of the building; and Arden Reynolds, retired Air Force security, Pinkerton employee and longtime Lompoc resident 7 known in Bakersfield as &#8220Strawberry ManC for some reason that wasn/t fully explained. Later, I talked with Rocky Cobb, the lady who has owned the café for 32 years. From them all emerged images of a beloved neighborhood hang-out and, in earlier times, of a place where the train, on its way to the diatomaceous mine, came to a dead stop so that the railroad men could get off and load up on sandwiches.

A couple of shops down, &#8220Zapateria OK MagueyC looked intriguing. Shoes (&#8220zapatoC), boots, belts, jewelry, and CD/s were for sale there. I asked the owner if he were Mr. Maguey. He wasn/t. He was Rey Ramirez, but he was willing to talk about the meaning of maguey, a liquor made from the agave plant. It seems that many liquors are made from the agave, especially the blue agave, such as tequila and pulque. In Mayan times, pulque was called the &#8220Drink of the GodsC and was available only to kings.

Mr. Ramirez, it turns out, is fascinated by Mayan history. There is nothing comparable to hearing a person speak knowledgeably of his roots, particularly when his roots are sunk in an ancient and fascinating culture.

Out of the mall and down Laurel Avenue on the way to the construction site, there is a new sign in front of an old business: &#8220We/ve got beans! Come on in.C So I did. Built in 1958 as the Lompoc Warehouse, in July 2005 the business changed hands and name. New owner Bob Campbell changed the name to &#8220Lompoc Valley Seed and MillingC. In addition to the traditional pinquitos, you can now buy 12 other varieties of beans including black, pinto, and Christmas limas. The famous cloth bags with the picture of the flower fields are, happily, still available.

Finally at the JM Development site at Laurel and North V, the clouds of dust and mystery cleared. Jerry Brandon, Lompoc-born-and-raised site superintendent, gazing from the window of his trailer office proudly assured me that all the demolition materials 7 the wood, the concrete, the metal 7 are being recycled; in fact, the ground-up concrete will be used as a base under the streets of the project.

He reminisced for a moment, remembering when this area was the site of vegetable sheds where both he and his mother worked in 1965 washing, culling, and packing vegetables to be shipped to canneries in Los Angeles. For details of the building project, he referred me to headquarters in Santa Barbara. Ian Bentley, sales coordinator there, described the project to be called Crown Laurel. There will be 73 single-family houses, 11 of them designated &#8220affordable,C built in the California Traditional architectural style. Access roads will open onto North V on the west and Maple Avenue on the north. Trees will line the area on the west. On the east side of the parcel will be commercial storage units. Targeted completion date: autumn 2007.

West Laurel, it is a/changin/. Fewer people will be avoiding it in the future. Let/s hope it can retain its charm and something of its history and perchance adapt gracefully to its differing character.

Allie Kay Spaulding can be reached at alliekay@verizon.net.

May 7, 2006