The Los Angeles Times du lieu suivant : Los Angeles, California • Page 333

I urange STREET WITH A PAST AND A FUTURE A "downtown plaza and parking study" includes this portion of San Juan Capistrano's main street, Camino Capistrano, looking north to the mission. limes pholo by Hal Schulz Planning Study Challenges San Juan's Love Affair With the Past residential area where families of Mexican and Indian ancestry live in adobe and board-and-batten homes. Together, the downtown and across-the-tracks housing area are quite a throwback, considering that nearby are condominiums, gas stations and fast-food restaurants. Mayor Yvon Heckscher, an attorney whose office is downtown, has definite feelings about old San Juan Capistrano. "Downtown has a character that is not material.

It appeals to the senses, the heart The history, romance and myth cannot be reproduced," he said. But Heckscher worries about the downtown's future. He fears outlying shopping centers will draw off shoppers and failing merchants will allow the area to deteriorate. "If we do nothing about it, it will go down the hole. It will become another decaying downtown." Heckscher says He would like to see parking eliminated on Camino Capistrano and sidewalks widened to give more of a pedestrian feeL He does not endorse a large scale commercial restoration such as San Diego's Old Town "All the action and pizzazz would detract from what we have.

You know how we feel about size in this place," Heckscher said. Pitted against Heckscher and those who want to do planning to save downtown are merchants who say they could tell City Hall all it needs to know. "Why do we have to spend $21,000 on a consultant Why Please Turn to Page 8, Col. 1 chapel is the oldest intact building in California and the rest of the mission grounds, behind a surrounding adobe wall, is remarkably preserved The legendary return of the swallows each St. Joseph's Day from winter migration adds to the allure.

Capistrano Trading Post with its prominent sign saying "Story of the Swallows," beckons visitors to the shopping area. Old California architecture is evident in many forms. The El Peon shops are behind a tall adobe facade, Capistrano Plaza has an arched portico covering the sidewalk. The Franciscan restaurant and plaza uses red roof tiles, and Mexico Lindo bar and restaurant has outside wall murals and an overhanging balcony. The Judge Richard Egan home from the late 1900s.

done in brick with Queen Anne gingerbread ornamentation, juts into the main street Across from it El Adobe Restaurant, boasts that its wine cellar, built in 1778, once was a jail for the famed bandit Joaquin Murietta. Among the shops are ruins of early homesites. And. if one follows Verdugo St past the restaurant-restored Capistrano Depot and across the train tracks, one reaches Los Rios St Here, on the county's oldest residential street generations of the Rios family have lived in the same house for 183 years. The Montanez Adobe, just as old.

is here to be walked through in all its mustiness, thanks to the San Juan Capistrano Historical Society. North and west off Los Rios St is the Little Hollywood Downtown merchants, leery of the whole process, are not reassured by the city's explanations and fear the intrusion of government There is no unanimity that anything major needs to be done. let alone what might be done to preserve and enhance downtown. As a beginning. San Francisco consultants CHNMB-Halprin and Associates have had persons, both in and out of the business community, walk the downtown and then try to arrive at some consensus observations From that has come a needs statement that says there should be a city entry or gateway on Ortega Highway, parking, rest rooms and directional signs for tourists, a completed network of sidewalks and landscaping.

The statement also calls for a cleanup. From the opinions of 36 persons who attended a workshop, project manager Harold Baxter reads community feeling as being against converting the main shopping street, Camino Capistrano, to a pedestrian mall, in favor of establishing a public plaza somewhere downtown, and disapproving of city officials' apparently poor rapport with merchants. Baxter will present that information to a citizens steering committee Thursday along with preliminary findings from Economic Research Associates and JHK Associates, which respectively are doing economic and transportation studies of the downtown. The uniqueness of San Juan Capistrano begins with the mission founded by Father Junipero Serra in 1776. The BY THOMAS FORTUNE Times Starr writer SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO South of the megalopolis and its wall-to-wall suburbs, only a few blocks off a freeway, is a place that says to the beholder "early California." It is not the recreated cachet of Main Street at Disneyland.

The feeling here is of its being the real thing. Which it is. It grew, instead of coming off a drafting board. And it came through the years intact unlike other Orange County crossroads that became cities or fell by the wayside As a place, downtown San Juan Capistrano is iess grandiose than an amusement park. It is the Old Mission, a few shops and restaurants of congolmerate Spanish architecture, a sprinkling of adobes.

But the authenticity, the 200-year history, the romance and mythology of San Juan Capistrano conjure distances in time. To visit here is not just to escape the present, it is to experience the past Tourists will snapshoot it. But for others, memories of moments when the mind drifted and touched a small-town past are behind their image of San Juan Capistrano. But these images and this history are being called into questioa The city has commissioned a consulting firm to do a "downtown plaza and parking" study. The intent, say city officials, is not to undo or redo the historic downtown but to preserve it and save it from deterioration.

PROOF IS IN THE DOUBLOONS Treasure Hunter Really Finds It Roger Miklos is one of the few. Call it luck, call it guts or call it a combination of both, Roger Miklos has found his fortune in sunken treasure. And believe it or not, Miklos says having a few million dollars in gold and silver to run your fingers through is almost as much fun as he thought it would be. At the age of 38, Miklos has unearthed a fortune in precious metals himself, and he is a partner in a corpo- BY EVAN MAXWELL Times staff Writer Gold doubloons and pieces of eight Spanish galleons and sunken treasure What human being has not dreamed the dream those words conjure? But dreaming is easy; for every thousand persons who dream, there are but a handful who risk following that dream. And from that handful, there are but a few who find what they seek ration which has recovered $200 million to $300 million in treasures.

In the process, Miklos has acquired a mouth full of broken teeth, a sense of self-preservation and a protective curtain of technical gadgets that includes a $36,000 four-wheel-drive vehicle and a laser-based alarm system for his home. The dozens of gadgets, most of them expensive, fit naturally into the successful treasure hunter's lifestyle; when in California, he has a choice of personal vehicles, in addition to the custom van, that includes a Rolls-Royce, a BMW, and a "full-dress Har-ley Hog" motorcycle. He prefers to keep his home address out of the limelight, but it is so situated that he has a 180-degree view of the Pacific Ocean. That is not a bad score for a guy with an eighth-grade education, a guy who started treasure hunting on broiling Florida beaches 16 years ago with a hand-held metal detector. And despite his successes, Miklos can still say that the biggest thrills of his life come not from the spending but from the discovery.

"I am still turned on by the romance of finding something very old and very neat and unique. When you are diving or digging and you come up with a gold coin, you know that you found it that no man has laid eyes on it for anywhere from 250 to 400 years. The monetary value of it what some antique appraiser says it is worth that is just a way of assuring yourself that it isn't phony." As thin as a foremast, Miklos brings the intensity of a Florida hurricane to his search for treasure and his daily work as West Coast representative for a cartel of treasure hunters. During the winter, he spends most of his time in California, dealing with wealthy collectors of gold and silver artifacts and other relics of Spanish treasure ships that sank in the Carrib-bean on their way home from the New World colonies. But come spring, Miklos will begin to get into shape for his own return to the Florida keys.

He first went there in Please Turn lo Page 4, Col. 1 TREASURE HUNTER Roger Miklos during on interview. Bottles were retrieved from wrecks. Times photos TREASURE TROVE Adventurer Roger Miklos holds a double handful of gold bars recovered from sunken Spanish treasure ships he's found. Coins fastened to his watch strap, top left, are pieces of eight that are part of the first treasure he found.

RA RC FROM THE DEEP Knives, spikes, pistol balls are among artifacts sunken ships yield. I.