By Jason Z. Cohen
Daily Bulletin

When George Chaffey stood at what later would become the top of Euclid Avenue, he envisioned a “very fine place.”

His Ontario would be a land of orange groves and vineyards, geometrically divided by straight, wide avenues and dotted with majestic homes.

The city’s character has changed with the times since that day in 1882, and its economy has shifted from agrarian to heavy industrial to a mix of distribution, retail and light manufacturing.

Through more than a century, Ontario has seen prosperous times and hard times. As the new millennium looms, she is poised to become San Bernardino County’s largest and richest city.

The city has been on the brink of greatness before, only to be turned back by a faltering economy. City leaders say they are ready, should hard times again descend, but others question whether Ontario truly is prepared.

The region’s recent prosperity and the city’s economic growth are causing local leaders to reflect on Ontario’s future, a process that is appropriate in its timing, said Michael Rounds, who is writing a book on Ontario’s history.

“The whole millennium thing is causing that sort of thing everywhere,” Rounds said. “It’s something that Ontario has engaged in every decade or two. They go into a period where they do a lot of speculating about where Ontario is headed.”

The future appears bright.

“Nobody’s going to tell me that that city won’t double in size in the next half century,” predicted Alan Heslop, director of the Rose Institute for State and Local Government at Claremont McKenna College. “It may even triple.”

Heslop said he envisions a period of intense growth soon.

“Ontario is poised on the brink of what could be a great leap forward or what could be a great pratfall,” he said.

“The odds favor the positive.”

When he first built his irrigation system and divided his colony into 10-acre lots, Chaffey took steps to ensure his colony attracted only the finest settlers.

He had four goals: Create a system to distribute water equitably to all residents; build a main thoroughfare from one end of the colony to the other; provide a college for the agricultural education of the colonists; and prohibit the sale of intoxicating liquor.

The centerpiece of his colony was Euclid Avenue, which he designed to be 200 feet wide with 65-foot traffic lanes on each side. Chaffey College, now a community college in Rancho Cucamonga, is the school he began building in 1883.

His irrigation system drew water from San Antonio Canyon and carried it to each parcel of colony land; it was a technological marvel in a time when Americans were just embracing scientific progress.

For all his vision, Chaffey never saw Ontario as a community of commerce. That idea was first proposed by Charles Frankish, whose Ontario Land and Improvement Co. bought the colony from Chaffey and his brother.

After the Chaffeys sold Ontario in 1886, Hotpoint opened its factory just south of downtown. The factory began producing flatirons in 1906.

By this time, the land boom of the late 1880s that had brought people to California seeking a new start had ended.

The end of the land boom combined with the nation’s worst economic depression to date in the 1890s were not enough to bury the young Ontario, historian Rounds said.

“Ontario weathered it pretty well; they had a down-tick at that point,” Rounds said.

As demand from factory workers increased, more services emerged downtown, and a commercial district began to develop along Euclid Avenue.

During the Frankish era, the city’s cultural base began to grow, Rounds said. A Carnegie library was constructed, theater companies began performing at the lodge halls and union halls. There were concerts.

“They even had an abortive attempt at an Ontario Philharmonic in 1897,” Rounds said.

There was a fair amount of trade with other nearby cities along the railroad. Pomona, San Bernardino and Riverside were the “big cities” within a short distance.

“There was a lot of going back and forth for cultural events. Even then, there was a pretty fair amount of going into Los Angeles,” he said.

Even in those early days, Ontario residents commuted by train into Los Angeles, Rounds said.

Ontario’s prosperity grew slowly and steadily until the Great Depression.

“I don’t think Ontario was struck as hard by the Great Depression as were other places. It was still primarily agricultural,” Rounds said. “It was not really good times, but it was not desperate times.”

Although prices of agricultural products were down, the region held its own.

World War II perked up the economy. The boys went off to fight, and women took their places in the factories.

Once peace returned, women left their industrial jobs and men came home to find they had somewhere to work.

During this period, a great flood of people came to California in search of new opportunities.

The city’s leaders after World War II “were really prescient,” Rounds said. “They could see that a major corner had been turned, and the future of Ontario was not in citrus groves anymore.”

Ontario latched on to this growth and, by the 1980s, most of the land available for housing was covered with suburbia.

Then came the bump in the road of the early 1990s as the real estate market lost its vitality. Since, Ontario has regained its momentum and appears to be taking advantage of its location and fortuitous timing.

The state’s population is moving from coastal to inland areas as real-estate marketssuch as Los Angeles and Orange County become saturated, said Heslop, who studies local economics and government for the Rose Institute.

“The population has been urban and suburban, but now it’s moving out into much-less populated areas,” Heslop said. “The most dramatic example of this is the Inland Empire.”

Ontario has a chance to join a new breed of cities on the edges of major metropolitan centers, known alternately as “exurbias,” “edge cities,” and “technoburbs.”

The economies of these post-suburban cities are characterized by commercial and entertainment activity, post-industrial manufacturing and high-end residential development.

They generally lack an identifiable center or hub of activity, leading researchers to refer to them as “centerless cities.”

“Ontario is such a city. It’s been a commuter suburb. It’s now attracting new kinds of business,” Heslop said.

Because of its heritage, though, Ontario retains its traditional city layout, especially with Euclid Avenue as a centerpiece.

City leaders have for years been talking about revitalizing downtown Ontario.

A proposal to build a courthouse and a new police station there fits Councilman Gary Ovitt’s vision for downtown, not as the definitive heart of the city, but as a region within the city serving a specific purpose.

“What I see happening downtown, I think it’s a civic center area. It’s the center for government and law,” Ovitt said. “I don’t think it’s so much retail we’re looking for down there. I don’t think it’s ever going to be a retail area to compete with the Mills or the Montclair Plaza.”

Retail businesses downtown will augment the professional businesses in the area, he said.

“We’ve got a nice area down there,” Ovitt said. “What we want to do is revitalize it a little bit so our history and our future are together.”

Ontario’s future is forming on three fronts, he said. Home prices, lower than those in Los Angeles and Orange counties, attract people; corporations and government are expanding the region’s infrastructure; and demographic changes are creating opportunities for a new market.

The region’s Latino population is forming new middle-class communities, and Asians, especially people of Chinese descent, are bringing capital to the region and starting businesses.

They are creating what Heslop calls the air-conditioned, white-collar, high-tech society of the future.

Housing is once again on the rise, leading Heslop to the conclusion that business is not far behind.

“Ontario is the gateway to the Inland Empire. It is, in a sense, the harbinger of what’s to come. It is the hub of a lot of development,” he said. “You have to hand it to the city fathers because they brought it to the point of genuine takeoff.” Growth maps 8 maps that show the city of Ontario's growth from 1890 to today.