VISTA -- For those who don't know much about Vista, the city's name might seem like an odd joke. After all, the section of Vista most people see traveling east or west on Highway 78 is probably the flattest part of the city. From the highway, it's hard to see why anyone would associate the Spanish word for "view" with Vista.

To find Vista's vistas, it's necessary to throw off the highway's straight and narrow and venture north or south. As you leave the highway, straight roads begin to meander and the ground gets steep. Without warning, panoramic views open up, flashing glimpses of the surrounding valleys.

But Vista is not just about hidden views.

The city is home to North County's only courthouse, on South Melrose Drive. Less visible, but just as vital, is the Vista Business Park on Melrose Drive. The city also is home to one of San Diego County's most vibrant and fastest-growing Latino communities, with 41 percent of Vista's population claiming Latino heritage. That number ranks Vista fourth among San Diego County's 18 incorporated cities, behind National City, Chula Vista and Escondido, according to estimates calculated by the San Diego Association of Governments, the region's planning agency.

While the courthouse and business park both bring bustle to this once-sleepy village, there is no doubt its heart and soul are found at the theater.

A play town

Vista's hills have proven the perfect incubator for the Moonlight Amphitheatre. Nestled like an egg in a nest deep inside Brengle Terrace Park on Vale Terrace Drive, the outdoor play palace, built in 1971, became the center of Vista's performing arts community in 1981.

At the time, Kathy Brombacher was the drama teacher at Vista High School, but today she is artistic director for Moonlight. The stage started with student actors and grew into much more over the next 22 years.

During the summer months, crowds flock to Moonlight to enjoy a picnic while they watch a play. In the winter, the action switches to the Avo Playhouse downtown on Main Street.

The audience has grown with the sophistication of each production.

"When we first started, we were excited if we got 500 people coming out in one night," said Cathy Brendel, Vista's assistant director of Parks and Community Services. "Now, if we get 500 a night in the summertime, we would be sulking."

Casts are a mixture of professional Equity actors and skilled local amateurs.

"We have always had the sense here in Vista that there are actors all around us," Brombacher said.

Decades ago, Vista was an agricultural community. Citrus groves once bore fruit where homes and strip malls now stand. The city's hills still cradle orchards and a few greenhouses here and there, but today Vista grows a fresh crop of actors and actresses every year.

Whole families get involved in the productions, each member contributing what they can.

The Malones have been involved in Moonlight since it opened.

Daughter Betsy "Bets" Malone played a boy in the Moonlight's first production, "Oliver Twist." Mother Carlotta Malone sews costumes, and father Bill uses his skill with wood to build sets.

Carlotta Malone said Brombacher has been the force that drives Vista's theater community to continually improve.

"In the costumes end of it, there's a big difference between what was acceptable when Moonlight started and what we have now. To go back would be unacceptable -- I mean the audience just would not accept it," Carlotta Malone said.

Bets Malone, now 32, has joined Vista's crop of professional actresses. She now lives in Los Angeles and just returned from a theater project in Milwaukee, Wis.

Law and order

In contrast to Vista's artistic soul is its status as North County's legal hub.

Five days a week, a new batch of potential jurors comes to the five-story building that sits, gleaming in the morning sun, like a beacon next to the Vista jail.

Criminal defense attorney Herb Weston remembers the old days when the Vista Courthouse was a one-story affair with only a few judges assigned to try cases.

"When they decided to build a new one, Oceanside wanted it, Escondido wanted it, everybody wanted it in their town," Weston remembered. "But for some reason they decided to keep it right where it was, in Vista."

In fact, previously published accounts of Vista's fight to keep the courthouse have been well-documented. Recently Mayor Morris Vance told the North County Times: "We went down and visited all the supervisors and we had meetings with the judges and we put together a plan and program, and fought and fought and fought, and finally got it back."

Before the new courthouse was built in 1999, Weston remembers making more than a few trips to Superior Court in downtown San Diego.

"They would send all the big criminal cases down there," Weston said. "North County used to be like the lower stepchild. Now we're doing more cases up here than they're doing downtown."

Since the new courthouse was built, an effort has been made to try cases in North County whenever possible. Weston said he has noticed that trend bringing more lawyers and their families to live and work in Vista and other nearby cities. He has watched once-empty office buildings on Melrose Drive fill with attorneys while the surrounding land fills with upscale housing, such as the Shadowridge development with its country club and golf course.

"I remember when I first started practicing in Vista 25 years ago, you could count the number of local practices on one hand, " Weston said. "Now, with the caseload we have, big firms are starting to treat North County as a separate identity."

Hidden workhorse

Vista's hills also serve as a kind of terraced platform for one of North County's most successful business parks.

The Vista Business Park covers a broad 1,200-acre swath of land bordered by Highway 78, Melrose and Sycamore drives and Palomar Airport Road.

Founded in 1987, the park contains more than 650 businesses that occupy more than 12 million square feet of commercial real estate. By comparison, Carlsbad's business park boasts about 13 million square feet.

The Vista Economic Development Association estimates that 18,000 people work in the business park, earning a half-billion dollars in wages every year.

Large and small companies alike call the park home. One of the largest is PenneySaver Inc.

PenneySaver was one of the first companies to move to the business park, locating in a spacious facility on Specialty Drive 13 years ago. The facility composes, prints and delivers 1.7 million copies of its advertising publication each week to all of San Diego County, south Orange County and Southwest Riverside County.

Dave Clark, PenneySaver's vice president of marketing, said Vista's business park was ideal because of its location.

"At the time we had our printing facility in Laguna Niguel and our distribution facility in Chula Vista," he said. "We were looking for a place in-between the two, and Vista was almost exactly in the middle."

He added that Vista and North County have provided access to the kind of workforce necessary to make a large-scale printing operation work.

"We have a need for quite a few entry-level employees for jobs like inserting," Clark said. "The pool of applicants has been very good for us in Vista."

There are quite a few manufacturing companies in the Vista Business Park, making everything from snowmobiles and high-performance car racing engines to nail polish and fiberglass spas.

Kevin Ham, the city's director of economic development, said the business park is about 90 percent full with only about 4 million square feet remaining for new buildings.

Currently, about 9 percent of the buildings in the business park are vacant. As companies move out of their old digs and into new, larger facilities, old buildings begin to sit vacant.

Ham said finding the next wave of businesses to fill existing facilities will be his next task.

"It's no longer about vacant land," Ham said. "It's about vacant buildings."

In the last 20 years, economic prosperity has largely centered around the business park and courthouse, both south of Highway 78. Big-box retailers like Costco, Wal-Mart and Lowe's have built along either side of the highway for years, but redevelopment in Vista's old downtown core has historically lagged far behind.

That all changed when the Vista Village shopping center opened at Vista Village Drive and Santa Fe Avenue in late November.

Downtown reinvention

City Hall spent $83 million and 15 years rebuilding Vista's confusing hodgepodge of downtown streets and fixing ailing infrastructure. That investment attracted $34 million in private investments from Regency Centers Corp. and Civic Partners Inc., which in turn funded a 15-screen movie theater and a variety of restaurants the city hopes will act like a magnet, drawing people downtown to spend money after dark.

Economic redevelopment plans have now turned to South Santa Fe Avenue, where a mixture of older storefronts and vacant lots have given the corridor a grittier feel than other parts of town. The city has plans to help revitalize what it calls the Santa Fe/Mercantile Corridor, which includes not only the properties fronting on Santa Fe, but also properties for several blocks to the north and south.

But for now, owning a business on South Santa Fe can be a struggle.

Raul Ramirez has owned his business, V&R Upholstery, on South Santa Fe for more than three decades. He said he has noticed an uptick in crime on Santa Fe since the Vista Village complex was finished last year.

"It seems that they are pushing the bad and low-income people into the downtown area," Ramirez said.

Its large Latino community earned Vista attention last year from the U.S. Department of Justice. Investigators scrutinized the city's local election process to determine why Vista's local elected offices, from city council to the school board, include few Latinos. A Latino has never been elected to the Vista City Council.

The investigation uncovered no evidence of voting rights law violations, a finding that did not surprise Ramirez.

Standing at his workbench, Ramirez said Vista's Latino community simply has not produced the right kind of candidate yet. He added that many of his friends, especially those who grew up under Mexico's broken political system, are simply not interested in politics.

He said that a successful Latino candidate for local office must be able to tap more than Latino voters.

"A Latino politician is not going to be elected by the Latino community," Ramirez said. "He will have to be elected by the whole community."

Over the years, Ramirez has watched Vista grow from an agricultural village into a suburban beehive of diverse interests.

"I know one thing, it was a lot more quiet back then," he said, returning to work.

Vista by the numbers

Incorporated: 1963

Area: 18.6 sq miles (11,903 acres)

1990 2003 2010 (projected)

Total population 72,129 92768 97,612

Hispanic 17,881 38,199 46,674

Black 2,963 3,419 3,325

White 48,180 44,674 39,279

Asian/Pac Islander 2,628 3,768 5,182

Other 477 2,708 3,152

Median age 30 31 32

Households 25,403 30,050 31,880

Median Household Income $32,907 $50,582 $42,614

Inflation adjusted (2003 CPI) $48,702 $50,582 $42,614

Median house price

2002 2003 % chg

92083 $269,900 $327,000 21%

92084 $310,000 $365,000 18%

Total assessed property value (tax base)

2000-2001 2003-2004

$4.8 billion $6 billion

Violent crimes per 1,000 residents (FBI Crime Index)

1999 2001 2002

Vista 30.4 28 34.7

San Diego County 36.1 35.7 35.6

Sources: San Diego Association of Governments, San Diego Association of Realtors, San Diego County Assessor