Downtown Esparto has gotten a lot quieter in the weeks since the state Department of Transportation closed the town's main street to through traffic and detoured thousands of casino-bound motorists around the Yolo County hamlet.

In mid-May, Caltrans shut down a five-block stretch of Highway 16 called Yolo Avenue over concerns that a crumbling 19th-century brick building might topple into the street.

The building's owners say they don't have the money to fix it, and officials said the situation could take months to sort out.

On Monday morning the town's main drag was sleepy and serene, with just the sound of the wind in the sycamores and the hum of power lines overhead.

Only occasionally would someone drive by. Sometimes a confused driver who had missed a detour for the Cache Creek Casino Resort would turn around at the concrete barriers and chain-link fences that block the road on the north end of town.

The lack of cars was nice for anyone trying to cross the street, but terrible for the handful of businesses that rely on casino traffic to stay afloat.

"They're killing us," said Amrik Singh, proprietor of the Grab-N-Go convenience store, just beyond the roadblock.

Singh said he's lost a third of his business since the closure and isn't sure he'll be able to make his mortgage payments much longer.

"Everybody's hurting because of the economy, and now this," he said.

Other businesses, especially the few small restaurants in town, have been similarly hurt, owners said. A Mexican restaurant that opened last year and relies heavily on weekend casino traffic has been especially hard hit, officials said.

Even the Post Office has suffered. Postal worker Gloria Bailey said casino patrons from the Bay Area used to mail their packages in Esparto because there was no waiting in line. Now they rarely come through, she said.

The closure has thrown another obstacle in the way of Esparto's long-awaited economic recovery.

Many storefronts on Yolo Avenue are boarded up and vacant, while historic structures, including the train depot, have broken windows and for-sale signs.

A street beautification project is moving forward, but other improvement plans are on hold, said Elizabeth Campbell, director of the local chamber of commerce.

"The whole town's in limbo," she said.

The problem building at the corner of Yolo and Woodland avenues is known to locals as the Wyatt Building. Built in the late 1800s, it has housed hardware, grocery and dry goods stores, all long gone.

Pam Pearson, who now works at the town's fire department, remembered running across the hardware store's wooden floors as a child and then working there 10 years.

She said that even then the crumbly bricks would yield easily to screws when deer heads were mounted to the wall.

The building's current owner is a nonprofit group in San Diego County called Healing the Nations Foundation, which had intended to rehabilitate it someday. Then in May, part of the roof collapsed and Caltrans closed the road.

The foundation's president is "Pastor Bob" Maddux. He said the building has now become a "huge liability" replete with structural problems and environmental hazards, including asbestos and lead.

The foundation doesn't have the money to fix the building but is hesitant to knock it down, he said.

Maddux said he is trying to find a low-cost solution to shore up the building and is hoping to secure grant money to do the needed work, but nothing has come through.

"I feel absolutely horrible about this situation," Maddux said.

Yolo County Counsel Robyn Drivon sent Maddux a letter last month that described the building as "an intolerable public nuisance" and threatened legal action. The county could eventually step in and demolish the structure, she said in an interview.

And County Supervisor Duane Chamberlain said he has been hammering at Caltrans to come up with a plan to reopen the roadway.

But officials said it appears that neither the state nor the county will be able to solve the problem quickly. The closure is likely to last for months, they said.

"There's no end in sight," said Caltrans spokesman Eric Alvarez.

Some longtime Esparto residents don't mind. They say that with the road closed to all but local traffic, it's more like the days before Cache Creek casino opened nine miles up the Capay Valley.

When it opened, an average of 10,000 motorists – most of them casino-bound – whizzed through Esparto each day on Highway 16, a county official said.

Others aren't too pleased. Nancy and Thomas Ryel said they moved to the Country Villa Mobile Estates on the edge of town for a peaceful retirement. Now thousands of detoured cars roar by the mobile home park, making it difficult to pull out of their own drive.

And accidents have increased at the congested intersections that drivers must pass through on their way to the casino, Nancy Ryel said. "It's horrible how they run the stop signs," she said.

Call The Bee's Hudson Sangree, (916) 321-1191.