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Originally part of Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana, Orange was founded in 1871. Fifteen years later, the Atchison Topeka & Santa Fe railroad was running three blocks from the center of town, helping fuel the fruit-packing and produce industries. Building booms in the 1880s raised much of the downtown commercial district, followed by residential expansions in the early 1900s and then again in the '20s and '40s.
"Since our area
has been on the National Register, home prices have doubled," Paula
says. "In 1997 we paid $236,500 for our bungalow. Last year, one
sold down the street for $500,000, and this year it's probably worth
more. That's a lot for something to go up in six years. If a house
has good bones, the fact that it's on the Historic Register helps
make it valuable -- and the more you fix them up, the more valuable
they are.
"Some 1,230
buildings in the city were placed on the National Register of Historic
Places in 1997. Almost half are bungalows and other period homes,
making up a one-square-mile area called Old Towne Orange, the largest
historic district in California according to the Old Towne Preservation
Association (OTPA). The city conducted a survey of pre-1940 structures
in the early 1980s and determined that certain areas were worth
conserving, including its central plaza commercial district, which
joined the National Register in 1982. But saving Orange's historical
fabric wasn't quite a slam dunk.
"By the time
I got married in 1968, Old Towne was referred to as a 'blighted
area' by the city," says Tita Smith, a lifelong resident and cofounder
of OTPA. "To our young eyes, it looked beautiful. My husband and
I did not want to live in a tract house, we wanted to live in an
old house we could refurbish.
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Neighborhood
Architectural
styles include Hip-roof,
Prairie and Spanish-style
bungalows
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Old Towne's
families had been here for many years -- it was a comfortable,
clean, quiet neighborhood. But what started to bring it down
was in the 1970s it was rezoned R-2, and demolition began
and apartments started going up. Realtors touted that you
could get more for your property if you developed it into
apartments."
In 1985
the city wanted to demolish four historic properties to make
way for a parking lot, and Tita and her neighbors banded together
to fight city hall. They took the issue to the press, spoke
up at numerous city meetings and vowed to elect only people
who would pledge to help preserve the neighborhoods. It came
as a surprise to the upstart group when the city agreed the
houses would stay. But six months later, Chapman University,
the local college that abuts Old Towne, proposed to build
a seven-story structure across the street from single-family
homes. Those residents came to Tita's homeowner group for
advice on what to do. In the process of helping with that
second fight, OTPA was officially launched.
Shannon
and Frank Tucker, who are in the midst of their fourth Old
Towne house renovation, joined the group in 1988. By the early
'90s when Shannon was its president, OTPA began the process
of working for Historic Register inclusion.
"We invited the State Office of Historic Preservation down
to give us some guidance on what we needed to do for the National
Register application," Shannon explains. "It took about four
years to produce the application, which was the size of a
phone book -- 400 pages long, three revisions. The state commission
was in awe that we did it without any support from our local
government, since we couldn't even get letters of recommendation,"
she remembers.
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Although OTPA
worked hard to let residents and city officials know the pluses
to a National Register designation, the city wouldn't endorse their
efforts. "There was a small but loud group who were frightened that
people were going to dictate what color they could paint their houses,
or tell them what kind of fencing they could have," Shannon says.
"There were around 2,700 notifications to property owners about
the proposed district, and 100 or so said they didn't want to be
included."
Even now, OTPA
is focused on changing misconceptions that people have about its
goals, contends Trace Weatherford, a three-year resident of Old
Towne. "Years ago some members were overzealous and would tell people
that they had the wrong plants in their yards, that kind of thing,"
she says. "Recently the city was called about a front-porch remodel
in the historic district, and that was erroneously attributed to
the OTPA board as well. We want the neighborhood to realize that
we don't care to police those kinds of things; we want to educate
people about preservation issues -- what can and should be done
-- and still allow them to live in their homes and have their own
lifestyles." Those unique lifestyles are perhaps most evident inside
the Craftsman bungalows, Victorians, Spanish Colonial Revivals,
Prairie School homes and cottages that make up the Orange historic
district.
Trace had driven
the streets of Old Towne pulling real estate brochures for years,
never dreaming she could afford to live there. But when she found
a small bungalow whose only visible interior attributes were a river-rock
fireplace and a clawfoot tub, she jumped.
"It had been
a rental for decades and was very nondescript -- carpeting, popcorn
ceilings, painted apartment beige from floor to ceiling," she says.
She had the Douglas fir floors refinished, removed the cottage-cheese
ceilings, gutted and remodeled the kitchen, added wainscoting and
a pedestal sink in the bath, and painted and landscaped. "I didn't
want a purist version of a bungalow interior, but I did want it
to be rich colors, warm, with a Mission flair."
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Neighbors
Paula and Steve Soest had another take on a bungalow-appropriate
interior look. They were coming from a 1954 house with mid-century
modern furniture and their newly purchased Craftsman bungalow
had pink carpet, pink walls and pink woodwork. "We didn't
know anything about Arts and Crafts until we moved here,"
Paula says. "We were very much into the '40s, '50s, Hawaiiana,
rattan furniture. But the house really told us what to do."
They took
up the carpet and refinished floors, and had the woodwork
professionally stripped room by room. Steve wryly says, "I
started in our son Jesse's room, got about three feet done
and realized I could do better just going to work and making
the money to pay someone to do it."
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The fireplace
bricks were faux finished when stripping the
paint proved ineffective. On the mantel is McCoy and Peters
& Reeves pottery. A William L. Gilbert clock and period
lighting.
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The Soests
went through Arts and Crafts books looking for earthy paint
colors and chose Bradbury & Bradbury friezes for several rooms.
They also sold most of their previous furnishings to fund
antique and contemporary Craftsman pieces. Today their home
is an appealing mix of Arts-and-Crafts-meets-Hawaiiana.
Steve,
a native of Orange, remembers it as a sleepy town in the '60s
and '70s, not the 24-square-mile city of 127,500 it is today.
"Lots of widows lived here, most of the houses needed work,
the rents were low and the downtown was in a slow decline,"
he recalls. "Now we see people moving in, landscaping, fixing
up their houses. I think they see what other people have done
in books and magazines, and think, 'Hey, we can do that.'
It's a younger group, and they tend to be into preservation."
"We're
all friends," chimes in Trace, "but we all have differences
of opinion. Some of us fall on the conservative side of preservation,
and some on the loosey-goosey side. But still every single
one of us agrees on one thing: it's worth the time and the
effort to save a piece of the past and know that you had something
to do with its preservation."
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Like Arts and Crafts, The Hawaiiana the Soests collect has
become pricey and hard to find. Paula is partial to figurines
and pot metal items, while Steve searches out ukuleles
and koa wood pieces. |
Sandy
and Jeff Frankel would never be placed in the loosey-goosey
category. They took their time locating a 1915 Craftsman-style
house that met their requirements for intact original details
-- in fact, their previous home sold three times, always with
a replacement-residence contingency. The Orange bungalow they
chose had been vacant for four years, and with the previous
owner wheelchair bound, no one had lived upstairs for quite
some time. It was in very much as-is condition: ancient curtains;
filthy, dark brown carpet from the '50s; a leaking upstairs
toilet; peeling and cracked plaster; a curiously chopped-up
orange, yellow and green kitchen; and other rooms with only
one or two coats of paint due to long deferred maintenance.
"The
house was so dirty and rundown that our friends just looked
at us like, 'What are you thinking?'" Sandy says. "But they
didn't have our vision to see what was underneath it all."
After spending four years restoring the home's interior --
which included replacing systems, stripping woodwork, plaster
repair, taking the kitchen back to near-original condition,
two bath renovations and researching the bungalow's original
paint colors -- the Frankels have a showplace full of Arts
and Crafts antiques and collectibles.
"We ended up with a couple of Stickley rockers, several J.M.
Young pieces, a Limbert stand and a piece from the Michigan
Chair Co., but almost everything else we have is generic,"
Jeff says. "It's nice to find signed pieces if you're reselling,
but we're not reselling."
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The Frankels
are ardent OTPA-ers, with Jeff currently serving as the president
of the 365-member organization. "The property-rights group
that was very active before we moved here in 1998, has sort
of faded away," he says, but he still wishes for increased
support from the city. "Chapman University is working with
the community more, and some of our city council members are
sympathetic to preservation concerns. But if you go to any
of the California preservation conferences and see how other
local governments embrace their historic resources, our efforts
are pretty stagnate.
"We would
like to have a perfect process with the city," Jeff continues,
"where the homeowner would have checklists that tell what's
required, they'd prepare material samples for design review,
the DRC [design review committee] would love what they're
doing and it would end right there. If things could occur
this way, it would save hours of city staff and OTPA time."
For her part, Sandy Frankel stresses education: "By showing
good examples, people will see how important it is to preserve
homes. If one handle to a teacup is broken, then the tea set
is ruined. A house can be like that: if you keep taking pieces
away, pretty soon you don't have anything."
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The property-rights
group Jeff mentions is still indelibly engraved in Tita Smith's
memory. "They argued that if they wanted to demolish their
old homes and put up four-unit apartment houses, that was
their right," she remembers. "They called themselves OTPA,
too -- Orange Tax Payers Association -- and would back the
developers. We had major battles with this group for about
10 years. Most of the time we lost."
Since
then, things have improved on the preservation front. OTPA
worked with the city to turn the existing design guidelines
into ordinance, and in 1992 Tita was appointed to the Orange
planning commission. Another member of OTPA sits on the design
review committee, and a former president was elected to two
terms on the city council.
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An early
bungalow that dates from 1913, this home is distinguished
by
battered porch pillars and decorative knee braces, porch railings
and
venting under the rear gable.
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"Now, if you want to hold office in Orange, you have to be
something of a preservationist," Tita asserts. "The residents
have come out very clearly to say that they love the Old Towne
area and want to see it preserved."
Shannon
Tucker takes a pragmatic stand on preservation versus new
development: "Some of the city staff are now extremely informed
about historic preservation issues and how they can be used
in positive ways as urban planning tools," she says. "It can
create a really balanced community. Today the city takes on
renovation projects at an energy level I never could have
imagined 10 years ago. I ask myself, 'Is this the same city
we were fighting on every little thing?' "
"For
a conservative town with conservative politics, the city has
really gone a great distance to support preservation," Tita
adds, "but the effort still comes from the grassroots level.
The key thing that has not changed is the zoning. We could
breathe easier, sleep better at night if it were rezoned to
ensure the historic architecture would be maintained.
"OTPA
has tried to maintain the historic fabric of the neighborhood,"
she continues, "and look what it's turned into. It's like
finding your great-grandma's diamond engagement ring tarnished
in the drawer, and you polish it up, and suddenly it's an
heirloom that is worth so much. That's what people in Old
Towne have done."
Lovingly
preserved or tarnished diamonds, these houses continue to
draw impassioned residents to the area. "I've always said
they'll have to pull my cold, dead body out of here," Paula
Soest semi-jokes. "And I've now added 'old' to that -- not
to tempt fate too soon. They can offer me a million dollars
and I'm never moving. You're getting more than a house here;
you're getting a neighborhood."
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