LOST IN ORANGE COUNTY : You Can Be Street-Wise and City-Smart, but Even Adventurous Drivers Find It’s a Jumble Out There

Stories of misdirected motorists and puzzled pedestrians are legion in this county of tangled streets and clogged highways. It is almost inevitable that, at one time or another, anyone who has driven, ridden or walked in Orange County has gotten lost.

Pat Selbinger can find her way just fine these days. She even works for a greeting service, welcoming new people and helping them get around town. But seven years ago, when she and her husband moved to Mission Viejo from South Carolina, the situation was a little different.

“I’ve lived all over the country,” she said, “and it was the hardest adjustment of all of my moves.”

She recalled one of her first driving adventures here, when she had to attend an evening meeting for her children’s school at a parent’s home. She followed a friend’s directions: Via Victoria to Trabuco Road, go west on Alicia Parkway. Then to Montebello Place which wound and curved and finally changed names--becoming Avenida Veronica, where the meeting was held.

When the meeting ended, Selbinger said she hoped that she could find her way home. That shouldn’t be difficult, someone said--she was in her housing tract and her home was just a short walk around the corner. Says a street-wiser Selbinger today: “Now I’ve learned the shortcut.” You don’t have to be a newcomer to get lost. Last Saturday, an Irvine woman who has lived in the county four years was searching vainly for a retail store whose owner told her over the phone: “We’re at the corner of Harbor Boulevard and Chapman Avenue.” After driving around the busy intersection for 20 minutes, she finally got out of the car in pouring rain. Standing under an umbrella at a gas station telephone on the corner of the two streets, she called the store.

“I can’t find you and I’m at the corner of Harbor and Chapman,” she said with desperation. “Oh,” the owner said, “you must be at Harbor and Chapman in Anaheim . We’re at Harbor and Chapman in Fullerton .” Only in Orange County, she thought.

If a wayward motorist can overcome pride and disregard embarrassment, he often will turn to the presumed expert on finding one’s way: The gas station attendant.

“A lot of people ask me where Irvine Boulevard and 4th Street are,” said a bemused Anthony Morgan, who works at a Tustin gas station.

Where are Irvine Boulevard and 4th Street?

“Right there,” Morgan said, pointing to the road in front of the station.

From where he stands behind the cash register, it’s as clear as can be. To Morgan’s left, the street is called Irvine Boulevard. To his right, the same street has a different name, 4th Street.

“We’re right on the border of Tustin and Santa Ana,” Morgan said. Just about where the unleaded gas pump stands, the street names change. “That’s what causes the trouble,” Morgan said.

“Somewhere a long time ago, someone decided service station people know where all the streets are in all the world,” observed Morgan’s co-worker Steve Inman. “We had a guy come in here and ask where 134th Street is. I said: ‘What city?’ And he said: ‘Los Angeles.’ ”

It may be little solace for those wandering the byways of Orange County, but the seed of their discontent was planted long before their arrival.

“Part of the dilemma . . . is when Orange County was first being settled in the early 1800s and the Mexican and Spanish land grants were being given . . . the most significant line that was set up was the line that follows the Rancho Santiago land grant,” said Richard Ramella, a former county planner now with a Newport Beach consulting firm.

That line, he said, which was roughly the path of old Newport Boulevard, ran perpendicular to the coast rather than north and south. When land was divided into parcels east of the line, boundaries were drawn perpendicular to the coastline, giving everything a sort of northeasterly slant.

But when the U.S. Geological Survey came along years later, everything west of the diagonal was marked off in standard mile-square grids oriented strictly north and south, east and west.

“That was the beginning of the confusion,” Ramella said. “Right in the middle of the county, everything changes.”

Ramella concluded that “the King of Spain has had more to do with our problems than any planner.”

But Spanish royalty had nothing to do with the woes of the Laguna Niguel Ritz-Carlton.

“One of the appeals of the hotel is it’s hidden away,” said Linda Adams, Ritz-Carlton spokeswoman. “It really was a problem when we first opened.”

The posh hotel opened for business in 1984 on a bluff overlooking the ocean, just off Coast Highway. The key word here is “off.”

“We were not allowed to put a sign on the street,” Adams recalled. “We even thought of buying a bus shelter sign to say: Turn right for the Ritz-Carlton.”

After three years it is easier to find the hotel, probably because the cross street intersecting Coast Highway was renamed “Ritz-Carlton Drive.”

Before that, however, hotel-bound guests expecting a uniformed valet to greet them often ended up asking directions from men in different uniforms down the road about a mile.

“There’s a Chevron station in Dana Point where most of the people would end up,” Adams said. “Before they (motorists) could even ask, they (station attendants) would say: ‘Are you looking for the Ritz-Carlton?’ ”

Dana Point Chevron station owner Walt Porter said he is still hounded by hotel hunters and others who have lost their way. “I feel like a travel agent,” he said.

Porter estimated “about half the world” pulls in for advice, not gas. Not only do they seek the secluded Ritz-Carlton but also the new, equally out-of-the-way Dana Point Resort hotel farther south.

Some of the station’s cashiers gave people looking for the Dana Point Resort a short cut which took them into the kitchen, Porter said. “Someone from the hotel finally came over and asked us to send them to the front door.”

Porter figures that motorists new to the area are disoriented driving “south” on Coast Highway. Coast Highway parallels the coastline, which, as you recall, runs not east or west or north or south, but diagonally. At sunset and sunrise, the confusion is heightened.

“They (motorists) don’t know which is north and south,” Porter said. “It is really difficult when you have the sun going down in the north and coming up in the south, according to the highway.”

As planning consultant Ramella observed, “The terrain dictates where you put the streets.” Compounding the confusion, urban “designers” prefer curved rather than straight streets. All of this leaves Orange County road maps looking like a plate of spaghetti noodles.

Van Schijndel, a former deliveryman and now a dispatcher for the Southern Comfort Messenger Service, remembers a particularly vexing search in the new community of Rancho Santa Margarita.

“Sometimes it gets kind of hairy out there,” Schijndel said. “I’ve had a lot of experience being lost in Orange County. But the best one was looking for a street in my map book that wasn’t there. . . .”

Schijndel had driven in circles for about half an hour, continually passing his destination without knowing it. Finally he stopped the car in frustration.

“I looked up, and there it was,” he said. “It wasn’t in the map guide. And I had a new map guide.

“After a while,” said Schijndel, “you learn to swallow your pride and go to places like gas stations or ask mailmen.”

“A mailman--they know everything.”

Joseph Breckenridge used to be a mailman. That’s when he learned that travelers would “see the mailman and know he knows” how to find any street.

“And usually he does,” said Breckenridge, now a public affairs spokesman for the U.S. Postal Service. “I used to work Harbor Boulevard near Broadway and Harbor. I’d get stopped every day and they’d say: ‘How do you get to Disneyland?’ ”

Of course, had the motorists simply lifted their eyes, they could have seen the amusement park’s distinctive, looming landmark, the Matterhorn, Breckenridge said.

Not far from the Matterhorn, at 150 W. Vermont Ave. in Anaheim, is the Automobile Club of Southern California.

“We’re very easy to find. We’re just north of Disneyland and everyone can find Disneyland,” said senior service representative Candie Stein, who obviously never delivered mail on Breckenridge’s route.

Like service station attendants and mailmen, the Automobile Club gets questions daily from confused and overdue travelers. Not too long ago, Stein recalled, the club got a call from a lady from Leisure World who wanted directions to John Wayne Airport. That’s about a 10-mile trip north on the San Diego Freeway from Laguna Hills.

After driving for more than an hour and about 70 miles, the woman telephoned the Auto Club again.

“When she saw the exit for (San Diego’s) Sea World, she thought she had gone too far,” Stein said. “She went the wrong direction.”

Perhaps a street map would have helped. Perhaps not.

Thomas Brothers Maps, the Irvine company that publishes the popular Thomas Guide, bills itself as “the principal publisher and marketer of street atlases and wall maps on the Pacific Coast.”

“They are the best,” dispatcher Schijndel said. “This map book is our Bible. It does the job 99% of the time.”

But now and then, even the highly regarded Thomas Guide has been known to mislead.

Tom Lennon, an executive with the map-making firm, recently bought furniture for his new home in Newport Beach to be delivered on a Saturday. The furniture didn’t arrive.

As Lennon tells it: “They called me at work on Monday and said, ‘We tried to make the delivery, but our driver couldn’t find your street in the Thomas Guide.’ ”

Lennon’s street, it turns out, was listed by one name on the official county parcel maps used by Thomas Brothers to draft its street maps. But for whatever reason, the developer renamed the street before the street signs were hung.

Thomas Brothers’ customer service representative Marla Saltman, who says she helps “people find themselves,” never ventures forth without her map book. But Saltman confessed that even she gets lost.

Saltman’s Achilles heel touches down in the hilly community of Cowan Heights, a residential neighborhood where the street signs are not mounted horizontally atop poles. The street names are lettered vertically on the poles themselves.

But even when the signs are clearly and accurately marked, it’s not always easy to find where you are going in Orange County.

In San Clemente, where the streets are named in Spanish, sound-alike and look-alike names abound. There are Serra and Sierra, Blanco and Blanca, Sueno and Ensueno, Avenida Arlena and Calle Arena, a host of Avenidas (avenues). You get the idea.

As if mismarked streets, unmarked streets and foreign-sounding streets are not enough, there are always those perennial teasers--the identically named streets.

In Costa Mesa, there’s an intersection of Newport and 17th and in county territory north of Tustin there also is an intersection of Newporte and 17th.

Despite the difficulties, Ramella, the planner, believes “Orange County really has a good street system.”

Even though “we have some problems created by old, old land grants . . . Orange County has done a marvelous job of providing arterial highways that handle a lot of people.”

But for folks like service station attendant Walt Porter, who encounters a steady stream of befuddled motorists, Orange County still has a ways to go before travelers can get from here to there without getting lost.

Where will the confusion end? Not at the seashore.

As Porter pointed out, even the boats that set sail from Dana Point harbor, which mind you is on the West Coast, must head to sea due east.

UP, DOWN AND ALL AROUND

Some of the county’s most confused motorists can be found where streets that run east and west and north and south suddenly meet streets that run on diagonals and curves. A classic example: Where Costa Mesa meets Newport Beach. Map from the Thomas Guide, Page 31.