RAMBLIN’ YOUR CHRISTMAS BLUES AWAY : Two Entirely Differenet Routes Back to Peace of Mind

Right about now, you are probably surrounded by piles of discarded gift wrap, serenaded by an astonishingly noisy array of new toys and overcome by the bleary feeling that results from temporarily substituting rum balls for green vegetables.

But there’s nothing like a spot of self-guided neighborhood touring to restore those feelings of peace and goodwill. We won’t bog you down in long lists of boring facts and figures. Nope, we simply propose that you trot around in the fresh air and soak in a few sights that you may have overlooked in the mad rush from here to there.

We’re proposing two entirely different, roughly hourlong rambles: one, on the tranquil, park-like campus of UC Irvine, where even the “old” buildings are just past college-age themselves; the other, in downtown Tustin, where the gracious aura of yesteryear lives on in numerous private homes and a few downtown storefronts.

Our UCI walk begins in the Irvine Marketplace on Campus Road, where you park your car and perhaps indulge in a fortifying restaurant brunch or lunch. Then you cross the footbridge spanning Campus Road to begin a leisurely meander around the first of the “rings” surrounding 21-acre Aldrich Park, the green jewel at the center of campus.

Passing the new Irvine Barclay Theatre on your right, you cross Pereira Road, named for William Pereira, the architect who planned the campus in 1963, when all this was still part of Irvine Ranch. While confused campus visitors may want to curse Pereira’s planning skills--as well as his ugly, hulking concrete buildings--he did have a symbolic idea in mind when he designed the two central rings of the campus: Students begin their undergraduate careers in the tight little world of the inner ring and go on to broaden their knowledge in the graduate and research buildings lining the outer ring.

Stop just long enough at the Administration Building (on your right) to pick up a campus map on the second floor, and browse the bin of flyers listing campus events. On weekdays, if you have a yen for greenery, you also might dart into Room 204 to pick up a copy of the UCI “Tree Tour,” which guides you through the broad range of Aldrich Park plantings with the help of a giant map.

Then start making tracks on the outer ring, heading first for the playful-looking white stucco and concrete block Student Center, completed this year.

Its inviting courtyard area--with its plaza of cafe tables adjoining a flight of steps, and a banked grassy area that invites warm-weather sunbathing--clearly was built with the Southern California lifestyle in mind. The view from the steps takes in a soothing panorama of rolling hills and trees. You can walk through this space and scarcely be aware you are entering a building.

Inside the center are shops oriented to student needs (travel, bicycles), an auditorium, meeting rooms, four lounges (which include spots for playing pool, watching videos or listening to recordings) and a fast-food court.

Back to your rambles, you see on your left the cubistic Student Services II building, designed by Siegel-Sklarek-Diamond of Los Angeles. Project architect Kate Diamond has said that because the campus lacks identity, “it needs buildings that are very sculptural and strongly modeled to provide a real sense of place.”

You can bypass the next three buildings on your left, but glance up at the fourth, Steinhaus Hall, which houses the biological sciences. Designed by Canadian Arthur Erickson, this late modernist building is enlivened by horizontal bands of light green glass.

Walking past Joe’s on the Green (another eating spot) to the inner ring gives you an unobstructed view of Aldrich Park. Now’s the moment to pull out that tree tour, which will clue you into the differences between, say, the Naked Coral Tree and the Natal Plum (actually an evergreen), to name just two of the 41 species.

Formerly grazing land, the entire campus is landscaped as an arboretum with both indigenous and exotic plantings. Many of the exotics were newcomers to Southern California when they were first planted here, and others had been ignored for years by landscapers.

The Physical Sciences II building, designed by MBT/Gayner, looks something like those cakes you can make with alternating layers of whipped cream and chocolate cookies. While the two decades-older Physical Sciences I structure next door is an ugly, fortress-like monolith, the newer building looks more human-scaled. The detailing of the windows, for example, helps to convince a passerby that there are offices for real people in there, not monstrous warehouses for wayward robots.

Passing the University Club on your right, you spy the ICS/Engineering Research Facility III, which is still under construction. It was designed by Rebecca Binder of Los Angeles, a leading female architect in a profession still overwhelmingly dominated by males.

In recent years, the campus has embarked on a $350-million expansion program that has employed some leading American and British architects. The redoubtable-sounding Information & Computer Sciences/Engineering Research facility and the neighboring Rockwell Engineering Center were designed by Frank O. Gehry & Associates of Los Angeles, a firm whose famous founder is noted for his eccentric use of such common industrial materials as galvanized and corrugated metal.

Praised by the profession for their distinctive look, the buildings are not universally beloved. Some of the materials are eroding already (look down at the shabby, peeling steps), the stingy, unfinished courtyards look like an afterthought and the hip orange metal stair-tower in the Engineering Research building offers only a boring view of copycat university housing (but climb it anyway, just to get a feel for Gehry’s use of materials).

Gehry himself views the building as a metaphor for engineering, and he meant to grab the attention of people interested in how things are put together. “You can see how the whole thing functions,” he once said, “because it is broken down into its major pieces, then reassembled as a working complex.”

Pass a row of trailers gussied up to look like serious buildings, and then look to your right at the unappetizing sight of grim, hulking social science buildings. It’s not surprising to learn that these charmers were used as backdrops for the science-fiction film “Conquest of the Planet of the Apes.” The buildings are popularly known as “the giant cheese graters.”

Now you wander off the ring, away from the park, to the welcoming enclave formed by the University Extension Building and Phineas Banning Alumni House, designed by another postmodern darling of the architecture world, Charles Moore and his Urban Innovations Group.

Passing under Moore’s pink archway, you spy facades that look like a stage set. They were based on 17th-Century Italian ecclesiastical architecture, updated with such postmodern flourishes as the pale pink-and-rose and blue-and-gray color combinations, and the whimsical corbels--almost like abstract gargoyles--that support the porch roof. The curving silhouettes of the steps leading to the buildings cheerily foist their playful, mock-elaborate ambience onto the attention of passersby.

To your left is the Graduate School of Management, designed by the top New York firm of Venturi, Rauch, Scott-Brown, in association with Bissell Architects of Newport Beach. The unconventional facade of the building combines a brash blue-and-white checkerboard pattern with the pedigreed look of wood paneling found in clubby old libraries. Venturi is known for his wry, Pop-influenced approach to architecture, but he also reworks fine and famous styles of the past in sophisticated ways.

That’s the last stop on this tour, routed for us by David J. Baab, a consultant in urban planning and design with Baab & Associates in Irvine.

For an afternoon stroll in downtown Tustin, we shanghaied Carol Jordan, the facts-at-her-fingertips president of the Tustin Historical Society, and Tustin attorney David M. Nisson, whose father and grandfather were orange farmers. It was a weekday, and the streets were untrafficked; on weekends they are even more peaceful, and finding a parking space is no problem.

Before you set out on foot, drop into the Tustin Area Historical Society (395 El Camino Real) to pick up the free brochure “Take Main Street to Tustin History” and maybe also Jordan’s pamphlet “Tustin Heritage Walk” ($2.50), which actually offers two substantial, intensively researched walks surveying Old Tustin’s businesses and homes.

The Historical Society, which houses a small museum, is open from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays, and 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on the first Saturday of each month. If you can’t make it during those hours and just want to grab a brochure, you can enter through the Chamber of Commerce office, which is open weekdays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

The museum is worth the effort, though. It features photographs of Tustin’s sleepy old days, maps showing old orange grove property divisions and a raft of illustrated charts to help you brush up on Victorian architecture.

An old sign propped above the door proclaims the Utt Juice Co.’s grape beverage “the queen of drinks.” The juice company--which pressed grapes from its vineyards in Lemon Heights until they were wiped out by disease in the early ‘30s--was the town’s leading industry for half a century. The dearth of nearby grape suppliers forced it to close in 1973, though its building still stands at the corner of Prospect Avenue and Main Street.

According to Jordan, one of the virtues of Tustin (“a very conservative, thrifty community--its roots are WASP and ultra-Republican”) is that most of the old buildings are in their original locations. They weren’t torn down or moved to other sites.

Founded in 1868 by carriage maker Columbus Tustin, the town seemed doomed to remain a dusty little burg when Santa Ana became the southern terminus of the Southern Pacific Railroad. But its future began to look much more promising during the land boom of the 1880s, when the scent of oranges began to permeate the land.

Nisson recalled the lazy summer days when he had orange fights in his family’s groves and found crawdads in the irrigation boxes. The town was still so quiet back then that he could easily hear his mother call from the house, a quarter of a mile away.

The walk starts with Tustin Hardware at 115 W. Main St., where a sign proclaims “Since 1910.” It was built (“around 1912,” Jordan murmurs) by Ed Utt of the juice company family in the Victorian Italianate style. Look upward to see the large, ornate brackets under the roof.

Now turn down C Street (Tustin street-namers weren’t exactly blessed with imagination) to check out the McCharles House at number 335, a cozy 1885 Victorian that is now a restaurant, and number 305, a modest dwelling built in the 1880s for Fanny Tustin, one of Columbus’ children. It is a rare example of the board-and-batten California version of the New England salt box--note the vertical boards--with a sharply pitched roof that coasts downward in a long arc. “For the snow,” Jordan jokes.

The blacksmith’s shop at number 245 was built in 1912 and is one of only two such old-fashioned services still operating in Orange County.

Crossing C street and walking back to Main, you pass the Tustin Presbyterian Church on the corner, dedicated in 1884. The heart of the early community--along with such other stalwart organizations as the Knights of Pythias Lodge, the American Legion and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union--the church was built with donations of money and materials from San Francisco friends of wealthy Tustin resident David Hewes. It was replaced by a Spanish colonial revival-style building in 1928, the year after the town--bursting at the seams with 900 inhabitants--was incorporated.

At 228 W. Main St., the Stevens House (built in 1887) is one of the major landmarks on your route. It is a splendid interpretation of the Queen Anne style, as delicately ornamental as a wedding cake. Fish-scale shingles and lacy rows of finials on the gabled roof, elaborately carved spindles and brackets, and a turret rising as tall as a witch’s hat give the house an air at once cozy and deluxe.

Sherman Stevens was a heavy hitter in the lumber business who imported plants and birds from all over the world for the grounds of his little castle. The story goes that for his wedding, a red carpet was spread across the street for guests walking from the Presbyterian church to the house. “And there they danced until morning,” Jordan said in her best storybook style.

Kitty-cornered across Main Street (350 S. B St.) is the 14-room Hewes House, built in 1881, which once was the biggest spread in town. Local teachers boarded there under the watchful eye of the Heweses’ housemate, B. F. Beswick, superintendent of the elementary school.

Most of the Victorians in Tustin actually combine bits and pieces of several 19th-Century styles, and Hewes House is no different. Approached from a sweeping, semicircular drive, it incorporates Victorian Eastlake elements (lathe-turned posts and elaborate moldings), such Victorian Italianate features as tall first floor windows and a square-pillared porch, and the Victorian Greek Revival “returns” at the corners of the gable (where the molding bends at a right angle).

Continuing along Main Street, you pass the Artz House at number 330, built in 1914 for Charles O. Artz, owner of the general store that still stands (it’s now a restaurant) at 150 W. Main St. A famous Tustin tale relates how Artz inadvertently shortened the life of a burglar who had the misfortune to break into the store during the shopkeeper’s semiannual cyanide fumigation of his staple goods.

A sturdy example of the unpretentious and practical bungalow style, the house is distinguished by a broad front porch with massive posts and ample windows. The neighboring houses also are large, comfy-looking bungalows.

The Vance House at 420 W. Main St. is another of Tustin’s notable Queen Anne-style Victorians. Built around 1887, it eventually was owned by banker Vinnie Cranston, who sold both his house and the town bank--such a deal!--to fellow banker Charles Vance.

For a whiff of eccentricity, cross the street to peer at 415 W. Main St., a house built in 1950 by an engineer who had the whimsical idea of studding the facade--as well as the sidewalk and curb--with a colorful medley of rocks he gathered in the Central and Rocky Mountain states.

Eccentricity does have its limits in Tustin, however. The fellow who once proposed to build a geodesic dome on his 2nd Street house was roundly opposed by neighbors and finally slunk out of town.

One final note: People still live and work in many of the buildings on this tour, so it’s best to restrain yourself from peeking in the windows, crisscrossing the lawns or indulging in any other forms of behavior liable to provoke Miss Manners.