The Old Neighborhood : Living: Nutwood Place in Orange, the city’s first housing tract, has kept its ‘family feel’ through the decades.
What Fairchild, Gilmore & Wilton Investment did was unusual only because it did it in 1906.
Like the boom developers that were to follow in the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s, it subdivided some orchard land outside of town, gave it a bucolic name--Nutwood Place--and advertised it as the town’s new status address. It was the first housing tract in Orange.
Some, but not many, of the city fathers took the bait. William Clement, owner of a lumberyard, built a house there, intending it to be the biggest and grandest in town. And it was--for about a year.
Bill Hart, editor of the local paper, moved there. So did George Harper, owner of a citrus packing house. Eventually, small, working-class bungalows filled the gaps: 40 or so houses in the whole neighborhood.
Now it’s three generations later, and many neighborhoods such as this have long since become slums or apartment complexes or office-building parking lots. So a drive into Nutwood Place today can be quite a shock.
For as you pass the squat, river-stone obelisks that still mark the entryways, you encounter a neighborhood unmistakably old and yet curiously new.
It still looks like 1930 or ‘40, almost. Few original houses have been replaced, and most have been maintained without any great change. There are picket fences and large, roofed porches and driveways with a stripe of lawn down the middle. The cars are new, but the streets are old and narrow. The trees are full grown. One, a monstrous sycamore, has forced River Avenue to duck and swerve around it.
But this is not a neighborhood just of grandmothers. Ad writers and vending machine operators and school administrators live here. The oldest? Pushing 90. The youngest? Due later this year.
In the front yard of one bungalow on Orange Street, neighborhood children play while one mother watches from a wicker porch swing. In the street, another young mother stops her van and calls out a greeting.
“A lot of girls my age are home during the days,” says Laurel Wolfe, who’s 29. “There are lots of young kids here, and we’re getting more all the time--three more babies this year.”
Around the corner by Toluca Street, William Clement’s impressive house is still a showpiece, looking as if the workmen finished building it last month. But the full-grown cedar and brass plaque out front set you straight: built in 1913. Once the phone number here was 6. Just 6.
Down the sidewalk comes Charley McCandless, who walks with a cane now. He’s 85 and has lived here for nearly 50 years. His daughter lives in the house next door.
McCandless says he does not know why Nutwood Place has withstood the pressure of change over the decades, but he’s glad for it. He likes being around the young ones.
“I like ‘em, these new kids,” he says. “Life goes around and around and around.”
McCandless is only one of several in the neighborhood who have seemingly been here forever. More numerous are the relative newcomers, the youngish families who sought out or stumbled upon Nutwood Place and recognized it as antimatter to modern planned communities.
Four years ago, “we just started driving around in the Old Towne area,” Wolfe said. “We didn’t want to get a typical tract home; I don’t know, it’s just the uniformity. We like the coziness of this kind of neighborhood. It definitely attracts a certain kind of person. It’s not for the woman who wants to be out with a big-time career.”
It’s a different style of living, she says. In Irvine, your space is inside the house and you go to the park to play. At Nutwood Place, she says, there often are two kids to a bedroom and one bathroom to a house, but you play in front yards and sidewalks and lounge on front porches.
“We’re adding on (to the house),” Wolfe says. “We could stay quite a while and be comfortable.”
Dean Hiser, an administrator for the county Department of Education, feels much the same way. He and wife Nancy and their three children live in what was William Clement’s house. “We fell right in love with this the first time we saw it,” he says.
Besides the beauty of its architecture, there’s the “family feel” of its neighborhood, Hiser says. Both are of an era when the typical family was large, strongly bonded and rooted in its hometown. Hiser, 48, grew up in such a house and neighborhood. “If I were retired, I’d be happy in this home,” he says.
Yet it’s uncertain whether the neighborhood can hold out that long. The realities of modern Orange County are closing in.
In other old neighborhoods nearby, “there have been a lot of apartment buildings in the last few years, a lot of old homes lost. There’s a concern that will continue,” especially since much of the neighborhood is zoned for two or three housing units per lot, Hiser says.
The neighborhood streets are still quiet, but “you get two seconds away from here and you have to fight the traffic,” says Wolfe. And now the city’s traffic planners want to widen West La Veta Avenue at the neighborhood’s northern boundary into an arterial highway.
“And about 1 o’clock, we start getting the migration,” she adds.
She means the people driving and walking through the neighborhood heading for Hart Park at the neighborhood’s southern boundary. Free lunches are served to the homeless there, and their presence in the area has neighbors upset in varying degrees, from demands for a police crackdown in the park to reluctance to take children there.
“I understand their fears,” Hiser said. “It does attract an undesirable element.”
Anxiety that the ‘90s will catch up with the neighborhood has turned the residents into activists. They have appeared en masse at City Hall to oppose the street widening, and officials have agreed to restudy the proposal. And they are waiting to see what happens to another old neighborhood’s petition to repeal zoning that encourages apartment development.
They are complaining to a City Hall that already takes preservation seriously. In 1979, the city established a steering committee to study ways of preserving the mile-square original town, now known as Old Towne, whose emblem is a downtown traffic circle and plaza.
An inventory of old buildings in the area showed a surprising variety of pre-1940 architectural styles, from the most common (553 bungalows) to single examples of Queen Anne Victorian, Gothic, Prairie and Japo-Swiss Craftsman.
A “Historic Preservation Element” was added to the city’s general plan to make preservation an official goal. The City Council then added teeth with an ordinance forbidding demolition of any Old Towne structure until city officials approve plans for its replacement. Replacement must follow official design guidelines, with the emphasis on maintaining the original appearance.
But even under the guidelines and ordinances, an old home can be replaced with a new duplex or triplex.
“Clearly, the biggest threat right now, the ongoing problem, is the disparity between existing use of historic properties and the zoning that would allow multifamily uses,” says Daniel Ryan, the city’s senior planner for historic preservation.
Much of Nutwood is zoned for triplexes. “If you zone R-2 (two residential units per lot), then you can put that second unit in the back and you don’t have to demolish the original building and you maintain the streetscape,” Ryan says.
“There are a lot of four- or five-generation families here. There are a large number of owner-occupied homes. People have grown up here and stayed or come back. They can’t find any places as unique or intimate. They are very vocal and outspoken about how they want the Nutwood tract to remain.”
“It’s my age of people who are coming out to protest,” says Wolfe. “We want to protect our neighborhoods. I grew up in Nebraska in the country, a small town, and I really enjoy it here.”
Will the neighbors be able to carry Nutwood intact into the 21st Century? “I’m not sure what the answer is,” Wolfe says. “It’s tough, and sometimes I get tired.”
This Old House
Except for a few changes, Max and Mae Stevens’ two-story Craftsman-style home on River Street looks like it did when it was built in about 1906. The home’s earliest known owner is the Harper family, local ranchers who purchased it in 1915 and sold it to the Methodist Church in 1962. The Stevenses purchased it in 1973 and raised their daughters Barbara, Elizabeth and Sandra there. “We held Sandra’s sweet-16 party here and I’ll never forget it. It was the first family gathering at our new home,” said youngest daughter Barbara Murphy. Occasionally a former resident will knock at the door, hoping for a glimpse of his childhood home. A minister’s wife taught piano lessons in the parlor, and some of her students have stopped by. “The house is special to a lot of people. It’s interesting how old houses hold so many memories,” said Murphy.
