IRVINE : Preservation of Buffalo Ranch Urged

After pleas from area residents to save a piece of the city’s history, the Planning Commission decided Thursday to recommend that the former Buffalo Ranch be spared as much as possible from a planned extension of Ford Road.

Buffalo Ranch--now the home of Lange Financial Plaza, at Ford Road and MacArthur Boulevard--was Orange County’s first theme park in the 1950s. It was used in the early 1960s by master planner William L. Pereira as he designed county landmarks such as the UC Irvine campus and Newport Center. Buffalo still roam the site.

Some proposed designs would have the new Ford Road extension built right through the barns and silos of the old Buffalo Ranch.

The City Council will take up the Buffalo Ranch issue Tuesday evening when it decides what to tell the Orange County Transportation Corridor Agencies. The latter wants to reroute and lengthen Ford Road to connect it to the future San Joaquin Hills tollway. Mayor Sally Anne Sheridan is on the toll road agency’s board, a consortium of 11 cities that is scheduled to decide Thursday which route Ford Road will take.

Planning commissioners said Thursday that they want Ford Road to be built between the Buffalo Ranch and a building owned by Pacific Bell. Aiming the road between the two sites would reduce its maximum traffic speed to about 30 m.p.h., said Mary Pat Daly-Hiller, an Irvine transportation analyst.

But if the Ford Road extension shaves off one of the buildings of the Buffalo Ranch, it might be possible to design it to acceptable 40-m.p.h. standards, Daly-Hiller said. That alignment could require the corridor agency to remove some of the landscaping from an apartment building across MacArthur Boulevard, she said.