PERSPECTIVE : Orange County’s Past Full of Unfulfilled Plans

It’s a warm, spring afternoon in the Orange County that might have been. We’ve just finished a scrumptious lunch at a cafe overlooking downtown Anaheim’s glimmering 10-acre lake.

After a brisk stroll around the geodesic dome that houses the city’s space museum, our thoughts turn to tonight’s NBA championship game between the Los Angeles Lakers and the Santa Ana Clippers.

It’s time to collect our friends. So we merge onto the Huntington Beach Freeway and travel south through Stanton and Westminster until the road connects with the Pacific Coast Freeway.

As planned, our friends are waiting at the monorail station outside John Wayne Airport. We ride through the Santa Ana Civic Center and into the Westdome parking lot just in time for the tip-off.

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The lake and the highways don’t exist, of course, and Orange County has yet to land a professional basketball team despite years of trying. But the scenario is not pure fantasy.

The space museum, Westdome and even the shore-hugging Pacific Coast Freeway were once serious proposals that for one reason or another never got beyond the drawing board.

History books, city archives and newspaper morgues are filled with other examples of grand-but-unfulfilled visions for Orange County. While most of the projects stalled in the planning stages, a few were pursued far enough that their demise left relics behind.

Hyde Park in Dana Point, for example, contains an elevator shaft, some arches and other remains from a 1930s luxury hotel project halted when funds ran out during the Great Depression. The ruins “shed tears of unfulfillment,” historian Doris Walker wrote in her book “Home Port for Romance.”

Another remnant is in the middle of Yorba Linda. During the 1960s, Caltrans planned to build a freeway along the northern edge of Orange County between Anaheim Hills and La Habra. Funding dried up, but not before the state constructed a two-mile stretch that is now called the Richard Nixon Freeway.

Few areas have captured the imaginations of local urban dreamers more than downtown Anaheim.

In the 1960s, the city explored the idea of building an Old World German Village in the city center. The attraction would have been modeled after Solvang in Santa Barbara County and was meant to draw tourists and to honor the German roots of Anaheim’s founders.

Developers envisioned lively Oktoberfest celebrations in a quaint shopping district.

The idea never got off the ground. But a few years later, another equally wide-eyed project emerged: Anaheim International Mart.

After the mart proposal fizzled, city officials in the 1970s focused on plans to build a lake and several small rivers near downtown. The lake would have been surrounded by retail stores, condominiums, restaurants, parks and a city cultural center. But it too was eventually written off.

Among the most ambitious designs for Orange County were those conceived by Caltrans, which sought to crisscross the region with a network of freeways.

A 1967 map of proposed Caltrans projects includes the Huntington Beach Freeway, which would have paralleled Beach Boulevard between La Habra and downtown Huntington Beach; and an extended Orange Freeway, which would have run from its current terminus at the Santa Ana Freeway through Garden Grove and Fountain Valley before ending at the ocean in Huntington Beach.

The most controversial Caltrans proposal was the Pacific Coast Freeway, a winding concrete ribbon designed to hug the coastline from Seal Beach to San Juan Capistrano.

Newport Beach residents emerged as the freeway’s most vocal opponents, fearing that construction would ruin the town’s quiet atmosphere and force the demolition of many homes in Newport Heights.

Evelyn Hart, a former Newport Beach councilwoman, said the freeway fight was part of a larger debate over whether the city should take on a “Miami Beach or downtown San Francisco kind of atmosphere.”

The combination of local opposition and a lack of funding eventually killed the Pacific Coast Freeway as well as the other Caltrans projects.

But one long-standing proposal might yet become reality.

For nearly two decades, Orange County has tried to attract a professional basketball team. One of the most serious efforts was in the 1980s when entrepreneurs considered building a $40-million sports complex at Civic Center Drive and Flower Street in Santa Ana. Talks were even held with owners of the Los Angeles Clippers about moving the team south.

But neighborhood opposition eventually scuttled the plan.

Despite the setback, some Anaheim business leaders are still talking about bringing an NBA team to the city--perhaps the Clippers.