An Ethnic Evolution

It’s Friday evening and Anaheim’s West Katella Avenue is coming alive with an ethnic hum.

Under a gaily painted sign, members of Southern California’s last great European immigrant wave are preparing to dance and tell jokes in their native tongue at Dutch Club Avio. A few doors down, nuns who shave their heads and don gray tunics as reminders of their faith are putting the finishing touches on landscaping at Orange County’s only Chinese Buddhist temple. And across the street, behind the neon glare of Fatima Stevens’ parlor windows, the proud Gypsy seer purports to tell the future by reading the lines on her client’s palm.

“The energy forces on this street are incredible,” said Stevens, 50. Descended from three generations of Yugoslavian Gypsy fortune tellers, she’s been practicing their art here since 1985. “For me it’s a very spiritual street--it has very good vibes.”

Others obviously agree--the eclectic ethnic mix found in the 1500 block is repeated elsewhere along Katella Avenue, considered one of the most culturally diverse corridors in Orange County. Besides the well-documented presence of African Americans, Latinos and Southeast Asians, the street plays host to immigrants from Yugoslavia, China and Holland. Next door to the Dutch club, a Korean church is under construction. And all of it stands within a stone’s throw of Disneyland.

“It’s kind of the mini-melting pot of Orange County,” Anaheim spokesman Bret Colson said of Katella Avenue in general, and this block in particular. “The street is difficult to characterize because it changes from one block to the next.”

Census figures tell part of the story. In the past 30 years, according to Bill Gayk, director of the Center for Demographic Research at Cal State Fullerton, the population along Katella Avenue has evolved from about 90% white to more than half nonwhite, including about 50,000 Hispanics, 16,000 Asians and 3,000 African Americans.

Product of Immigration

But those figures don’t reflect the true face of Katella.

When Dutch Club Avio first opened here 20 years ago, according to its manager, KlaaskeCooperman, there was not much development on Katella. The club, called by a name that translates roughly into “all fun is ours,” was a product of the massive Dutch immigration of the 1950s--a period of rebuilding in Europe following the devastation of World War II.

Today, Cooperman said, the organization--housed in a shabby wooden building resembling a gingerbread house with blue and white shutters--exists primarily as a place where aging Dutch immigrants can enjoy their fading culture.

“Dutch people don’t immigrate anymore,” she explained. “Our children are completely Americanized, and none of them come to the club.”

If they did, they would find it hopping on Friday nights when members--whose number has now dwindled to about 270 from the “thousands” of several decades ago--gather to dance to the tunes of Dutch bands, eat Dutch food and converse in their native tongue.

“The older you get the more nostalgic you get,” said Cooperman, who at 58 is one of the club’s youngest members. “People like to get together, talk in their own language and tell jokes that can’t be translated into English.”

Most of them give the club about 10 more years.

“We are at the stage,” said Tony Varhallen, 60, “of putting up a sign saying, ‘The last one out, please turn out the lights and take all the money.’ ”

Not so at the Orange County Assn. for Buddhist Practices a few doors down, which recently completed construction of a new 7,000-square-foot sanctuary with two adjacent buildings for classrooms and a library. The temple, serving 65 Chinese Buddhist families mostly from Orange and Los Angeles counties, started 20 years ago in a private Fountain Valley home and moved to Katella Avenue in 1989.

“We passed by and it was for sale,” Keri Pan, the only English-speaking staff member, said of the abandoned Christian church that originally housed the Buddhist temple.

Today the landmark building, with its ornate turned-up roof tiles and huge mahogany lotus-carved doors, hosts monthly services featuring chanting, readings, silent meditation and lectures in Chinese. Two months ago the temple held a four-day educational summer camp for kids. And the institution’s resident staff of monks and nuns is regularly augmented by visiting dignitaries such as the Rev. Wu Ming, the group’s spiritual leader in Taiwan.

“We lead a simple life,” Abbess Kuo Zin, the temple’s founder and head nun, said of the daily service, study and meditation regimen. Visits, she said, are by appointment only. “We’re kind of like a family.”

Across the street, Fatima Stevens’ business thrives. There are three generations of Stevonoviches living in this house with red awnings marked by the huge circular picture of a hand and a neon sign announcing “Palm Reader.”

The family’s ancestors shortened the name, Stevens said, after arriving from Yugoslavia in the early 1900s.

“I’m proud to be a Gypsy,” said the woman who traces her fortunetelling skills to the teachings of her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother.

Now Stevens sees several clients a week in a room guarded by life-size statues of Jesus and Mary next to a parlor featuring plaster figurines of the Seven Dwarfs.

“Snow White is my favorite cartoon,” she explains, “and I really do believe that fairies and angels exist. After all we are near Disneyland . . . “

Some of her neighbors, in fact, blame that proximity for what they see as the street’s architectural chaos. “It’s a mess,” said Diana Pollock, a longtime dweller in the shadow of Fantasyland, “and Disneyland is doing it. The street looks like an amusement park--like an extension of Disneyland.”

For Pollock, 55, an easy solution lies slightly over the eastern horizon. “We’re just hanging on until we retire,” the factory worker explained, “and then we’re out of here and Prescott [Arizona] bound.”

Others say they are charmed by the quirky cultural and physical diversity the street seems to engender. “What makes Katella interesting,” said Ken Mulroney, who’s lived here for 11 years, “is the people on it. It’s fun meeting people from all over the world.”

Abbess Zin, of the Buddhist temple, sees that as part of Katella’s draw. “I sense a lot of good feeling on this street,” she said through a Chinese interpreter. “The street has a very good aura.”