A Path Through O.C. History

Starting at Katella Avenue’s eastern end are a string of well-seasoned horse pastures and a farm house that time forgot. Later, the scenery features massive palms, recently planted to spruce up the street’s sagging edge.

And, finally, there are the landmarks that give one of the area’s oldest streets its quirky charm: a newly remodeled Buddhist temple, an aging Dutch social club, an Arabic family coffeehouse and the well-known Orange County horse track that, between races, caters to its largely Latino clientele by offering boxing matches.

Wending its way through these distinct cultures like an asphalt Nile, Katella Avenue is a microcosm of the county. With roots in the area’s distant past and a stake in its developing future, the avenue spans the ages of Orange County’s history and offers a glimpse of its changing face.

“Driving along Katella,” says Mark Baldassare, a professor of urban planning at UC Irvine, “offers a vivid picture of the degree to which the county has changed from being homogenous, white and middle-class to being a global village. When I bring people here from the East Coast, I like to take them along Katella to give them a sense that this is not the classic 1950s white suburb they think it is.”

Census figures bear him out.

In 1970, says Bill Gayk, director of the Center for Demographic Research at Cal State Fullerton, about 90% of the county’s residents--including those along Katella Avenue--were white. Today in the Katella corridor, according to statistics compiled by the center, slightly more than half the residents are nonwhite, including about 50,000 Hispanics, 16,000 Asians and 3,000 African Americans.

That translates into neighborhoods connecting Disneyland to such places as a Jewish deli in which most of the waiters speak Spanish.

“It definitely reflects the changes that have taken place countywide,” Gayk said of Katella Avenue.

Fred Smoller, a professor of political science at Chapman University who teaches a course on Orange County, uses Katella Avenue as a symbol of the choices ahead for the region. It’s not unlike the decisions that faced framers of the U.S. Constitution more than 200 years ago, he says, when leaders debated whether America should be a nation made up of rural landowners and limited government or an industrial one aspiring to world leadership.

In Orange County today, according to Smoller, the issue is similar--whether to cling to the county’s early identity as a tranquil suburb or to compete with Los Angeles.

“Different parts of Katella reflect those different themes,” Smoller said. “There’s the desire to go forward and become more urbanized, as well as the desire to hold on to the rural past. You can drive past the horse stables of Villa Park [where it becomes Villa Park Road] on the same street that goes into urban Long Beach.”

Along the way you pass through portions of Anaheim, Orange, Garden Grove, Cypress, Stanton and Los Alamitos.

From the beginning, Katella Avenue formed an important link between eastern and western Orange County. But it wasn’t always Orange County’s Main Street. It started as a dusty dirt road meandering among ranches and fruit trees.

The name came from rancher John B. Rea. In the 1890s, he bought 80 acres in Anaheim just south of where Disneyland now stands. The ranch needed a name, so Rea and his two young daughters, Kate and Ella, made a game out of thinking one up.

One day the rancher called the girls to dinner and announced that the ranch would be called Katella--a combination of his daughters’ names.

“I think he did it more for a joke than anything else,” Kate Rea would later recall. She went on to open Anaheim’s first public library and help found the Anaheim PTA, and died in 1972 at age 95.

The name stuck, eventually lending itself to one of the first public schools to be built in the area and, in 1934, to the newly paved road on which the ranch was a major destination.

Its birth as a thoroughfare came in 1955 when Walt Disney, whose plans for America’s first theme park had been rebuffed by Burbank, chose to build the park instead in a 160-acre citrus grove along Katella Avenue.

Historians later speculated that he chose the spot because it reminded him of his boyhood home in Marceline, Mo. Whatever the case, the opening of Disneyland on July 17, 1955, ushered in a new era.

Communities sprang up along the street named for two little girls. And the arrival of visitors from throughout the world gave the area an international flavor that boded of things to come.

Today, 44 years later, one of the major challenges up and down Katella is how to cope with change.

“It’s kind of the circle of life,” said Bret Colson, a spokesman for Anaheim, which has spearheaded a major redevelopment effort along the avenue and beyond. “You are born, grow up, have your best years, get a little bit older and either pass away or somehow regenerate. Basically, what you’re seeing is a renaissance.”

Wednesday his city will mark a milestone in that renaissance by formally dedicating Gateway Monument, a 15-foot-high aluminum work of art on Katella’s median strip that symbolizes the area’s reconstruction.

“Katella is kind of the mini melting pot of Orange County,” Colson said. “It’s like an old friend that’s always been there and always will be there. Perhaps, in time, it will take its place as one of the great streets of the world.”