Center Street Served as Hub During 1870s

It’s 1872, only seven years after the Civil War, only 15 years after Anaheim was founded, a time when this busiest street in the city, Center Street, was only a wide, dirt path nearly impassible after a good rain.

This was the region’s downtown, home of some local institutions.

The two-story adobe at the extreme left, above, was August Langenberger and Benjamin Dreyfus’ general store--with the emphasis on “general.” Advertised as “the oldest established House in Anaheim,” it not only sold the usual boots, hats, crockery, hardware, dry goods, groceries, wine and liquor but served as a Wells Fargo agency, polling place, neighborhood tavern and for a time the town school.

The building at the extreme right is Planters’ Hotel. John Fischer, Anaheim’s first postmaster, built the original in 1868, but three years later it burned to the ground in 30 minutes. Its successor, pictured less than a year after it opened, was notable for being lighted and heated with gas produced on the premises.

It was advertised weekly in the Anaheim Gazette as a “first class house,” but it too burned to the ground in 1890 and never rose again.

With the prospect of advertising gone, the Gazette finally felt free to observe that in its final years, Planters’ had been a “ramshackle, out-dated affair with small rooms, narrow hall-ways and low ceilings. At best, it was a second-class hotel with first-class prices.”

Nothing remains of this stretch of street; it is now a shopping center on the west side of Anaheim Boulevard where Center Street ends. Above is modern Center Street as it appears just east of where Planters’ stood.

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OC Then and Now calls, (714) 966-5973; e-mail OCthenand now@latimes.com