Old Towne Orange

Old Towne covers 708 acres on the grid surveyed in 1871, and the grid is still the plan: 29 miles of public street across 40 named streets radiating from the plaza at Chapman and Glassell. The city's address layer records 4,534 addresses inside the boundary, 1,263 of them carrying a unit designator, across 2,587 parcels with a median of 0.152 acres. The city's historic survey covers 2,422 resources here, of which 2,342 are recorded as buildings in a historic district and 164 parcels carry a Mills Act contract, the state program that trades a property tax reduction for a maintenance agreement on a historic house.

Across the 2,143 surveyed parcels that carry a construction year the median is 1924 and the range runs 1874 to 2012, with Bungalow the most common recorded style on 498 parcels, then Contemporary on 450 and Minimal Traditional on 228. Three city parks sit inside the boundary, Plaza Park at 1 Plaza Square, Veterans Memorial at Depot Park on North Atchison and Pitcher Park on South Cambridge, along with the Civic Center, the Main Library and Old Fire Station 1, and a mile of the city bike network. The city's parcel record splits elementary four ways, 880 parcels to Cambridge, 778 to Palmyra GATE Magnet, 560 to West Orange and 354 to Sycamore, then divides middle school between Yorba and Portola and sends every parcel to Orange High.

Everything here begins with a lawsuit. The Spanish crown granted Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana, some 63,000 acres, to Jose Antonio Yorba and his nephew Pablo Peralta in 1810, the only Spanish land grant in what became Orange County. When the rancho was broken up in the 1860s the Los Angeles attorney Alfred B. Chapman represented several of the heirs and took land as his fee. He and his partner Andrew Glassell laid out a townsite along Santiago Creek, and Andrew's brother William surveyed the farm lots in 1871. They called it Richland. Washington refused the post office because California already had a Richland, so in 1873 the town took the name Orange.

The plan is still legible on the ground because nobody ever rubbed it out. Chapman and Glassell gave the center of the town to Orange as a public square, and in 1886 it was made the circular park it still is. Chapman Avenue and Glassell Street cross at the middle of that circle, so the two founders meet at the center of their own town every day. The streets around them were named for what grew here and what shaded it, Almond, Lemon, Olive, Maple, Palm, Sycamore, Walnut and Cypress, while Batavia, Palmyra, Marietta, Toluca and Waverly carry the names of towns back east, the kind of borrowing homesick settlers did. Orange incorporated on 6 April 1888, and the streets were not paved until 1912.