Orange highlight
Historic Old Towne Orange
The largest historic district on California's National Register, centered on a town plaza and featuring homes and businesses built in the early twentieth century.
Old Towne Orange is built around Plaza Park, a one-square-mile district of homes and commercial buildings whose construction peaked in the early 1900s. The neighborhood contains many structures built following Orange's incorporation, including Orange County's oldest operating bank. In 1997, the district was added to the National Register of Historic Places as the largest such district in California, recognized for the integrity of its architecture and the steadiness with which Orange preserved what other Southern California cities razed during the 1960s and 1970s.
The district's architecture spans Victorian, Craftsman, Spanish Colonial Revival, Prairie School, Mediterranean Revival and California Bungalow styles. A walk through the streets shows how a mid-sized city chose to keep its past. The Orange International Street Fair has taken place every Labor Day weekend since 1973, drawing roughly 400,000 visitors who come to experience the plaza and the buildings that surround it. Film productions have used the district as a backdrop for over twenty feature films because of its authentic turn-of-the-century character and proximity to Hollywood.
A neighborhood built around a plaza and maintained across generations tends to anchor families to the place. Knowing who depends on you, and planning for them if something happens to you, is what term life insurance is for. Residents of Orange's historic core often have deep roots and households that span multiple adult lives—the kind of situation where planning matters most.