North Cleveland St, Orange

Driving along Chapman Avenue in Orange I decided to take a short trip down memory lane and turned on Cleveland Street to look at the house in which my aunt grew up 60 years ago. I last visited the house in 1965 and, although the neighborhood hadn’t really changed much, I managed to drive right by the small 1920’s bungalow and made it all of the way to Chapman University before I realized I had missed it.

This area is truly a vision of what the neighborhoods were like back then. Of course the houses looked a lot smaller to many than when I was 9 years old. But then, they are truly small which makes their small lots look deceptively big. Her house couldn’t be much bigger than 800 square feet but her front yard seemed to stretch a ways to the sidewalk.

Many of the neighboring houses are bigger, some with two stories, and you would have never thought that they were built six decades ago. They were all meticulous cared for. I’m pretty sure the neighborhood went through a period of decline a while back, so it obviously has had a resurgence probably led by a lot of the young professionals I spotted driving into their detached garages.

What’s great about living in “old” Orange is that you can maintain the feeling of a period gone by with a short trip into Old Town Orange. It’s remarkable that a city can so effectively blend its past with the present and all of the conveniences of big shopping malls (The Block) and state-of-the-art medical facilities (CHOC).