Santa Fe Depot

This is the 70 acres between the Old Towne plaza and the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe line, and the city gives it its own specific plan, SP-5, rather than treating it as ordinary Old Towne. All of it sits inside the city's local Old Towne historic district and 60 percent of it inside the National Register district. The zoning is written for mixed use rather than houses alone: 16 acres of Old Towne Mixed Use-15, 11 acres of Old Towne Mixed Use-24, 11 acres reserved as public institution for Chapman University, the depot and St John's, and 10 acres of single family. Of the 376 addresses here, 97 carry a unit designator.

The city's historic survey covers 189 resources inside the boundary, 172 of them recorded as buildings in a historic district and eight carrying a Mills Act contract. Across the 146 surveyed parcels with a construction year the median is 1923 and the range runs 1886 to 2004. Veterans Memorial at Depot Park sits inside the boundary at 100 North Atchison Street. The site is now the Orange Transportation Center, a Metrolink station and OCTA bus transit center on a line Amtrak and BNSF also use. The city's parcel record assigns 101 parcels to West Orange Elementary, 70 to Cambridge and 21 to Sycamore, then every parcel to Portola Middle and Orange High.

This is the strip between the plaza and the tracks, and the tracks are why it exists. The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe reached Orange in 1887, about four blocks west of the circle, and Atchison Street is named for the railroad, which in turn took its name from three towns it was chartered in 1859 to connect, Atchison and Topeka in Kansas and Santa Fe in New Mexico. Within a decade the most important business in Orange was packing fruit and loading it onto that line, and this district is where that work happened.

The depot standing today is the second one. It went up in 1938 in a style caught between two eras, an arcaded outdoor waiting room with plaster walls and a red tile roof, with streamlined detailing at the entrances. It worked as a freight and passenger station until it closed in 1971, and was bought by the city. Commuter rail came back through in 1994. Around it the packing houses survive, including the plant that once ran as the largest Valencia orange packing house in the world and kept working until 2006, the last citrus packing house in Orange County to shut its doors.