Commentary : Losing the Orange Inn to Progress

If the moving of the Orange Inn doesn’t leave a sour taste, then nothing will. This is a crime in which we all are culpable.

For some, perhaps, the Orange Inn on Coast Highway between Laguna Beach and Corona del Mar was just another roadside attraction.

But for those who remember when the Orange in Orange County stood for thousands of acres of citrus groves, when Harbor Boulevard was the major thoroughfare to the beach, when Irvine was a ranch, the restaurant will be a reminder to a way of life losing its way.

I pedaled by last week, as I have for the last 15 years, and although the old cafe is gone, it remains etched into the chasms of my memory, just another remembrance of an agrarian Orange County that went down for the count.

We’re making progress, I’m told. We’ve got a Performing Arts Center, a noisy airport, outdoor concert halls, state-of-the-art shopping malls, an infrastructure as entangled as a Venice canal--the California Promise. We’ve replaced the farms with an Euclidean-built society as simple as a straight line is crooked.

Are we having fun yet?

For two generations, the Orange Inn stood as a beacon of light to bicycle riders and hungry passers-by in quest of a brief respite from encroaching suburbia. The Orange Inn catered to a clientele peculiarly Southern Californian. It had its own parlance, like an avo-on-squaw sandwich. It had its own flow, like a smoothie.

But it also had a flaw--its location.

With the cool blueness of the Pacific facing it, and the rolling, ashen, cattle-dotted hills behind, the Orange Inn was sitting on a developer’s dream. But can developers be blamed for bulldozing a piece of history as if it were another earthen obstacle to progress? After all, what makes dollars makes sense.

Our rush-rush, push-push mentality must share the blame. In the Norman town of Lisieux, France, they’ve built around a small strip of cobble Roman road in the town’s center. They’re proud of their heritage, and it has never occurred to them to tread on such a relic--all of 20 feet long.

The Orange Inn may not have been as historically striking as a rocky Roman road, but it was uniquely ours. It was part of our fiber the way that Roman road is part of the Normans.

When the autumnal Santa Ana winds swirl in the coastal sky, I’ll remember the Orange Inn, its different owners, its varied menu, its slow pace in the face of on-rushing traffic.

Perhaps with a little protest, we could have forced them to build around the inn, not over it. Perhaps, perhaps. But we are so conditioned to shedding the old and erecting the new, we limply watched this travesty occur.

There are times when I think this is the place; there are times when I find it difficult to find the place. There are times when I find the view enjoyable; there are times when I find it clouded (or smogged). There are times when I’m in a giant hurry; there are times when I get passed on the right. There are times, and I am sure there are times when everyone finds this true, I think this is paradise.

But there are times when I think they’ve paved paradise and put up a parking lot. This is one of those times.