Historical Homes Put New Life Into French Park

‘We always told them, “Give us a chance and we’ll find people to come back into this neighborhood and restore the old houses.” ’

--David Fraunfelder

Barbara Houghton stood at Bush and 12th streets in Santa Ana and marveled at the big Victorian house across the street, fresh with blue paint and every shingle in place.

She remembered a house with a different appearance when she and her husband, Lee, lived down the street a few years ago. Thick, deteriorating mustard-color stucco hid the 95-year-old house’s original redwood siding, and no one knew exactly how many people lived there. Drugs and money changed hands through open windows.

“The city finally condemned it,” she said. But even that didn’t stop transients from climbing up the big rubber tree in the front yard to get in.

Last year, developers Gary Hadsell and Leon Roach bought the house for $132,000. They spent more than $200,000 to renovate it and months scraping, sanding, blasting and painting it back into shape. Today, the 2,700-square-foot house, built by Dr. Charles Dexter Ball around 1890, is leased as office space to professionals.

The Ball house is one of about a dozen historical homes in the French Park neighborhood that recently have undergone--or are in the midst of--major surgery. What was fast becoming a collection of worn-out museum pieces in an unpleasant part of town a few years ago “has finally turned the corner,” said David Fraunfelder, former president of the Historic French Park Assn.

The association, formed in 1979, has led the effort to preserve and restore the approximately 150 structures 50 years or older in the neighborhood. It also has spawned similar groups in other parts of the city, has pressured the city to enforce its housing codes and challenged landlords to take more interest in their tenants and properties.

“We always told them, ‘Give us a chance and we’ll find people to come back into this neighborhood and restore the old houses,’ ” Fraunfelder said.

The neighborhood is a pocket of tranquility amid the bustle of downtown Santa Ana to the west and the grime of the industrial area and railroad yards to the east. In the center of the neighborhood, surrounded by French and Minter streets and Vance Place, sits a small, shady triangular park that lends the neighborhood its name.

In the morning, residents sit and read newspapers beneath the park’s trees. At lunchtime, office and construction workers occupy its benches. Before the association and the city spruced it up with new benches and old-fashioned street lamps, the park belonged mostly to vagrants, Fraunfelder says.

One recent morning, white-clad painters were applying the finishing touches to a two-story Victorian house on French Street, while workmen a block away dug utility trenches for a Craftsman house and an Italianate-influenced Victorian that recently had been moved onto a vacant lot.

On Washington Avenue, the neighborhood’s northern boundary, three more historic houses were in varying stages of renovation. They probably will be rented for moderate rates, said Bob Torres, the city’s housing development supervisor.

And on Bush Street, construction workers were busy completing a 26,600-square-foot office building that the neighborhood helped plan, according to developer Larry Moore.

“At first, we were looking at the property for apartments, but the neighborhood was not excited about that at all,” Moore said. “The alternative was professional offices. I told them we could spend more on the exterior, that it would be quiet at night and professionally maintained. They liked that.”

The neighborhood association also had a hand in the design, which is “compatible with the turn-of-the-century architecture of the neighborhood,” Moore said.

Fraunfelder said the conversion of residential properties to office space on the neighborhood’s edge is “one of our greatest areas of discussion. . . . But it’s a big improvement over what was there before. If you want it to be nice in your lifetime, you’ve got to bend a little bit.”

Glory Allender, the association’s current president, said a recently approved office conversion of a historical house on East Washington Avenue “is the last one” the neighborhood will accept on property where such use is not expressly permitted.

“We fought hard for the specific plan,” which forbids such uses except on Bush Street, Allender said. “But we would have lost this house if the conversion plan was not approved.”

Perhaps the biggest change in French Park is on Lacy Street. Two Victorian mansions that had stood vacant in their own run-down neighborhoods recently were moved into French Park on a lot that had been strewn with beer cans. The block is not one of French Park’s prettiest, but the houses, when they are restored, will help greatly and may inspire other owners on the street to begin renovation work, Fraunfelder said.

The Houghtons, who still own and rent out two houses in the neighborhood, recently won approval of their bid to buy the larger of the two mansions, known as the Harmon-McNeil house. Restoring the 3,500 square-foot, gingerbread house--in the heart of Santa Ana--might seem unusual for a semi-retired couple who moved to leisurely Laguna Niguel a few years ago.

“My heart’s here,” said Barbara Houghton, an interior designer. “I needed more to do, and my husband got discontented. He’s a very skilled craftsman, so what I design, he can build.”

Houghton said she and her husband, both in their 60s, will restore the home, at an expected cost of $80,000, and live in it “as long as I am ambulatory.”

“We raised eight children in a one-bathroom, three-bedroom house in Manhattan Beach,” Houghton said. “Our kids think we’re out of our minds.”

Houghton said the flurry of renovation work and what she and her husband perceived as a new interest on the city’s part helped convince them that it was a good time to return to French Park. “It seemed like it was never going to happen,” she said, referring to the association’s grand plans for the neighborhood. “But now, all the things we hoped would happen are happening.”

Steve and Catherine Cate bought their Mediterannean-style house on French Street last year. It needed extensive repairs, Catherine Cate said, “but we didn’t want to live in a cookie-cutter home.” Besides, she and her husband, a hospital pharmacist, had a fixer-upper once before, in Arizona.

Their list of projects for the house extends into the next decade, at least.

“We may never be done,” she said. “But we’ve got the rest of our lives to do it, because we’re not going to move.”

That won’t be unusual for French Park residents. Across the street, Leonard and Connie Castillo have lived in the same house since 1958, and three of their six grown children still live in the neighborhood.

“It’s an ideal neighborhood for children, even though it’s in the middle of town,” said Connie Castillo. “It’s near the church (St. Joseph’s Catholic Church) and the schools . . . and people aren’t afraid to walk outside. Everyone knows each other.”

The house was once occupied by descendants of Charles E. French, the early Santa Ana banker and manager of the San Joaquin Ranch (which later became the Irvine Ranch), according to canceled checks and receipts found in the attic, Connie Castillo said.

A Santa Ana street map gives a clue to the neighborhood’s origin: the streets of French Park do not run north-south and east-west like most streets in the city, but run parallel and perpendicular to the railroad tracks, which cut through the city diagonally.

The neighborhood grew out of the Western Development Co.’s plan to bring the Southern Pacific Railroad into Santa Ana and lure shop owners to the new, handsome streets they carved out of the wild mustard adjacent to the depot.

With a payment of $40,000 to the railroad, the principals of Western Development--William H. Spurgeon, J. H. Fruit and James McFadden--beat out Columbus Tustin for the stop on the Southern Pacific line. But they never succeeded in creating a new business district east of Santa Ana. The shopkeepers stayed put, and Jacob Ross, whose land lay to the west, sent men to the railroad station with signs that said: “This is only our depot, come down and see our town.”

The lots on the new streets were sold for homes, and the area became one of Santa Ana’s first neighborhoods with snob appeal, as the town’s bankers, doctors and lawyers built handsome houses there.

A house on Wellington Avenue is the oldest home built in French Park still standing. It is one of four houses owned by Wayne and Viola Small, who live around the corner in a 1930s house on French Street. Their son and daughter-in-law live in the Wellington Avenue house.

Small moved to French Park from Ohio with his parents in 1943. His father worked in the Santa Ana Woolen Mill on Washington Avenue.

In the early 1960s, Small remembers, a lot of the old houses came down and apartment buildings went up. Or the houses were converted to multifamily units and were abused and neglected. In 1969, the home of Charles E. French, once one of the finest in the neighborhood, was torn down.

“You could see all the way to the Pacific Ocean from the top of that house,” said Small.

In the 1970s, Small had plans to demolish his own houses and build 40 apartment units, when the neighborhood began to get “hysterical historical,” Small said.

“I was on the fence,” said Small, who at the time questioned whether the neighborhood could be saved or was even worth saving. Still, “I liked the decor of the neighborhood, and he (the project designer) wanted to put in big old cement boxes, and I wasn’t too happy with that.”

In 1981, the City Council passed interim zoning restrictions and architectural guidelines that stopped the apartment construction in French Park. In 1984, the council made the restrictions permanent. They constrain developers from converting old houses into anything more than duplexes (professional offices are permitted on Bush Street), and all new development or major renovation plans must be submitted to the Planning Commission. The commission usually recommends that the Historic French Park Assn. be consulted before the final plans are approved.

The city also has provided low-interest loans for renovation projects in French Park. This year, the city already has loaned or committed more than $200,000 there.

Of the $3.1 million the city expended in fiscal year 1986-87 in rehabilitation loans, about 10% went to French Park. “That’s a lot for one neighborhood,” said city housing manager Patricia Whitaker, “especially one that’s just a few square blocks.”