The lack of impressive civic landmarks and public plazas down Orange County’s Harbor Boulevard belies the street’s long history of civil disturbance and speaks to its potential of playing a more important civic role.
The historic Santa Fe Depot in Fullerton, just east of Harbor Boulevard, is part of a reenergized downtown landscape that features various bars and restaurants and even galleries and artists’ lofts. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
A light post serves as a memorial to Kelly Thomas, a mentally ill homeless man who was beaten to death by Fullerton police last year near Harbor Boulevard. In Anaheim, demonstrators amassed on Harbor over the summer following police shooting deaths, underscoring the long if under-appreciated history of civic activism on the boulevard. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
The metal and glass facade of the Anaheim Convention Center just off Harbor Boulevard dwarfs an office dweller. The boulevard is a vision of architectural extremes, ranging from the dramatic flourishes of Disneyland and the convention center to shabby and underdeveloped stretches south into Santa Ana, Fountain Valley and Costa Mesa. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
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The Chase Bank building at the corner of Harbor Boulevard and Lincoln Avenue in Anaheim was originally a Home Savings built in 1970 and designed by the prolific architect and artist Millard Sheets. He was known for giving such buildings a stately beauty and in this case, the architecture deftly finds a middle ground between pedestrian and automotive scale. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
Anaheim was once synonymous with oranges, now the only grove left standing is tucked away at the corner of Harbor and West Santa Ana Street. It’s also the site of the first battle of the 1936 Citrus War, in which striking orange pickers clashed with police. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
Other areas of Harbor Boulevard have seen their share of violence and political upheaval. Pearson Park, on the corner of Harbor and Cypress Street in Anaheim, drew a nighttime Ku Klux Klan rally of reportedly 10,000 people in 1924, when it was known as City Park. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
The only rail service along Anaheim’s Harbor Boulevard is Disneyland’s own monorail, which sweeps by on an elevated track. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
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Disneyland visitors wait to cross Harbor Boulevard on its eastern side. The theme park has lived up to Walt Disney’s aim to create a fantasyland hidden away from the metropolis around it, though its architecture has seeped out onto the boulevard to beckon tourists and residents alike. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
The flag of the Republic of South Vietnam waves in the breeze outside the Vietnamese Catholic Center just off Harbor Boulevard in Santa Ana, which has a booming Asian population. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
An inflatable dinosaur towers over one of the many used car lots along Harbor Boulevard in Santa Ana. “When you compare Harbor to the other major streets in north and central Orange County -- Bolsa Chica, Brookhurst, Glassell -- these other streets have no pretense to them. But Harbor, at least in certain stretches, will always have a pretense of being more than it actually is,” says OC Weekly Editor Gustavo Arellano. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
Kids scoot down Harbor Boulevard in Santa Ana as late afternoon traffic rolls along a landscape of strip malls. Despite real estate development, the boulevard has seen little change over the years. There is no equivalent of the light-rail expansion that is remaking L.A., neither is there a large infusion of bike lanes or a rethinking of pedestrian access that would better engage with the landscape. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
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A stretch of Harbor Boulevard in Santa Ana features dense development built beside perennially empty parcels and derelict old homes. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
A vacant lot along Harbor Boulevard in Santa Ana is another side to a street that’s dominated by drive-throughs, auto-body shops, tire outlets and big-box stores. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
About four miles south of Disneyland, in a Santa Ana strip mall on the east side of Harbor Boulevard, is a working-class Mexican bar with a tongue-in-cheek name: El Fracaso, or “The Failure.” In the gap between how the two places present themselves to the world -- between the Failure bar and the Happiest Place on Earth -- is a pretty precise measure of Harbor Boulevard. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
The sun sets behind a water pump shop along Harbor Boulevard in Santa Ana that harks back to the days when the Orange County landscape was dominated by orange groves. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
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Triangle Square, at the southern end of Harbor Boulevard, is a 200,000-square-foot shopping center envisioned as a town square when built in 1992 but which has since struggled to fill space. Its new owners have announced plans to invest $20 million to upgrade the site, renamed “The Triangle.” (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
