Why Anaheim Packing District matters.
Anaheim Packing District is an adaptive-reuse enclave where Anaheim Colony's agricultural inheritance meets surviving industrial architecture, pedestrian-scaled public ground and a compact concentration of buildings repurposed from the city's citrus and early automobile eras.
Positioned between Downtown Anaheim, the Historic Palm District, and the southern reaches of Anaheim Colony, the neighborhood occupies a compact section of Anaheim Boulevard where former agricultural and commercial properties interrupt the surrounding residential street grid. Mission Revival facades, sawtooth industrial forms, mature trees and low-rise commercial buildings preserve the scale of an earlier Anaheim beneath a skyline still dominated at close range by historic rooflines and towers. Movement centers on Anaheim Boulevard before turning through courtyards, garden paths and converted industrial interiors that place former production buildings within walking distance of one another. Farmers Park extends that encounter outdoors through a narrow planted corridor between historic structures, giving the district a landscaped connective element amid masonry, stucco and timber construction. The result is a neighborhood whose physical character depends on the survival and reuse of working buildings from Anaheim's agricultural past, concentrating several generations of local development within an unusually compact piece of the original colony.
What defines Anaheim Packing District.
Anaheim Packing District is best known for growing around the Anaheim Orange and Lemon Association Packing House, the 1919 Mission Revival building that survives as Anaheim's last citrus packing house from an industry that once dominated the surrounding landscape. Anaheim's agricultural economy had shifted decisively toward citrus after disease devastated its nineteenth-century vineyards, and Valencia oranges became the city's principal export during the first half of the twentieth century as Southern Pacific and Santa Fe rail connections carried fruit toward eastern markets. The Anaheim Orange and Lemon Association erected its new packing house for $40,000 beside the rail corridor in 1919, equipping the building with an endless conveyor that moved fruit through washing, grading and packing operations. A large golden orange above the entrance advertised the association's product directly to traffic passing along Los Angeles Street, the thoroughfare subsequently renamed Anaheim Boulevard. Long-distance citrus shipping became increasingly dependent on refrigeration, prompting construction of a substantial pre-cooler and chilling tower behind the packing house in 1926 as ice protected fruit during rail journeys across the country. The association operated there until 1955, when expanding suburban development was rapidly replacing the groves that had supplied Anaheim's packing industry. Electra Motors, a Litton Industries division, occupied the building from 1963 to 1969, removed the fruit-handling equipment, enclosed the northern loading dock and demolished the cooling tower, substantially changing a property whose original industrial purpose had disappeared. Maxad Inc. and Amparco Inc. subsequently controlled the building between 1969 and 2000 as a succession of businesses used it for offices and storage. Public acquisition in 2000 prevented the surviving packing house from disappearing during another cycle of Central Anaheim redevelopment, and restoration work beginning in 2011 brought Thirtieth Street Architects, Structural Focus, Tovey/Shultz Construction and Spectra Company into a rehabilitation that retained the building's historic exterior and major structural character. The California Preservation Foundation presented the project with a Preservation Design Award in 2013, and the restored building reopened on May 31, 2014 as a two-story food hall developed by Shaheen Sadeghi and LAB Holding. The Anaheim Orange and Lemon Association Packing House entered the National Register of Historic Places in 2015, completing a century-long transition from citrus-processing infrastructure through industrial decline into the architectural centerpiece of a new district built around Anaheim's surviving agricultural fabric.
Thomas Crawford's attempt to convert surplus citrus into marmalade created a separate industrial chapter immediately south of the packing house and supplied the district with another surviving link to Anaheim's agricultural economy. Crawford began erecting a factory at South Los Angeles Street and Santa Ana Street in 1916, expanding the operation to three adjoining buildings by the end of 1918 as demand for orange marmalade increased. Thomas Crawford Inc. became Exchange Orange Products Company Inc. in May 1918 and joined the California Fruit Growers Exchange later that year, placing its marmalade under the Sunkist brand as the cooperative sought additional commercial uses for citrus. Production relied on small-batch cooking and thin strips of orange peel suspended in clear jelly, but high production costs, inconsistent quality and weak marketing ended the venture in 1920. The Anaheim Orange and Lemon Association purchased the former factory that November and converted it to storage for fertilizer, fumigation equipment and surplus packing supplies, physically tying Crawford's failed processing experiment to the larger citrus operation nearby. Subsequent uses included a radiator shop as the buildings outlived the agricultural economy that had created them. LAB Holding later restored the surviving complex as MAKE, preserving an industrial counterpart to the larger packing house and returning another early twentieth-century production site to active use. The Packard Building adds an automobile-era layer nearby, originating with a 1922 agreement involving property owner Anton Schulte before construction produced a showroom with a 50-foot frontage, 150-foot depth, unusually tall interior and windows on three sides designed to place automobiles prominently before passing traffic. Clyde W. Cromer became its manager as the building opened during the early 1920s expansion of automobile ownership, introducing a commercial form fundamentally different from the citrus-processing structures surrounding it. MAKE and the Packard Building extend Anaheim Packing District beyond a single restored packing house, preserving the transition from fruit cultivation and food manufacturing into automobile commerce that reshaped Central Anaheim during the opening decades of the twentieth century.
How Anaheim Packing District fits.
Anaheim Packing District works as the anchor for an outing connecting the original German settlement, a Carnegie-funded civic building and Anaheim's first major public park within the historic colony surrounding the district.
Begin at Founders' Park, where the 1857 Mother Colony House preserves the origins of Anaheim in the Los Angeles Vineyard Society's settlement of 50 German colonists. Superintendent George Hansen built the three-room redwood house as his residence and office after laying out the colony on land purchased from Juan Pacifico Ontiveros, dividing the settlement into 50 vineyard properties enclosed by North, South, East and West streets. Señora Vicenta Sepulveda de Carrillo acquired the house in 1872, Frederick Ruhmann followed in 1884 and the Mother Colony Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution rescued the building from demolition by moving it from Anaheim Boulevard in 1928. The property became Orange County's first historical museum the following year. The neighboring Woelke-Stoffel House, a two-story Queen Anne residence built in 1894 during Anaheim's citrus ascendancy, extends the site from the colony's viticultural beginnings into the agricultural economy that succeeded its vineyards. Continue to Carnegie Library, where Anaheim's civic development emerged from a circulating library established in 1873 and a municipal collection created in 1902 from 672 books, shelving, a reading table and two rocking chairs. Andrew Carnegie committed $10,000 toward a permanent building in 1907, architect John Austin supplied the accepted design and Kuechel and Rowley secured the construction contract with a revised $9,589 bid. A Masonic cornerstone was laid on November 21, 1908, and the building opened January 1, 1909 for a city whose population remained near 2,000. Anaheim's postwar growth eventually overwhelmed the small library, which surrendered its original function after a new Central Library opened in 1963. Threatened during the Project Alpha redevelopment era, the Carnegie building survived through local preservation efforts, gained municipal protection in 1978 and entered the National Register of Historic Places in 1979 before joining the Muzeo complex in 2007. Conclude at Pearson Park, where Anaheim's early public landscape expanded across 19 acres north of the colony center. Rudy Boysen created cactus and water gardens there in 1921, years before the horticulturist became associated with the hybrid berry carrying his name. Anaheim developed City Park during the 1920s, adding an amphitheater and ballfield grandstand in 1927 as permanent civic architecture entered the grounds. The park received the Pearson name in 1960 in honor of former mayor Charles A. Pearson, preserving a connection between Anaheim's early recreational landscape and a municipal leader from the city's twentieth-century expansion. A four-ton cactus removed from the 1916 Wohlgemuth House decades later was transported by crane to Boysen's cactus garden, adding another surviving piece of Anaheim Colony horticulture to the grounds. The progression moves from Hansen's vineyard colony through Carnegie-funded civic culture and Boysen's horticultural landscape, connecting Anaheim Packing District to the settlement, institutions and public ground that developed around the agricultural economy preserved in its industrial buildings.
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