Why Beach Boulevard matters.
Beach Boulevard is a storied corridor where Stanton's working-class character meets Orange County's former “Road to Summer,” a state highway whose roadside commerce grew around the direct inland approach to Huntington Beach.
Running through Stanton between West Anaheim and Garden Grove, the Central Orange County corridor follows State Route 39 from the Anaheim boundary across Cerritos Avenue and Katella Avenue toward the Garden Grove Freeway, forming the principal north-south axis through a city measuring little more than three square miles. Katella Avenue intersects the boulevard near Stanton's geographic center, joining two arterial routes whose scale exceeds the compact residential grid surrounding them. Long commercial parcels, freestanding buildings and deep setbacks give the roadway a linear form distinct from the smaller blocks extending east and west into Stanton. The southern approach carries Beach Boulevard toward the Garden Grove Freeway and the flatter urban plain continuing through Westminster toward Huntington Beach, preserving the geographic logic behind its mid-century coastal association. The result is a boulevard whose state-highway dimensions and continuous commercial frontage place compact Stanton inside a 21-mile Orange County route extending from inland communities toward the Pacific.
What defines Beach Boulevard.
Beach Boulevard is best known for forming the Stanton section of State Route 39, the north-south highway that became Orange County's direct inland road to Huntington Beach. California signed Route 39 in 1934, drawing its southern alignment through a patchwork of existing roads that included Huntington Beach Boulevard and Stanton Avenue before continuing north through Buena Park. The state adopted a conventional highway between Northern Station and Ocean Avenue in November 1935, then extended state-highway sections through successive actions in 1937, 1939 and 1941 as the coastal route acquired greater continuity. Heavy traffic near Knott's Berry Farm produced another consequential change by 1942, when Route 39 shifted away from Grand Avenue onto an extension of Stanton Avenue that bypassed the increasingly busy attraction. Orange County unified the disparate road names under Beach Boulevard in 1960, explicitly honoring the “Road to Summer” association that had developed around automobile travel to the coast. A proposed Route 39 freeway had entered location studies in 1958, and the state adopted a freeway corridor between Route 1 and Lampson Avenue in 1968 before rescinding that plan in 1975. The surface boulevard survived as the regional route, leaving Stanton on the only conventional north-south highway providing a direct connection between inland Orange County and its coastal communities.
Stanton's stretch acquired a second cultural layer as Japanese American businesses concentrated along Beach Boulevard and nearby streets during the postwar decades. Daimaru Food Market operated at 11360 Beach Boulevard as part of a wider commercial network serving Japanese American families across Stanton, Anaheim and Garden Grove. Mitsuyoshi Restaurant developed farther south at 12033 Beach Boulevard, joining businesses that made the corridor a recurring destination for households rebuilding community life in Orange County after wartime incarceration and dispersal. Nearby commercial centers reinforced that geography: East West Shopping Center developed on Ball Road, Pear Tree Center opened in 1976, and Tabiji Restaurant operated from 1971 through 1997 as Japanese American commerce expanded across western Anaheim and Stanton. Orange County Buddhist Church occupied its Dale Avenue site from 1965, adding a religious institution to the same regional concentration. Beach Boulevard occupied the center of that commercial geography, linking businesses dispersed across adjacent communities through the automobile corridor that had already become one of northern Orange County's principal routes.
How Beach Boulevard fits.
Beach Boulevard works as the anchor for an outing connecting a surviving piece of Stanton's first municipal era, a family roadside enterprise born during Orange County's 1950s attraction boom and a contemporary public market created from a failing commercial property.
Begin at Stanton's First City Hall, the small 1914 building surviving on Beach Boulevard from the community's original period as an incorporated city. Stanton had incorporated in 1911 after residents opposed Anaheim's attempt to develop a sewage farm on the J. M. Gilbert Ranch, with former California Assembly speaker Philip A. Stanton assisting the campaign and lending the new municipality his surname. The city hall followed three years later and remained after residents ended that first municipal government in the 1920s amid concern over road-building costs. Commercial use preserved the structure through the following decades, and the building became a community market known as Bauman's for more than half a century. Few physical remnants compress Stanton's unusual municipal history so tightly: incorporation, dissolution and commercial reuse survive within a modest building beside the roadway that later became the city's dominant arterial. Continue north to Adventure City, whose origins reach Jay and Bea DeArmond's 1955 purchase of a former chicken ranch beside Beach Boulevard. The couple opened Hobby City there with three specialty stores devoted to collecting and craft pursuits, expanding the property to six acres and more than twenty independently operated businesses. Bea's collection eventually occupied a half-scale White House replica opened as a doll museum in 1979, with holdings ranging from Egyptian dolls to an eighteenth-century Noah's ark set and a Japanese imperial-court display exhibited at the 1896 Japan Expo. A miniature railroad installed in 1967 inspired grandson Allan Ansdell Jr. to develop a larger children's attraction, and Adventure City opened beside the family complex in 1994 as a two-acre park with eleven rides and attractions. The project extended one family's roadside enterprise across three generations and nearly four decades of Beach Boulevard development. Conclude at Rodeo 39 Public Market, created after Frontier Real Estate Investments acquired a largely empty Beach Boulevard business plaza in 2017. The 22-acre property had fallen to 10 percent occupancy before redevelopment paired new housing with a commercial center anchored by Dan Almquist's public-market concept. Rodeo 39 opened in October 2020 as one of Orange County's largest new retail projects of that period, occupying 40,000 square feet and giving first physical locations to numerous independent operators. Almquist drew visual inspiration from Hong Kong night markets and rodeo imagery, commissioning original work from five Southern California artists across the 42,000-square-foot project. More than half of its early tenants represented first-time physical storefronts, extending Beach Boulevard's long association with independent roadside enterprise through a radically different commercial form. The progression moves from Stanton's surviving 1914 municipal building through a three-generation roadside attraction and culminates in the reinvention of a nearly empty shopping property, tracing more than a century of local development directly along Beach Boulevard.
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