Why Old Town Tustin matters.
Old Town Tustin is a historic enclave where Central Orange County's suburban landscape meets a nineteenth-century townsite, mature tree canopy and compact commercial streets that preserve the physical scale of Tustin before its postwar expansion.
Positioned between North Tustin, Central Tustin, and Santa Ana, the neighborhood occupies the original heart of the city, where Main Street and El Camino Real cross within a tight street grid surrounded by residential blocks that retain the proportions of an early Orange County settlement. Victorian, Craftsman, Colonial Revival and Spanish Colonial Revival houses sit among mature sycamores and other long-established trees, and the commercial center shifts into one- and two-story masonry storefronts whose narrow frontages preserve the scale of the former agricultural town. Main Street supplies the primary encounter through a short commercial spine where historic façades, converted residences and later infill remain close to the sidewalk before the street returns to older residential blocks. El Camino Real creates a secondary passage through the district, bending north from Main Street past early commercial buildings and into a lower-density corridor where the town center gives way to later development. The result is a neighborhood whose streets, architecture and unusually mature vegetation retain the dimensions of early Tustin within the far larger metropolitan landscape that subsequently grew around it.
What defines Old Town Tustin.
Old Town Tustin is best known for preserving the town center created after Northern California carriage maker Columbus Tustin and Nelson Stafford purchased 1,300 acres of Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana land in 1868 for $1.50 per acre. Tustin subdivided his portion and pursued a settlement called Tustin City, yet initial land sales moved slowly enough that he eventually gave lots to people willing to construct houses. A school opened in 1872, and a post office followed that October with Tustin serving as postmaster as stores, a blacksmith shop and houses gathered around the young settlement. Tustin and neighboring Santa Ana subsequently competed for the Southern Pacific Railroad terminus, a contest Santa Ana won in 1877 after assembling the stronger inducement for the company. The setback deprived Tustin City of the railroad-driven commercial expansion its founder had envisioned, and Columbus Tustin died in 1883 before the settlement achieved sustained prosperity. A horse-drawn street railway opened in 1886 to connect Tustin with the Southern Pacific depot in Santa Ana, creating a transportation link for the community despite the earlier defeat. Southern Pacific finally extended a branch into Tustin in 1888, with service beginning that September from a warehouse and ticket office near Walnut and Newport. The railroad never turned Tustin into the regional center its founder had imagined, yet the townsite endured around the same compact core that remains legible in Old Town.
Santa Ana River water arriving through the Santa Ana Valley Irrigation Company in 1877 helped prepare the surrounding acreage for the agricultural economy that eventually gave Tustin the prosperity its early real-estate venture had failed to secure. Citrus and walnut cultivation expanded across the district, and Sherman Stevens became one of the important figures in that transition after moving to Tustin in 1882 and investing in local land and businesses. Stevens joined C. E. Utt and James Irvine in the San Joaquin Fruit Company, whose work included the first large-scale citrus plantings on Irvine Ranch acreage and helped connect Tustin with Orange County's expanding commercial agriculture. His 1887 residence on Main Street, designed by Los Angeles architects Costerigan and Merithew, was built from redwood shipped from Eureka to McFadden's Landing and carried inland by wagon. Religious institutions developed beside this agricultural growth: First Advent Christian Church organized in 1880 and opened its chapel the following year, and David and Matilda Hewes helped finance Tustin Presbyterian Church, dedicated in 1884 with twenty-six charter members. David Hewes also became president of the Santa Ana, Orange and Tustin Street Railway Company when it incorporated in 1886, joining religious patronage with the transportation effort that linked the town to Santa Ana. Commercial architecture became more substantial during the twentieth century, and the two-story Knights of Pythias building completed on El Camino Real in 1925 housed shops below its lodge hall, followed by additional two-story buildings that gave the still-rural center a denser street presence. Cox Market Plaza arrived in 1926 on Tustin family land and later became Tustin Food Center under Ed and Leola Cox, carrying the commercial core into another generation as surrounding orchards gradually disappeared. Tustin designated Old Town as a local historic district in 1988, preserving a concentration of buildings whose chronology connects the original settlement with the agricultural prosperity and commercial consolidation that followed.
How Old Town Tustin fits.
Old Town Tustin works as the anchor for an outing connecting a private automotive collection created from a family racing enterprise, the immense surviving structure of a World War II airship base and an aviation museum centered on twentieth-century military aircraft.
Begin at Marconi Automotive Museum, whose origins lie with Dick and John Marconi, father-and-son entrepreneurs whose nutritional manufacturing business financed decades of automobile collecting and competitive racing. John Marconi competed in Formula Ford, Formula Atlantic, Formula 5000, GTP, GTU and Ferrari categories, and Dick later entered Sports Car Club of America competition at 57. The family acquired a former salad-oil plant in Tustin during the early 1990s to house its race team and expanding collection, then converted the property into a museum and donated both the building and vehicles to the Marconi Foundation for Kids. Open since 1994, the institution now holds more than 100 automobiles and motorcycles valued collectively $70 million, with Ferrari, Lamborghini, American muscle and competition machinery forming major parts of the collection. Continue to Tustin Hangars, the surviving physical centerpiece of a naval installation commissioned in 1942 for lighter-than-air patrols along the Southern California coast. Naval Air Station Santa Ana began operations with a single blimp before expanding to twelve K-class airships by the end of that year, and its immense timber hangars followed in 1943. Each structure extended more than 1,000 feet, with timber arches rising more than 17 stories and enclosing several acres beneath a clear-span roof, a wartime engineering response to severe steel constraints. The installation returned to military service in 1951 as the country's first airfield devoted solely to helicopter operations, later supporting Marine aviation through the Vietnam era, Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm before closing in 1999. The North Hangar was almost completely destroyed by fire in November 2023, leaving the South Hangar as the principal surviving giant of the original pair. Conclude at Lyon Air Museum beside John Wayne Airport, founded by Major General William Lyon and devoted principally to authentic aircraft, vehicles and artifacts associated with World War II. Lyon combined a military aviation career with business and collecting, and the museum occupies a site beside Martin Aviation, the aircraft service company established by aviation pioneer Eddie Martin in 1923. Its aircraft place the engineering represented by Tustin's immense airship infrastructure beside preserved flying machines from the period that produced it, extending the outing from private automotive competition through naval aviation into a broader history of twentieth-century transportation technology. The progression moves from the Marconi family's racing and collecting enterprise through the colossal timber engineering of Tustin's former naval air station and culminates among Lyon Air Museum's historic aircraft, tracing the region's twentieth-century relationship with speed, engineering and aviation beyond Old Town's nineteenth-century street grid.
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