Downtown News
Garden Grove Downtown
Business Association
May 2022 Number Two • Published every other month by and for owners and business operators of the downtown area
The Day Everyone Came to Downtown The “Open Streets 2022” event in the downtown area of Garden Grove brought out wrestlers, singers, musicians and a whole lot of residents on Saturday, April 2 afternoon and evening. As part of plans to spotlight both the current attractions and possible future of the city’s central core, visitors to the area – radiating out from historic Main Street and the north side of Garden Grove Boulevard – were treated to a variety of entertainments and attractions, as well as booths and tables offering information about an assortment of public agencies and private organizations promoting their services. At Euclid Street and Acacia Parkway, flamboyant “Lucha Libre” wrestlers
performed their act-robatic combats. Along the Medal of Honor Bike and Pedestrian path, walkers and bicyclists rolled past a new mural saluting Garden Grove’s railroad past with a colorful look at the old “Red Cars.” Southeast, a Ferris Wheel towered over the scene. The center of it all was Main Street, which was closed to vehicular traffic between Acacia and Garden Grove Boulevard to create room for the “After Party” from 6-10 p.m., featuring live music, a beer trailer and other attractions. North of that block along Main were a wide variety of food trucks, booths and craft activities, including painting a car in a colorful variety of hues.
What’s going down in the downtown GG
There’s always something going in downtown Garden Grove and that’s especially true in May. The annual Strawberry Festival is held in the Village Green park at Main and Euclid streets, commemorating the community’s agricultural past. It’s on Memorial Day weekend, Friday, May 27 to Monday, May 30. A highlight will be the Strawberry Festival parade held on a route that begins at 9th Street and Chapman Avenue and heads south along Euclid Street toward the downtown area, passing by the Village Green. Please see next page
ROBBIE FURMAN OF HAPPINESS IS A BALLOON This Main Street business is not full of hot air
Happiness is a Balloon: it’s Up, Up and Away! Need a lift? Want some color in your life? Want to celebrate but flowers make you sneeze? Then you can direct yourself to Happiness is a Balloon, located at 12903 Main St. in Garden Grove. Owned and operated by Robbie Furman, this unique store offers a wide variety of balloon-oriented displays, gifts and more. “I started Happiness is a Balloon to bring some much-needed joy to the world,” said Furman. “My dream has always been to open up a little balloon shop in a place that truly embraces the true meaning of community. Garden Grove is that place.” He creates a whole line
of balloon sculptures. “Our products are almost all handmade. I take uninflated balloons and I turn them into my own form of art.” Additionally he creates smaller gift items, to room décor, to large scale balloon sculptures. A creation of his are “Flurkinz,” hand created from color paper napkins. “This designs work great with my other balloons creations.” The store is open every day for pickups and deliveries and the showroom is open most days. For more information, call (949) 434-0451. E-mail is info@happinessisaballoon. com . Website is: www.happinessisaballoon.com .
The history of GG’s historic downtown area PART ONE Orange County historian Jim Sleeper once remarked that local redevelopment agencies have turned many historic OC locations into “historic parking lots.” This applied especially to central business districts – downtowns – in the county’s older cities. Downtowns are making a comeback locally and nationally, and some cities that enthusiastically tore theirs down in the Seventies are working hard to build new ones. One such revival is taking place in Garden Grove, where the original commercial core dates back to 1875 or so. The recent attention paid to the area around Garden Grove Boulevard and Euclid Street by the city, is the third major facelift for the area. History, once again, repeats itself. Garden Grove was established in 1874-5 by Alonzo Cook and a handful of others, who started a village near what was originally called Ocean
Avenue (now Garden Grove Boulevard) and the Anaheim Road (now Euclid). The small village grew slowly, and the commercial district was a block of wooden structures along an unpaved dirt road. But the coming of the Pacific Electric railroad in 1905 changed all that, and made Garden Grove a (slowly) booming market town. The rail line that cut diagonally through the area just west and south of the businesses gave rise to several large packing plants for the crops of walnuts, chili peppers, oranges and eventually strawberries. It remained a small “downtown,” but it did have a paved “main” street, streetlights, banks, grocery stores, a hotel and a movie theater (The Gem). If it lacked a certain visual appeal in that most of the structures were made of wood or brick, it sufficed. At last until March 10, 1933. It’s generally called the Long Beach Earthquake, but
What’s going down downtown? Continued from front page
For more details, go to: https://strawberryfestival.org . At the Gem Theatre on Main Street, “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” is playing to big crowds and rave reviews. Shows are Thursday through Sunday to May 15. For more information, go to https://www.thegemoc.com . Regular events happening in the downtown area (except festival weekend) include the Friday Night Car Show held Fridays on Main Street between Garden Grove Boulevard and Acacia Parkway from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. On Sunday mornings there’s the Farmers’ Market, offering fresh fruit, vegetables and more from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.
DOWNTOWN GARDEN GROVE, LATE FIFTIES View is looking north from what is now the Costco parking lot
the epicenter was actually closer to Huntington Beach. It struck Garden Grove hard, leveling much of the fragile downtown and damaging nearby Garden Grove High School, where one student was killed by falling masonry. You can’t really call a tragedy like that a “blessing in disguise” but it did lead to a substantial facelift for the area. Merchants and others (Garden Grove did not become an incorporated city until 1956) created the Euclid Improvement Association and went to work. The street was widened, and many of the tumbleddown brick and wood buildings were replaced with sturdier wood-andstucco structures in a Spanish mission style. Whitewashed storefronts and red-tile roofs gave the area a distinctive look. As Garden Grove (indeed, all of Orange County) boomed after World War II, so did its downtown.
It stretched east and west along the Boulevard and north and south along Euclid. Although locals still did most of their Christmas shopping at the big department stores in Santa Ana (Sears, JC Penney, Montgomery Ward), they bought their groceries, hardware and even their cars in town. The downtown area took a hit in the mid-Fifties with the Orange County Plaza opening at Chapman Avenue and Brookhurst Street. Although modest by today’s standards, it was the first major “modern” shopping center in the county, featuring a JC Penney, two supermarkets and dozens of other stores. It drew many shoppers away from downtown to this new “uptown.” The bigger blow to the area came from state and county transportation planners. Continued next issue