Highway 101 by Stephen H. Provost

Author:Stephen H. Provost
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Linden Publishing
Published: 2020-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

Tommy’s Restaurant, with its huge sign just off the freeway, is impossible to miss at El Camino Real in San Clemente.

THE SANTA ANA FREEWAY

It’s hard to believe it these days, but Orange County, godfather of the subdivision, was once at the center of Southern California’s fertile crescent, a swath of land that extended up U.S. 101 and eastward across to San Bernardino along U.S. 99/60/70. If you can’t find that on the map, it’s because that highway has been replaced by Interstate 10.

U.S. 101 in Orange County, for its part, has been renamed Interstate 5, although it’s still the same road. As an aside, this is the only place in California where 101 no longer exists. It starts up as a freeway in Hollywood, and the old highway can be found—still signed as 101—along surface streets in coastal San Diego County.

Whatever you call it, it’s best known in the county south of Los Angeles as the Santa Ana Freeway, named for the county seat (no, the city of Orange isn’t the capital of Orange County) and renowned for its anytime-of-day rush-hour traffic. That’s in part because, as you head north toward the L.A. County line, it’s squeezed like an orange into three lanes each way, in contrast to the wider but still congested San Diego Freeway that runs parallel a few miles to the west.

Today, Orange County has more than 3 million inhabitants, but back in 1948, it had even more oranges: 5 million in all, growing on 67,000 acres. There were towns in the area, to be sure, but they were just that—towns. Not cities or the elements in a seemingly endless asphalt-and-concrete playground, as they are today. Old photos of Highway 101 and the network of now-busy boulevards that crisscross the landscape show them in their infancy as dusty roads lined by mile after mile of orchards.

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