Yorba Linda

YORBA LINDA — Several times a day, Pam Speak takes a break from her sales job at Another Time N Place, grabs a portable phone and heads a couple of doors north on Main Street.

Her destination is C.P. McGinnis & Co., where owner Sandy Stinson often can be found sipping coffee at the sidewalk table in front of her antique shop.

Speak can pull up a chair and visit her friend while keeping an eye on her own shop, catching her telephone calls and greeting other Yorba Linda Main Street merchants who make stops at Stinson’s table a part of their daily routine.

Stinson, a Yorba Linda resident who opened her shop here two years ago, describes the downtown district as “the last real, true Main Street USA in Orange County,” a vestige of the area’s rural and small-town ambience of the early 1900s.

Yorba Linda, after all, is one of the last places in Southern California where residents can travel on horseback over riding trails that wind among homes, parks and retail centers. And on Main Street, they can still tether their mounts while they shop.

Main Street is “so Yorba Linda,” said Dixie Lee, owner of Dixie Lee’s Antiques. She likens it to TV’s fictional Mayberry, made famous by “The Andy Griffith Show.”

“It’s family-oriented and community-minded,” Lee said.

If the merchants have a complaint, it is that their shops are a secret too well kept among new retail strips on Yorba Linda Boulevard and Imperial Highway, too easily missed by shoppers from other cities and visitors to the city’s landmark Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace.

“I hear it all the time,” said Leo Reilly, owner of Yorba Linda Hardware, which has been in business since 1927. “People come in and say, ‘I have never seen this place before.’ ”

But Main Street merchants say they prefer downtown to the more visible retail centers nearby because the old-fashioned atmosphere suits their businesses, which offer American and European antiques and tableware, vintage clothing and home decorating items, dolls and toys.

Most of the shops are in buildings dating to the 1920s, when Yorba Linda was a village in the midst of the citrus and avocado groves that covered much of northern Orange County and when fruit packinghouses and farm supply stores were the biggest businesses.

Main Street was the heart of the community then, bustling with weekend activity when residents of nearby farms and ranches came to town to have their horses shod, buy hardware and dry goods, go to church, visit with neighbors and treat themselves to lunch at Young’s Cafe.

Owned by Fay and Fannie Young, the cafe was one of the busiest spots on Main Street in the 1930s and ‘40s, said Jack Young, 67, son of the proprietors and a lifelong resident of Yorba Linda.

“We had a great time,” said Young, recalling that youngsters would congregate at the cafe while their parents took care of business. From there, they might venture into nearby groves or play in the ravine, but they would always return to the cafe at the end of the day.

The children would then wait patiently on a wooden bench in front of the cafe for Fannie Young to emerge with leftover cakes, pies and ice cream that she would give away to the children as she closed up shop.

That bench now sits in the backyard of Jack Young’s house, which is just a block from the old downtown.

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The cafe, like the blacksmith shop and the feed store, is gone, but the old-fashioned atmosphere has been preserved on Main Street. In keeping with the ambience, the newest addition, a barber shop built about six years ago, looks as if it has been there for decades.

Three years ago, city officials had budgeted $500,000 for a clock tower, archway and other Main Street improvements to help promote downtown. But the 1994 collapse of the Orange County investment fund, in which Yorba Linda had part of its money, thwarted those plans.

Denied help from the city, the merchants organized and took over the promotion effort. They now sponsor two annual events--a crafts fair in the summer and a Christmas fair in December--to raise money for improvements such as new benches, added this fall at a cost of $6,000.

Business owners say a critical element of their survival is to ensure that shops are convenient for browsing, that sidewalks encourage strolling and that merchants find time to chat with potential customers and offer personalized service.

Two days before Thanksgiving, for example, a customer walked into Stinson’s antique shop looking for Duncan Phyfe dining room furniture. The only set Stinson owned was in her own home, but she sold it on the spot, even though she then had no table on which to serve her own Thanksgiving dinner.

“She said she had to have it,” Stinson said. “I can always go out looking for another one.”

The Way It Was

Most of the shops on Yorba Linda’s Main Street are in buildings constructed in the 1920s, an ambience that suits the businesses.

Yorba Linda Profile

Established: 1907

Motto: “The Land of Gracious Living”

Population: 58,100

Median household income: $67,892

Ethnicity: 79% white, 10% Latino, 10% Asian, 1% black

Major employers: Sensormedics Corp., Unit Instruments, Price Club/Costco, John Harland Co., with about 300 employees each

Landmarks: Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace, Bernardo Yorba Ranch House

POINTER: Personal service is a hallmark

Sources: Yorba Linda Chamber of Commerce, Yorba Linda city clerk, U.S. census