ORANGE : Plan Fuels an Effort to Save Station

With its sloping, storybook roof, the Don Clark service station has been a Main Street landmark since 1927.

Welcoming travelers from across the state when Main was still part of old Route 101, the tiny, picturesque station looks as though it belongs at Disneyland. Now closed and surrounded by a fence and huge pits where the gas pumps once stood, the building sits forlornly, a historic holdout on a corner near commercial high-rises and state-of-the-art shopping malls.

Dean Clark, station co-owner and son of Don Clark, who died in 1990, fears that the building has become a relic and that it faces extinction as a victim of the largest public works project in city history.

Clark, a fourth-generation Orange native, remembers working at his father’s gas station at 305 S. Main at age 7. He calls the building the “most photographed gas station in the world.”

“People say: ‘This is the first thing I saw when I came to Orange. . . . Please don’t destroy this piece of local history,’ ” Clark said. “I wouldn’t consider selling it for $1 million.”

The station is one of about 33 businesses and 46 residences that could be demolished or relocated as part of a massive $26-million project to widen Main and Glassell streets and La Veta and Chapman avenues.

A Planning Commission public hearing on the street-widening project will be held at 7 tonight in City Council chambers at 300 E. Chapman Ave.

Clark and hundreds of other Orange residents turned out at a hearing last month to protest the street-widening project. Homeowners say the plan will turn their streets into a freeway while preservationists argue that it will destroy historic homes and ruin the treasured charm of the Old Towne area.

At the December Planning Commission hearing on the widening, a project official presented 10 alternatives to the plan in response to opposition and recommendations from the public.

“All of the alternatives reduce the direct impact on these streets, but some of them are not practical,” said Sylvia Salenius, vice president of P & D Technologies of Orange, the company that compiled the extensive report on the project.

One of those alternatives for the widening project, if adopted, would save the Don Clark service station. Jack McGee, director of community development, said that alternative is among the most likely to be approved by the commission.