Placentia Turns 100, and Old Town Finally Has Something to Show for the Wait

"We have one of the last old towns in Orange County that hasn't been updated," Heidi Mahnke, owner of Broken Timbers Brewing Company, told the Placentia City Council in April 2025. She said it during a public meeting about a streetscape plan that, by then, had already been talked about for the better part of a decade.

That complaint has been the honest version of Old Town Placentia for years. The city adopted its Old Town Placentia Revitalization Plan back in 2017, with development standards meant to bring in new storefronts, wider sidewalks, and a Metrolink station that would turn the district into a walkable, transit-connected town center. The Metrolink station itself was approved by the Orange County Transportation Authority in 2016. Almost a decade later, residents and business owners were still standing up at council meetings asking when any of it would actually show up on Santa Fe Avenue.

This is the year the gap between the plan and the pavement starts to close, and the timing is not a coincidence. Placentia was incorporated on December 2, 1926, which makes 2026 its centennial year, and the city built an entire calendar of programming around the milestone. What's interesting for anyone who actually lives here is that the centennial isn't just parades and commemorative merchandise. It's arriving in the same twelve months as the first physical, dated, budgeted changes Old Town has seen since the plan was written.

The complaint that finally has a start date

Mahnke's brewery, at 116 W. Santa Fe Avenue, hosted a February 2025 meeting for Old Town merchants and neighbors to hear directly from city staff about the streetscape project: new lighting, bike racks, more trees, and a hard look at the pavement. Longtime resident David McNair told the council that other Orange County downtowns, Old Town Orange among them, had proven that investing in a historic core pays off, and that Placentia had the same opportunity sitting untouched.

What changed between that meeting and now is a construction schedule. The city's FY 2026-27 Arterial Roadway Rehabilitation Project is set to begin in August 2026 and finish in November, covering pavement grinding and overlay, full-depth reconstruction in the worst sections, and replacement of damaged sidewalks, curbs, and gutters, funded through SB1, Measure M, and gas tax revenue. That is not a rendering on a city council slide. It's a crew showing up this month.

Old Town also picked up a small but telling piece of infrastructure in December 2025, when the council approved a one-year pilot program for paid overnight parking at the Crowther public lot, managed through the ParkMobile app. Crowther Avenue is the same stretch where the long-promised Metrolink station is supposed to eventually sit. A paid overnight system only makes sense if the city expects more cars staying downtown after dark, which is a quiet signal that planners think the district's evening foot traffic is actually growing.

The restaurant turnover that says more than the press releases

If you want proof that something is different in Old Town this year, skip the planning documents and look at who's opening a door.

Tony's Original Bar & Deli, a Southern California sandwich institution with more than 50 years of history, has recently made the jump from its longtime Anaheim location into Old Town Placentia, bringing the same oversized sandwiches and neighborhood-bar feel that built its following. A few miles away on Orangethorpe Avenue, Juan Pollo is preparing to open its 27th Southern California location at 2095 East Orangethorpe, Suite A, according to permit filings with the OC Health Care Agency reported this spring. No opening date has been set, but the filing itself tells you a chain with nearly four decades of steady, unglamorous growth picked Placentia as its next stop.

That new activity is layering on top of businesses that never left. Tlaquepaque Restaurant has been serving Old Town since 1965, when Placentia's sister-city relationship with Tlaquepaque, Mexico gave the restaurant its name, and it still runs a Sunday champagne brunch with live entertainment from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. El Farolito, described in local reporting as one of Old Town's legendary family-owned kitchens, has held its own corner of the district for just as long. These are the businesses that kept the district's lights on through the years when "revitalization" was mostly a word in a staff report. Broken Timbers is doing its part for the centennial too, running a limited-time drink built around what its menu calls bold, local flavor, timed to the city's 100th year.

The centennial calendar, half spent

By the first week of August, Placentia's centennial year is already more than half over, and most of the marquee events residents will remember happened before this post was written. Here's where things actually stand:

The one still ahead of us this week is the biggest food event on the calendar. The 12th Annual Taste of Placentia runs Thursday, August 6, from 5 to 9 p.m. at Tri-City Park, with unlimited tastings from local restaurants and breweries and live music from the 80's All Stars. Presale tickets are $45, jumping to $55 at the door, with a $10 children's ticket ($15 at the gate) and VIP tables for ten running $650 in advance. The confirmed restaurant lineup includes Craft Burger Co., Craftsman Wood Fired Pizza, Rich Farm Ice Cream, Spitz Mediterranean Restaurant, Que Vida Tacos, and more than a dozen others, with organizers expecting over 100 vendors total by event day.

What the citrus festival says about the other Placentia

The George Key Ranch festival back in June is worth a second look, because it points at the same tension playing out in Old Town today, just a century earlier. The Key Ranch house itself was built in 1898 and remodeled in 1908, a Colonial Revival and Craftsman home that belonged to one of the citrus ranching families who built Placentia's early economy. George Gilman Key and his wife Hannah eventually turned part of the property into a small museum, and Orange County bought the ranch in the early 1980s to preserve it as Key Ranch Historic Park.

Placentia's own history explains why that preservation instinct runs so deep. The city was incorporated in 1926 with just 800 residents and 117 acres, earning it the nickname "the baby city" for being the smallest in Orange County. The arrival of the Santa Fe Railroad in 1910 had already connected local citrus growers to national markets, and packing houses and shops grew up around that rail line to form the town's first real center. A citrus disease later wiped out most of the orange groves that built the city's identity in the first place, forcing Placentia to remake itself more than once. The same question the city faced a hundred years ago, how much to preserve and how much to rebuild, is the exact argument that's been playing out over Old Town's storefronts for the last nine years.

Why this matters if you already live here

None of this changes what your commute looks like tomorrow morning. But if you've lived in Placentia through any part of the last decade of "revitalization is coming" conversation, this is the first year where you can point to an actual construction schedule, an actual new tenant, and an actual paid parking pilot instead of another public meeting. The centennial gave the city a reason to finally move, and whether that momentum holds past December is the real story worth watching once the birthday banners come down.

If you're weighing what a changing Old Town might mean for your own home's value, or you're simply curious what a century of Placentia history says about where the next one is headed, Mary Meza Hayes has spent years tracking exactly this kind of shift across northern Orange County. Schedule your free consultation whenever you're ready to talk about what it means for you.