I had an errand to run over in Orange this afternoon, so afterwards I just kept driving down Katella to check out the Arena Inn. Yup, it's all fenced off and clearly emptied out. A few of the locals have already climbed the fence and done a whole lot of graffiti spray painting on the buildings, just to show how honorable and intelligent their "culture" is. Otherwise, the Arena Inn is closed and abandoned and fenced off.
I'm just so surprised they pulled this off without all the media attention and protests that similar long term resident motels have dealt with when they are closed and replaced with upscale new development. Not a peep on this one, except for
@Darkbeer1 noticing it. I wonder how long it has been closed???
It's interesting how long it's taken for this to happen when you think about it. Back in the late 90s the prediction was that the revitalization of the infastructure surrounding DLR, the Disneyland's expansion, which included DCA and DTD, were supposed to spur nearby development. A few projects materialized, most notably GardenWalk, but the Anaheim Resort District hasn't really taken off until now.
For the most part, Garden Grove stole all the new hotel development on their stretch of Harbor Blvd. in the early 2000's. Garden Grove was very aggressive with tax breaks and marketing to corporate developers, and it was mostly successful.
Garden Grove's city council had a really delusional period where they thought they were going to get a non-Disney theme park built, and/or an NFL stadium, and/or an Indian Casino, and/or a canal-lined shopping center. For about a decade there was a constant stream of fantastical sketches of all these proposed projects that always had sketchy funding sources.
But what Garden Grove was successful at, through all of their very generous tax breaks and aggressive courting, was getting thousands of corporate hotel rooms and a dozen chain restaurants built during the 2000's. These were all solid 3-star hotels (Embassy Suites, several Hiltons, several Marriotts) surrounded by cookie cutter palm trees, parking lots and mid-range chain restaurants (Bucca Di Beppo, Red Robin, Joe's Crab Shack, etc.). But it was all a noticeably safer and more pleasing looking (if rather generic) environment than the sketchy 1960's motels and greasy spoon coffee shops that were just up the street in Anaheim.
Garden Grove's Harbor Blvd. development circa 2000-2007
If Anaheim had been as organized and driven as Garden Grove had been 15 years ago, most of those hotels and restaurants would have been built further north on Harbor. After all, they only exist due to the booming tourism industry driven by Disneyland and the Anaheim Convention Center. And all of that is in Anaheim, not Garden Grove.
