THE STATE of the City event Thursday at the Hyatt Regency Orange County in Garden Grove (OC Tribune photo).

As a history buff, I never tire of trying to convince people of the connection between their past, the present and the future.

That was done rather adroitly on Wednesday at the annual “State of the City” event held at the Hyatt Regency Orange County.

Held jointly by the City of Garden Grove and the Garden Grove Chamber of Commerce, the event included the usual accolades for civic dignitaries and public servants. The keynote speaker was outgoing long-term Mayor Steve Jones, and he took care to note that 2024 is the 150th anniversary of the founding of Garden Grove by Alonzo Cook and posse in 1874 in the general area of what is now Main Street and Garden Grove Boulevard.

There was even a “guest” appearance by Alonzo himself, complete with beard and a slightly Yiddish accent to note how far Garden Grove had come since its founding two years before Custer’s Last Stand.

Among the points made in Jones’s remarks were the growth of the downtown/civic center area.

Since its inception 150 years ago on a few hundred acres on a mostly featureless coastal plain, the community has grown upward and outward from a village to a town to a city of over 173,000 people.

Under construction at Euclid Street and Acacia Parkway is a new three-story police facility and an attached four-level parking structure.  A new park will be built nearby to take the place of the park displaced by new police HQ facility.

The first of the long-awaited Cottage Industries businesses in the area east of the civic center, SmokeQueen BBQ, has opened and attracted long lines.

The downtown area from which the seminal “Big Strawberry” was originally the central business district has now become a vibrant center of the arts, restaurants, retail business, higher education and more. It may be hard for many of us to see that future. But Alonzo could and Steve Jones does, and we are grateful to both of them for their vision and confidence.