But he said he would consider selling "if somebody made an offer you couldn't refuse."
Talk like that worries preservationists. They don't want to see the trees bulldozed. Many residents are still bitter about the city's "bulldozer years" in the 1970s and 1980s, when many historic buildings were destroyed downtown to make way for development.
Pressel is open to offers, but also says he wants to give the grove to his son. And even though the grove has lost money for at least 10 years, the Pressels continue to nurture the trees. They pay to disc the ground and irrigate. If a tree dies, they replace it, even though the grove is almost more work than it's worth.
Pressel remembers the days when Anaheim was once covered with orange trees. At the peak in 1944, there were 64,681 acres of oranges in Orange County. By 1999, that had dwindled to 188 acres.
Jim Collison, 39, chairman of the California Square Neighborhood Assn., which is spearheading the preservation effort, remembers those orange groves too. Now, he said, "it's almost all completely gone."
"I think it would be surprising to many younger kids to realize that all this stuff here right now wasn't here 20 or 30 years ago," Collison said. "It's very, very different. There's just something neat about having agriculture and open space as a keepsake for the future."
