Orange Riviera

Viewed from hip Los Angeles, Orange County has sometimes seemed a quaint appendage sprawling southward down the Pacific Coast, a pleasant afterthought with an odd weakness for white shoes and alarmists of the John Birch Society stripe. To the larger world, the county still summons up images of citrus groves and Disneyland, planned communities and the young Richard Nixon, hard- core conservatism and the late John Wayne. But today Orange County is undergoing a dramatic change, exploding with new wealth. Its economic output has more than tripled in a decade, and its population since 1970 has jumped by 50%, to 2.1...