Colony Park

Colony Park covers 40.9 acres in central Anaheim, bounded by Olive, South, Water and Santa Ana Streets and threaded by Atchison, Casita, Kroeger, Melrose and Valencia. The whole boundary lies inside the Anaheim Colony Historic District, the largest of the four districts the City Council has adopted. The county assessor records 116 parcels inside it with a median lot of 3,141 square feet, and the city's address layer records 777 addresses against them, so much of the housing is attached and shares its ground.

The city's footprint layer measures 168 buildings here and reads 104 of them as multi-family, 60 as detached and four as other, with 134 standing at two stories and 19 at three. The general plan splits the ground between Residential Low Medium on 20.4 acres and Residential Medium at up to 36 homes to the acre on 19.6, and Colony Park itself, a 0.9-acre pocket park, sits wholly inside the boundary. Anaheim publishes attendance boundaries here, and every interior point tested returns Jefferson Elementary, South Junior High and Katella High.

Colony Park stands on the site of the Kwikset lock factory, and the ground is as industrial as downtown Anaheim gets. Adolf Schoepe founded Kwikset in Anaheim in 1946 and has a fair claim to being Orange County's first modern industrialist. The plant at 516 East Santa Ana Street ran a metal plating and manufacturing operation from 1948 until 1998 across sixteen acres.

Kwikset stopped making locks here and sold the property in 2001. The Anaheim Redevelopment Agency took on the cleanup, which ran to roughly eleven million dollars and pulled petroleum, lead, solvents and other residues out of the soil, then doubled the project when a neighboring sixteen acres came free. What came out the other side is Colony Park, about forty acres of housing with a public park inside it. The houses date from 2009 onward, with 2013 the median year, which makes this one of the newest neighborhoods in the oldest part of the city.