Gramercy Park

Gramercy Park covers 27.9 acres on the Camino Grande shelf in east Anaheim, on three streets over half a mile: Coral, Peridot and Twin Peak. The gemstone naming continues into the communities immediately around it, Amber and Tourmaline in Amber Lane, Garnet, Onyx and Sapphire in Horizons, and Amethyst, Quartz and Ruby in Kings Meadow, all laid out in the same three years. The city records 117 addresses on 115 parcels, all detached single family, with a median lot of 3,400 square feet.

The general plan divides the boundary between 16.4 acres of Residential Low Medium Hillside and 11.6 acres of Open Space, so two fifths of the ground is slope held between the homes, and 27.5 acres are zoned Multiple-Family Residential at a floor of 3,000 square feet of lot area per unit. One parcel carries a pool on the assessor record. The whole boundary falls in ZIP 92807 and in flood zone X. Gramercy Park sits in Orange Unified School District and feeds Canyon High.

Gramercy Park borrows a New York name for a hillside in Orange County, and then names its own streets after stones. Coral and Peridot run through it, and they are the tail end of a scheme that covers this whole shoulder of Camino Grande: Garnet, Onyx and Sapphire in Horizons, Amethyst, Quartz and Ruby in Kings Meadow. Twin Peak Lane is the exception and describes what you can see from it.

Anaheim Hills itself began on 30 October 1970, when Santa Anita Consolidated took deed to 4,200 acres of the Nohl Ranch to build a planned community, and a Texaco Ventures joint venture took over the residential land in August 1971. The first neighborhood, Westridge, opened in July 1972, and the city bought a separate 300 acres for a golf course that Richard Bigler laid out and that opened the same year. Gramercy Park is a hundred and seventeen attached homes over twenty eight acres, built on lots of around thirty four hundred square feet, which is the compact end of the Anaheim Hills range. The community was designed around the slope rather than against it: Anaheim Hills was the first residential development anywhere to use landform grading, shaping pads to the natural line of the ridge instead of cutting flat terraces, and the bends in these streets are the visible result.