Authors Tract

Authors Tract covers 31.4 acres and the city's address record holds 127 addresses inside the boundary against 127 parcels, one address to each lot. Five streets run inside across 1.11 miles of centerline and each carries the name of an American writer: Emerson, Frost, Longfellow, Sandburg and Whitman. The city zones 23.9 of the acres for 6,000 square foot one family residential lots and the lots themselves run to a median of 0.18 acres.

Mail here carries the 90620 zip code and the whole boundary sits in the California Geological Survey liquefaction zone the city publishes. The neighborhood feeds Arthur F. Corey Elementary, Buena Park Middle and Buena Park High.

Before any of this was a street grid it was Tongva country. A village called Juyubit stood beside Coyote Creek at the foot of the West Coyote Hills, about a mile north of these streets. Manuel Nieto received a Spanish grant covering the whole district in 1783, and when his heirs split it into five ranchos in 1834 the piece that became Buena Park was Rancho Los Coyotes, roughly 46,806 acres of grazing land. Abel Stearns ended up with the rancho, and in 1885 he sold 690 acres of it to James A. Whitaker, a Chicago wholesale grocer who founded the town two years later as the railroads pushed through.

The five streets inside this pocket are Emerson, Frost, Longfellow, Sandburg and Whitman, and they are not a random set of surnames. Every one of them is an American poet. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Walt Whitman come from the nineteenth century; Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg from the twentieth. Whoever laid out these 31 acres picked a single shelf of the library and worked down it. The houses came seventy years after the town did: the county assessor dates 108 of the 127 homes here to the 1960s and the remaining 19 to the 1970s. They sit on lots that run a little larger than the city norm, on quiet loops rather than through streets.