Composers Tract

Composers Tract covers 25.0 acres and the city's address layer records 102 addresses inside the boundary across 99 parcels, on 0.9 miles of street with lots running to a median of 0.173 acres. Seven streets serve it and each is named for a composer: Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Handel, Schubert and Verdi.

The city zones 18.2 of the acres for 6,000 square foot one family residential lots and the whole boundary sits inside the published liquefaction zone. Mail carries the 90621 zip code, and the neighborhood feeds James A. Whitaker Elementary, Gordon H. Beatty Middle and Buena Park High.

Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Handel, Schubert and Verdi. Seven streets, seven composers, and every one of them European and dead before 1901. There is no Gershwin here and no Copland, which tells you the person naming these blocks was thinking of the concert hall rather than the radio. About 102 homes sit on 25 acres, on lots that run near a sixth of an acre, in the 90621 postal district on the northern side of the city, and almost all of them went up in one decade: the county assessor dates 86 of them to the 1960s, and the oldest structure inside the boundary to 1920.

Buena Park itself began as a railroad town. James A. Whitaker, a Chicago wholesale grocer, bought 690 acres from Abel Stearns in 1885 and founded the town in 1887 during the land boom the first railroads set off, opening a general store and helping start a church. The name most likely comes from an artesian well and its park like grounds near what is now Artesia and Beach, and local settlers called the spot Plaza Buena, good park in Spanish, which is how an English word and a Spanish one ended up sharing a city name.