Generals Tract

Generals Tract covers 109.8 acres and the city's address layer records 470 addresses inside the boundary across 462 parcels, on 3.71 miles of street with lots running to a median of 0.145 acres. Twenty three streets run inside and twenty of them are surnames, which is where the city's own name for the neighborhood comes from: MacArthur, Patton, Pershing, Bradley, Sherman, Sheridan, Hancock, Fremont, Wainwright, McClellan, Ridgeway, Arnold, Clark, Gaines, Hershey, Lee, Morgan, Norstadt, Scott and Ward, with Holder Street, San Rafael Drive and Valley View Street as the edges.

Carl Brenner Park sits wholly inside the boundary, 4.5 acres on San Rafael Drive, and the city zones 82.4 acres for 6,000 square foot one family residential lots. The boundary straddles a school district line: most of it feeds Raymond Temple Elementary, Walker Junior High and John F. Kennedy High, and the eastern part feeds Arthur F. Corey Elementary, Buena Park Middle and Buena Park High.

The street list here is an American command roster. Sherman, Sheridan, Hancock, McClellan, Scott, Fremont and Lee come from the Civil War. Pershing comes from the First World War, and MacArthur, Patton, Bradley, Arnold, Wainwright and Clark from the Second. Ridgway and Norstad were not history when these blocks were named; they were serving commanders in the 1950s, which is a useful clue to when the grid went in. About 470 homes sit on 110 acres between Holder, Valley View and San Rafael.

Buena Park was a defense era boom town in the plainest sense. The county's farms went under tract housing through the 1950s, and this city incorporated on 27 January 1953, with Orange County clerk B. J. Smith swearing in the first council and Grady Travis elected mayor. Streets named for generals in a subdivision sold to veterans on new mortgages is about as clear a picture of that decade as a street index can give.