Dana Point

The City of Dana Point draws a community under its own name, and at 1,419 acres it is the largest of the eight, 34.2 percent of the city. It runs from the Del Obispo corridor and the San Juan Creek flats up into the hills above the harbor, and holds 6,640 addresses on 274 named streets, with Santa Clara Ave at 190 and Del Obispo St at 187. The parcel record classes 2,967 lots single family and 321 multiple family, on a median lot of 7,201 square feet with a typical home of 2,100 square feet, and the county flags a private pool on 550 of the 3,437 lots.

This is where most of the city's association housing sits: 32 of the 63 associations on the city's HOA layer are inside this boundary, among them Marlborough Seaside Villas (312 addresses), Dana Woods Community Association (284 addresses), Encantimar (223 addresses), Stratford at the Pacific (197 addresses) and Waterford Pointe (194 addresses). The city maps 14 parks over 61.0 acres inside, 7.99 miles of bikeway and 31 bus stops, and Doheny State Beach meets the boundary at its southern edge. Dana Hills High stands inside the community, and Capistrano Unified feeds Richard Henry Dana Elementary, Kinoshita Elementary and John Malcom Elementary for elementary, Marco Forster Middle for middle and Dana Hills High for high.

The town people see today was drawn in the 1920s. In 1926 the Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler and General M. H. Sherman formed the Dana Point Syndicate and bought 1,388 acres, and they put Sidney H. Woodruff in charge, the Los Angeles builder who had just finished Hollywoodland. Woodruff promised paved and tree lined streets, sidewalks, water mains and sewers, and named the streets after colored lanterns because hide traders on the bluff and merchant ships in the bay were said to have signaled each other with them. In 1929 Governor Young threw a switch that lit roughly 400 ornamental lantern lights on underground wiring, which was new for the time. His centerpiece, the Dana Point Inn, got a three-story foundation and a 135 foot elevator shaft dug down to the beach before the Depression stopped it, and the project was abandoned in 1939. Thirty four of his thirty five houses are still lived in.

The harbor came later and cost the town its best wave. Work started in the summer of 1966 to an Army Corps of Engineers design, about a million tons of rock went into two breakwaters, the cove was closed off and pumped dry so the channels could be dug, and one of the two rocky headlands was demolished and used as fill. Roughly three million cubic yards of earth were moved, and the surf break known as Killer Dana went under the rocks. The harbor was dedicated on 31 July 1971. Before that Dana Point had already become the workshop of the surf industry, with Hobie Alter opening the first retail surf shop on the mainland here in February 1954 and Bruce Brown making The Endless Summer in town. Dana Point finally became a city on 1 January 1989, joining the old Woodruff village with Capistrano Beach and Monarch Beach.