Fountain Park

Fountain Park holds 193 separately assessed homes on 5.02 acres, laid out on seventeen named streets, the most of the 28 Fountain Valley communities on this site. Obsidian Court carries 32 of the addresses and Pebble Court 22, with Rhodolite, Cobalt, Onyx and Royale following. The assessor records three bedrooms on 121 of the homes and two on 72, a median building area of 1,388 square feet and a median lot of 1,179 square feet.

The general plan designates the whole site Medium Density Residential, which allows up to 15 homes to the acre, and FEMA places all of it in Zone X as an area with reduced flood risk due to levee. Garden Grove Unified files this land in study area 97 of its own school locator, which feeds Thomas Paine Elementary, Sarah McGarvin Intermediate and La Quinta High.

The street list here reads like a mineral cabinet. Cobalt, Obsidian, Onyx, Rhodolite, Calera and Pebble run through 193 homes on five acres at the north end of the city, off Edinger Avenue, built in 1973 and 1974. Calera is the Spanish word for a limekiln. The children here go to Garden Grove Unified rather than the Fountain Valley district, which is the giveaway that this pocket sits right on the city's northern seam.

Edinger is the north edge of Mile Square, and Mile Square is exactly what its name says. In 1942 the Navy bought 640 acres of farmland here and laid out three runways in a triangle as the Mile Square Naval Outlying Landing Field, an auxiliary to the air station at Los Alamitos where carrier pilots practiced deck landings. The county began leasing the perimeter for parkland in March 1967 while the Navy was still flying the middle, opened the first 85 acres in 1970, and pushed the park north to Edinger in 1976. Military use ended in 1974.