Amerige Heights

Amerige Heights is the largest of the fifty Fullerton neighborhoods on this site at 279.6 acres, and the city governs it under a specific plan written for it alone. The zoning layer gives 260.56 acres the Amerige Heights SPD designation and the general plan matches it with the Amerige Heights Specific Plan. Inside are 1,610 addresses on 955 parcels, 279 of those addresses carrying a unit number, spread across 75 named streets and 8.73 miles of private street.

Bastanchury Park sits at 1717 West Bastanchury Road on 10.8 acres, open since 2005, with baseball and softball, basketball, a playground, recreation trails and restrooms. Robert C. Fisler Elementary stands inside the boundary itself, a K through 8 campus of 892 students, and Sunny Hills High is 0.08 miles out with 2,337. D. Russell Parks Junior High is 0.25 miles away and Fern Drive Elementary 0.22, all of them in Fullerton Elementary and Fullerton Joint Union High.

In 1957 Hughes Aircraft put its Ground Systems Group on hundreds of acres of orange grove in the gently sloping northwest corner of the city, and for the next four decades the plant built ground radar for the United States and for foreign militaries. It looked more like a college campus than a factory, with broad lawns and stands of tall trees. Employment peaked at 15,000 people. Fullerton's population had already quadrupled during Hughes's first decade, from 13,958 in 1950 to 56,180 in 1960.

SunCal bought the 293 acre campus at Gilbert Street and Malvern Avenue and rebuilt the whole thing between 2001 and 2004 around a plan for 1,250 houses in seven architectural styles, apartments, a ten acre school site and a shopping center anchored by Target and Albertsons. More than half the houses were drawn with a porch on the front and the garage at the back. Robert C. Fisler School opened inside the community on Starbuck Street. The street names are the best part of the place, because they are Fullerton people. Hetebrink is John Hetebrink, an early settler who farmed tomatoes, walnuts and citrus on 40 acres north of Chapman Avenue and whose 1914 house still stands on East Chapman.