Edwards Central Park

Edwards Central Park covers 13.2 acres measured against the city's published boundary and sits entirely inside the Ellis-Goldenwest Specific Plan area. The address layer records 56 addresses inside the line and types 38 as residential, all classed single-family by the assessor with no unit designators. Three named streets serve them across just 0.31 miles, the shortest street network on the register, and all three are horse names: Silverspur Lane, Polo Circle and Horseshoe Lane. The boundary fills 100.0 percent of its own convex hull.

The homes and lots are both large. The assessor's median building is 4,093 square feet with a tenth to ninetieth percentile band of 3,932 to 5,540, on a median lot of 9,471 square feet, and 28 of the 38 dwellings carry a pool, close to three in four. City zoning reads the whole boundary as specific plan designation and the general plan designates 86.2 percent of it residential low density. The community sits outside the Coastal Zone appeal jurisdiction, and Huntington Central Park West and the county's Harriett M. Wieder Regional Park both lie within 250 meters.

The river was killed on purpose. The Bolsa Chica Gun Club, whose members included Henry Huntington and Edward Doheny, hired Tom Talbert to dam the Freeman. The dam was finished around January 1900, cost 10,000 dollars, and stood fifty feet wide and twenty feet above the water line. Celery farmers downstream tore down fences over it, in an episode the Anaheim Gazette called the Uprising of the Webfeet, and the case ran for years until the state supreme court ruled in 1907 that the Freeman was a drainage ditch rather than a navigable stream, so the club could keep its dam. A trace of the river's path can still be found running through the Shipley Nature Center in the park.

The houses came ninety years later. All 38 of them were built between 1990 and 1992 on about 13 acres, a small pocket rather than a tract. The three streets, Silverspur Lane, Polo Circle and Horseshoe Lane, point at the equestrian ground that has long operated on this side of Central Park, and they are the reason the neighborhood reads as country rather than suburb from the moment you turn in.