Summer Lane

Summer Lane covers 46.1 acres measured against the city's published boundary, of which 92.2 percent sits inside the Meadowlark Specific Plan area. The address layer records 367 addresses inside the line and types 313 as residential, all of them classed by the assessor as single-family residential with no unit designators anywhere in the community. Twenty-six named streets serve those 313 homes across 2.27 miles, which is the densest street naming of any community on this register: one street name for every twelve homes.

City zoning reads 92.2 percent specific plan designation because the plan governs in place of base zoning, and the general plan designates 70.1 percent of the ground residential medium density. The assessor's median building is 2,287 square feet with a tenth to ninetieth percentile band of 1,726 to 2,903, on a median lot of 3,751 square feet, and 27 homes carry a pool. The whole community sits outside the Coastal Zone appeal jurisdiction. Streets run to a garden vocabulary, among them Acorn, Harvest, Primrose, Foxglove, Clovergreen and Ashwood.

This corner of north Huntington Beach was farm ground for a long time before it was anything else. From the 1890s through about 1910 the peatlands around here were one of the country's top producers of celery, helped along by cool salty sea breezes, artesian wells and rich soil. David E. Smeltzer had established celery as a serious Orange County crop in 1891, and a small town called Smeltzer grew up around his packing houses near what is now Gothard Street and Edinger Avenue. A celery blight arriving around 1905 to 1908 took the profit out of it, and farmers moved to sugar beets and winter cabbage.

Summer Lane is a late arrival to all of it. All 313 of its homes were finished in 2000 and 2001 on about 46 acres, across five recorded tracts. The streets are gentle and English sounding, Acorn, Chadwick, Pembrook, Rosecrest, Brightfield and Doverton, and they sit on land that grew celery and then carried Meadowlark Airport, which operated here from the 1940s until it closed in 1989.