Sycamore Crossing

Sycamore Crossing is a tight grid, 161 addresses on 18 acres across 207 recorded parcels. It was approved as a gated community of 160 detached houses on private streets with a communal recreation area holding a swimming pool, a cabana and a tot lot, on pads running from about 3,070 to 7,210 square feet and averaging around 3,700. The median parcel measures 0.039 acres and the general plan designates the whole boundary low medium residential. The street names run to a single register: Autumn Ridge, Cinnamon, Evergreen, Firwood, Harvest, Marigold, Sedona, Summerfield and Sunflower.

The community sits on the north bank of Santiago Creek between Tustin Street and Rosewood Avenue, and the creek channel itself was offered in fee to the Orange County Flood Control District when the tract was recorded. The whole of the boundary falls inside the City of Orange Neighborhood Preservation District, and the city levies a landscape maintenance assessment district named Sycamore Crossing across it. None of the addresses carries a unit designator, so the housing is detached despite the lot sizes. Every parcel here is assigned to Palmyra GATE Magnet for elementary, Yorba Middle and Orange High.

The name is not decoration. This sits on the north bank of Santiago Creek, which the Portola expedition named in 1769 for the apostle Santiago el Mayor and whose canyon the Spanish called Canada de Madera, timber canyon, for the sycamores and live oaks growing along it. The Tongva and Acjachemen lived in this watershed for thousands of years on the acorns and the water, and Jose Pablo Grijalva, a Spanish soldier, built an adobe beside the creek in 1796. The land here is part of what was later called the A.B. Chapman Tract, named for the Los Angeles attorney whose fee in the breakup of Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana became the city of Orange.

An earlier development on this ground, built in the mid 1970s, was razed because its grading was flawed. Van Daele Development Corp of Riverside then took the site detached and gated, 160 houses on about eighteen acres with private streets and a shared recreation area, approved by the city council in February 1995. The streets were named for the season the fruit came in: Harvest, Autumn Ridge, Summerfield, Evergreen, Firwood, Cinnamon, Marigold and Sunflower, with Sedona and Atwood among them.