West Orange Park Acres

West Orange Park Acres is two kinds of neighborhood inside one boundary. Across its 634 acres the general plan designates 305 acres estate residential at one to two dwellings per acre, and 148 acres are zoned single family on 40,000 square feet, which is the acre lot pattern the area is known for. Against that sit 91 acres of low medium residential, 50 acres of maximum multiple family and 30 acres of duplex, and the result is 1,511 addresses on 16.43 miles of public street with a median parcel of only 0.077 acres. Seven hundred and one of those addresses carry a unit designator, so nearly half of what stands here is attached housing.

Seventy three of the acres are designated open space and Santiago Oaks Regional Park sits 43 feet from the boundary. The city's recreation trail layer runs 1.52 miles inside it and the bike trail layer another 2.25, and the Orange Park Association builds, maintains and insures a twenty mile trail system across the wider community. Two thirds of the boundary is inside the Orange city limit and the rest is unincorporated Orange County, which decides who provides services and issues permits on a given lot. Elementary splits close to evenly on the city's parcel record, 846 parcels to Linda Vista and 752 to Esplanade, then every parcel goes to Santiago Charter Middle and El Modena High.

This is the half of Orange Park Acres that meets the city, and it holds the original tract. The ground came out of the 2,000 acre farm Ferdinand Kiefhaber bought in 1894 from what had been Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana. In 1911 the family sold to C.C. Chapman, Mervin Monnette and Frank Mead Sr, and Mead's son and Monnette formed the Orange Park Acres Corporation to develop 640 acres, drilling wells and forming a mutual water company alongside it because there was no other supply. Until after the Second World War this was citrus, avocados and egg ranches.

The street names run in three clear sets. One is the American Revolution and the colonies, with Bunker Hill, Jamestown, Portsmouth, Saratoga, Valley Forge and Yorktown all within a few blocks of each other. The second is dryland botany, a long run of native and desert plants, Saguaro, Pinyon Pine, Jack Pine, Paintbrush, Bluebonnet, Bottlebrush, Chaparral, Indigo, Jimson, Desert Peach, Tumbleweed and Wheatgrass, with Hummingbird, Quail and Partridge among them. The third is Spanish and Californian, Cabrillo for the navigator, Catalina, Navarro, Valencia for the orange and the city both, Morada meaning dwelling, and Palo Loma.