Bristol / Warner

Bristol / Warner covers 93.3 acres and the county records 332 parcels and 329 site addresses inside the boundary, at a median distinct legal lot of 6,600 square feet. Fifteen named streets run 3.63 miles within it, and five of them carry saints: Saint Andrew Pl, Saint Anne Pl and Saint Gertrude Pl sit between Anahurst Pl, Camden Pl, Carlton Pl and Glenwood Pl.

The zoning layer gives 45.8 acres to single family residence and 13.4 acres to general commercial along Bristol Street, with 4.3 acres of multiple family residence and 1.9 acres inside the Bristol Street Corridor Specific Plan. The city park and open space layers place no facility inside the boundary. Santa Ana Unified covers all of it, with Jefferson Elementary 0.25 miles away and Valley High 0.49 miles away.

This neighborhood is named for its crossroads. Bristol was called Newport Road until at least 1891 and was Bristol Street by 1894, after Henry Richard Bristol, an Illinois pharmacist who arrived in Santa Ana in 1882, farmed for a few years, then went back to the drug trade. In 1888 he and A. R. Rowley opened the Bristol and Rowley Drug Store and later put up a two story building at Fourth and Main that people called the Bristol and Rowley Block. He sold out in the early 1910s for his health and finished his life growing Valencia oranges in the San Fernando Valley. Why a major county road was named for a druggist a dozen years off the train is still an open question among local historians.

The ground underneath is a corner of one of the county's biggest land deals. When the courts divided Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana in 1868, splitting the old Yorba grant into 72 parcels, James McFadden took 4,756 acres, and Warner Avenue between the Santa Ana River and the Costa Mesa Freeway marks the northern edge of what he got. That land stayed in crops for another eighty years. The houses standing here now went up in the 1950s, a few hundred of them, on a handful of streets that end rather than continue.