Downtown

Downtown covers 134.2 acres and sits differently on the assessor roll from the rest of the city: the county records only 161 parcels and 140 site addresses inside it, on 158 distinct legal lots, because the ground is carried in large blocks rather than house lots. Fifteen named streets run 4.6 miles within it, First through Fifth Streets crossing Main St, Broadway, Sycamore St, Birch St and Ross St. The zoning layer gives 73.4 acres to Specific Development No. 84 and the general plan carries 45.6 acres as institutional and 29 acres as district center.

Three city facilities sit inside the boundary: Birch Park at 2.4 acres with a senior center, a formal garden, fitness equipment and a shuffleboard court, the Civic Center plaza at 4.9 acres and Sasscer Park at 0.9 acres. The city draws its Downtown historic district across the boundary and the historic properties register lists 54 inside it, 15 of them landmarks. Nova Academy Early College High sits inside the boundary and Santa Ana Unified covers all of it.

Santa Ana begins on this ground. William H. Spurgeon, a Kentuckian, bought 74.25 acres from Jacob Ross on October 27, 1869 for $594, then hired George Wright to lay out a townsite of 24 square blocks, mapped on December 13, 1870 and running from First Street north to Seventh and from Broadway east to the street that still carries Spurgeon's name. Ross Street remembers the family that arrived first. Jacob Ross Sr. crossed the country in an 87 wagon train, bought his share of Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana on May 28, 1868 for $1,750, and cleared cactus and mustard off it before selling much of it to Spurgeon. The town incorporated in 1886 with about 2,000 residents and was chosen as the seat of the new Orange County in 1889, after years of rivalry with Anaheim over where the county line and its center should fall.

The county then built to match. The Old Orange County Courthouse opened in 1901, designed by C. L. Strange in Richardson Romanesque with Arizona red sandstone walls set on a Temecula granite base. It was closed in 1979 as seismically unsafe, restored, and now serves as the Orange County History Center. The block around Fourth Street went up in the same confident years. The third Spurgeon Building went up in 1913 on the site of the 1882 one, and its clock tower is still the most recognizable thing on the skyline. The Yost Theater opened in June of that same year, designed by Frederick Eley for vaudeville and silent pictures, and after Luis Olivos leased it in 1950 it became a house for Mexican cinema where Antonio Aguilar and Vicente Fernandez performed.