French Court

French Court covers 65.5 acres and the county records 165 parcels and 164 site addresses inside the boundary, at a median distinct legal lot of 7,215 square feet. Twelve named streets run 3.28 miles within it, among them French St, Dresser St, Lacy St, Bush St, Poinsettia St and Penn Way. The zoning layer gives 17.1 acres to multiple family residence and 12.5 acres to the Midtown Specific Plan, with 4.8 acres carried as open space land.

The city carries the boundary inside its Midtown Plan and its adaptive reuse overlay. Twenty properties inside the boundary sit on the city historic register, two of them landmarks and nine keyed, among them the Fitton House, the Galloway House and the Eden-Jacobs House. Wallace R. Davis Elementary sits inside the boundary and Santa Ana Unified covers all of it.

French Court takes its name from North French Street, which runs the length of it, and the street carries the name of one of the men who built Santa Ana. C. E. French managed the Irvine Ranch and was responsible for the original Irvine family ranch house in 1876. He served as the town's postmaster under four presidents, handled real estate and banking, promoted the street railways and took an active part in securing the main line of the Santa Fe Railroad through Santa Ana. In 1878 he donated office space and a cabinet for books to get the Santa Ana Public Library Association started, and he was elected to the first public library board in 1891. In 1899 he built the Grand Opera House block, one of the largest in the city. French Street and French Park were named for him and his family.

The neighborhood picks up where the French Park blocks end and runs north along French Street from Tenth up to Seventeenth, on ground that was the northeast edge of town when Santa Ana was still growing out from the townsite William Spurgeon laid out in 1869 and the county seat it became in 1889. Its landmark is impossible to miss. The Santa Ana Water Tower stands at 517 East Fourteenth Street, at the French Street end of the neighborhood, and it is a recognizable symbol of the city, a common sight for anyone passing through on Interstate 5. Built in 1928, it rises 153 feet and was designed to hold a million gallons, more than enough water for the 30,000 people who lived in Santa Ana at the time. It is still in service today, holding upward of 800,000 gallons for a city more than ten times that size.