Heninger Park

Heninger Park covers 242.2 acres and the county records 924 parcels and 839 site addresses inside the boundary, at a median distinct legal lot of 6,250 square feet. Nineteen named streets run 11.02 miles within it, among them Camile St, Bishop St, Richland St, Highland St, Cubbon St and Garnsey St. The zoning layer gives 124.1 acres to Specific Development No. 40, which is the historic zone itself, with 36.2 acres of open space land and 9.7 acres in the South Main Street Commercial District.

The city draws its Heninger Park historic zone across the boundary and the historic properties register lists 34 properties inside it, 11 of them landmarks and 14 keyed. The Neal Machander Tennis Center sits inside the boundary as a special use facility of 3.3 acres. Three campuses sit inside the boundary on the city school layer: Franklin Elementary, Martin R. Heninger Elementary and Santa Ana High.

Martin R. Heninger arrived in Santa Ana on May 15, 1906, to join his brother H. B. Heninger, who had come three years earlier. Martin was born in Monroe County, Missouri, on November 29, 1851, left school at seventeen when his father died to help raise seven brothers and sisters, and later built a career in the Dakotas in lumber, banking and a 450 acre farm. He sat in the constitutional convention at Sioux Falls that brought South Dakota into the Union in 1889 and was clerk of Brown County before selling his share of the Aberdeen Electric Light and Gas Company and coming to California. In 1907 the two brothers bought thirty four acres out of the Noah Palmer Ranch. It was a barley field.

The Heningers planted trees, laid sidewalks and curbs and paved streets, then bought two more pieces, one of ten acres and one of eighteen, and improved those as well. Over about twelve years they sold lots and built roughly 150 houses for their buyers, and by 1922 the neighborhood was being called the finest residence section in the city. Most of the lots were built up by 1920. The family lived first on South Broadway, then in a two story Colonial Revival house on South Birch with a wrap around porch, set on two lots with a long front lawn, where Martin and Mary Heninger raised their daughters Nora, Mabel and Mildred. Their third house was on South Ross, and Martin died there on April 1, 1922. He is buried at Fairhaven Memorial Park. The Heninger House at 602 South Birch Street is a landmark on the Santa Ana Register of Historic Properties, and the elementary school at 417 West Walnut Street carries his name.