Lyon Street

Lyon Street covers 257.5 acres and is the coarsest grained neighborhood on the Santa Ana map: the county records only 98 parcels and 88 site addresses inside it, on 90 distinct legal lots, and the median lot measures 65,761 square feet, or 1.51 acres. That is the signature of apartment complexes and industrial blocks rather than house lots. Thirteen named streets run 5.46 miles within it, among them Lyon St, Mantle Ln, Zoo Ln, Warren St, Wright St and Normandy Pl.

The zoning layer splits the ground four ways: 58.3 acres of light industrial, 42.6 acres of suburban apartment, 32.6 acres of general commercial and 26.1 acres of single family residence, with 24.8 acres of open space land. The city carries part of the boundary inside its Metro East Mixed Use Overlay Zone and its adaptive reuse overlay. Two school districts share the ground: Santa Ana Unified covers 66.8 percent and Tustin Unified covers 33.2 percent.

Lyon Street is named for George B. Lyon, who lived from 1806 to 1890 and owned most of the land the street now runs through. The Tustin pioneer C. E. Utt, who reached the district in 1874, counted Lyon among the families who settled there in the two or three years after that, and a newspaper noted him putting up a two story house in Tustin in 1882. The name has nothing to do with the animals at the zoo next door, and neither does Elk Lane a few steps away, which points instead at the Santa Ana Elks Lodge.

Lyon cut his holding into building lots during the railroad boom of the 1880s. The boom collapsed, his carefully divided ground reverted to farm acreage, and there it stayed for decades. That is why the name is a Victorian one and the houses are not. The typical building inside the boundary dates to 1969, with most of it going up across the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, and the neighborhood still carries light industrial and agricultural zoning alongside its apartments. A substantial monument marks Lyon's grave at Fairhaven Memorial Park.