Pacific Park

Pacific Park covers 329.7 acres and the county records 1,328 parcels and 1,305 site addresses inside the boundary, at a median distinct legal lot of 6,341 square feet. Twenty six named streets run 16.01 miles within it, among them Beverly Pl, Harwood Pl, Hunter Ave, Kilson Dr, Camile St, Halladay St and Grant St. The zoning layer gives 130.2 acres to single family residence, 35.8 acres to multiple family residence and 24.2 acres to two family residence, with 11.4 acres in the South Main Street Commercial District.

Pacific Electric Park sits inside the boundary at 1.4 acres, and the city records a community garden, a stage amphitheater, fitness equipment, a picnic area, a shade shelter, a bridge and a playground on it, with Roosevelt Community Center Park adding 1.54 acres on the open space layer. Twenty properties inside the boundary sit on the city historic register, eight of them landmarks. Three campuses sit inside the boundary, Roosevelt-Walker Academy, Edward B. Cole Sr. Academy and Circulos at ALA High School.

In 1923 a retired railroad man bought a walnut grove here and made a neighborhood out of it. George Elmer Kilson was born in Iowa in 1857 to Norwegian immigrant parents, reached California on 7 February 1882 and spent more than thirty years as a telegraph operator and ticket agent for the Southern Pacific at Saticoy before retiring in 1916. He moved his family to Santa Ana by 1920 to get into the land boom. The grove he bought ran from McFadden Avenue on the south to about the line of East Wisteria Place on the north, with Halladay Street on the east and Oak Street on the west, and he subdivided it as Kilson Square with the Guaranty Finance Company. Sales opened in 1924. At least eighteen houses went up on speculation, ten of them by a local contractor named Verne E. Maynard, and the sales pitch pointed out that most lots came with four mature walnut trees, which might produce enough nuts to pay the interest and the taxes. Kilson Drive still carries his name, and Wisteria, Normandy and Beverly Places still run through the old grove.

This is old housing stock by Santa Ana standards. Of the 1,251 homes here with a known build year, 433 date to the 1920s and the typical one to 1931. Twenty properties inside the neighborhood sit on the city's Register of Historic Properties, among them the Cypress Fire Station at 625 South Cypress Avenue, put up in 1928 and left empty for years until the city council voted in 2022 to spend a million dollars turning it into a Police Athletic and Activity League center for young people and seniors. The monument signs at the neighborhood entrances went up in 1983, and when the refurbished signs were unveiled in March 2024 the man who set the decorative rock and the wrought iron was Luis Garcia, a neighbor who works for the company that built the originals.