Santa Ana Memorial Park

Santa Ana Memorial Park covers 486 acres and the county records 1,996 parcels and 1,989 site addresses inside the boundary, at a median distinct legal lot of 6,250 square feet. Thirty two named streets run 17.26 miles within it, among them Occidental St, Commercial St, Berkeley St, Magnolia Ave, Anahurst Pl, Camden Pl, Carlton Pl and Glenwood Pl. The zoning layer gives 254.9 acres to single family residence and 48.8 acres to open space land, with 22.6 acres of two family residence and 14 acres in the South Main Street Commercial District.

Memorial Park sits inside the boundary at 16.3 acres, and the city records a municipal pool, a recreation center, a stage amphitheater, a ball diamond, handball and volleyball courts, fitness equipment, a concession stand, public art and a playground on it. Three campuses sit inside the boundary on the city school layer, Mater Dei High School, Manuel Esqueda K-8 School and George Washington Elementary, and Santa Ana Unified covers all of the ground.

The neighborhood is named for the park at its center, and the park is named for the dead. The city set aside the ground in May 1950 as a living memorial to the people who had carried the fight for democracy, and the sixteen acres at 2102 S. Flower Street were dedicated in May 1959 by Earl Warren, the former governor of California. The swimming pool and the community center that generations of south Santa Ana learned to swim in date from 1956. The city broke ground on a new aquatics center in 2025 to replace them.

The blocks themselves are older than the park. Most were laid out and built between about 1907 and the early 1950s, on the south side of downtown, and the street names record two different eras of ambition. Berkeley, Stanford, Occidental, Pomona and Lowell run in a row of college names. A block away, Saint Anne Place carries the name the Portola expedition left on this valley in 1769. This was the working end of town: the Holly Sugar factory on Dyer Road opened in 1912 and came down in 1983, and the Main Street frontage here got an arch in 2007 reading Historic South Main Business District.