Willard

Willard covers 145.5 acres and the county records 367 parcels and 357 site addresses inside the boundary, on 362 distinct legal lots at a median of 7,535 square feet. Sixteen named streets run 5.74 miles within it, among them Halesworth St, Riverine Ave, Lime St, Durant St, Garnsey St and Van Ness Ave. The zoning layer gives 31.5 acres to multiple family residence, 27.2 acres to professional and 20.4 acres to two family residence, with 14.4 acres inside the Midtown Specific Plan.

Fourteen properties inside the boundary sit on the city historic register, four of them landmarks, and the list runs to apartment buildings as well as houses: the Deluxe Apartments, the El Patio Real Apartments and La Casa del Rey Apartments sit alongside the Granville Spurgeon House and the Armstrong House. Willard Intermediate sits inside the boundary with its 4.85 acre joint use field, and Santa Ana Unified covers all of the ground.

Willard is named for its school, and the school is named for Frances E. Willard, the American educator, temperance reformer and suffragist whose campaigning fed into the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Amendments. Santa Ana's first junior high opened in 1912 at Ninth and Main, in a building that had served as the high school from 1900, and it took Willard's name in 1923.

The neighborhood is older than any school building standing on it. Spurgeon's original plan of 1870 stopped at Seventh Street, and Willard is part of what grew north of that line as the town spread up Broadway, Ross and Flower in a run of small separate additions rather than one subdivision. Houses here go back to the 1890s and 1900s, with 1910s and 1920s work behind them and infill from the 1940s through the 1980s filling the gaps, which is why a walk of three blocks can cross ninety years of building.