Southwest Stanton

Southwest Stanton is zone STN04 on the Orange County Fire Authority's published layer, one of four compass quadrants drawn across the city for emergency management, and it is the largest of the four by population and by homes: the zone record carries 3,749 addresses and an estimated 9,372 residents, and the county assessor lists 1,841 parcels inside its 560.7 acres. Some 20.9 miles of street run through it across 154 named streets, more than any other quadrant, in two obvious sets: a row of Santa names, Barbara, Catalina, Cruz, Gertrudes, Maria, Monica, Paula, Rita and Rosalia, and a run of brooks, from Clearbrook and Crestbrook through Meadowbrook, Northbrook and Springbrook.

Of the homes the assessor gives a bedroom count, 863 carry three bedrooms, 359 carry four and 254 carry two, and 1,755 buildings stand on 141.2 acres of footprint. Stanton Park at 11111 Cedar Street covers 5.5 acres with a fitness court, a playground structure, exercise equipment and open green space, and the city's own seat is in this quadrant: the Stanton Civic Center at 7800 Katella Avenue holds the Community Services Department front counter, staff offices and a banquet hall, with the Stanton Family Resource Center at 11822 Santa Paula Street carrying free family programs and a renovated playground. The federal flood layer places 555.3 acres in zone X and 5.3 in zone A. Garden Grove Unified covers 557.8 of the acres, and its locator splits the high school assignment between Pacifica High, enrolling 1,634, on 71.0 percent of the quadrant and Rancho Alamitos High, enrolling 1,439, on 28.5, with Alamitos Intermediate at 581 covering 84.0 percent and Wakeham and Bryant elementaries at 307 and 571 students splitting the ground almost evenly.

In 1911 Anaheim proposed putting a sewage farm on the J. M. Gilbert Ranch southwest of town, and the ranchers who would have had to live beside it fought it. Philip A. Stanton, a former Speaker of the California State Assembly, told them the surest defense was to become a city, and on 23 May 1911 the vote carried 76 to 65. The new municipality covered about ten square miles with some 750 residents, the largest in Orange County by area, and one of its first acts was an ordinance banning sewer farms outright. With the threat gone the city had little left to do, and the voters chose to give up their charter so the state could build roads through the territory. The clerk filed the papers on 8 August 1924. Stanton did not become a city again until 4 June 1956, when annexation by its neighbors became the new threat. The civic center of the modern city is in this quarter, on Katella Avenue, along with the Family Resource Center on Santa Paula Street. Roughly 895 of the homes here went up in the 1950s and another 518 in the 1970s, which makes this the largest and the earliest built out of Stanton's four quarters.

The street names are worth slowing down for. One long run carries the surnames of Civil War generals from both armies, Grant and Sherman and Custer on one side, Hood and Ewell and Bragg and Hardee on the other, with Lincoln Way among them. A second run is a set of California saints and rancho names, Santa Barbara, Santa Catalina, Santa Cruz, Santa Gertrudes, Santa Maria, Santa Monica, Santa Paula, Santa Rita and Santa Rosalia. A third is English, with Ascot, Belgrave, Camden, Carlton, Dover, Hampton, Kent, Roxbury, Windemere and Yorkshire. And a fourth, the 1970s blocks, is built entirely out of brooks and dales: Clearbrook, Meadowbrook, Northbrook, Springbrook, Westbrook, Ferndale, Glendale, Lansdale and Ramsdale. Stanton Park on Cedar Street is the neighborhood green, and Hollenbeck Park at Cerritos Avenue is a short walk beyond it.