Cherokee Mobile Garden

Cherokee Mobile Garden occupies 30.7 acres on Beach Boulevard in west Anaheim. What sets it apart from every other community in this section is how the ground is held: the county assessor records three parcels inside the boundary, two of them typed as mobile home park and one unclassified, with a median parcel area of 295,275 square feet, close to seven acres. Against those three parcels the city's address layer records 310 addresses, 306 of which carry a unit designator, so the addresses are spaces within the park rather than separate lots.

The city's street layer runs 2.1 miles inside the boundary and its address layer names a single street, Beach. The general plan designates 30.6 of the 30.7 acres Residential Low Medium at up to 18 homes to the acre, and the whole boundary is zoned under the Beach Boulevard Specific Plan. Everything falls in ZIP 92804 and in the 0.2 percent annual chance flood zone. Anaheim Union High School District serves the upper grades here and Centralia Elementary School District the lower.

This ground stayed groves until Disneyland. The park opened on 17 July 1955, and in the six years that followed the population of Anaheim went from roughly fourteen thousand people to a hundred and four thousand. The city annexed 1,493 acres in 1953, another 2,700 in 1954 and 3,300 more in 1955, quadrupled in size over the decade and grew faster than any city in the nation. Before 1960 this ground was still orange trees; by 1970 the groves out here were gone and the land was worth ten times what it had been in 1955.

Cherokee Mobile Garden is one of the answers west Anaheim gave to that. It runs three hundred and ten spaces over thirty acres fronting Beach Boulevard, the old state Highway 39, on ground that was orchard within living memory of some of the people still parked on it. A mobile home community was the way a working household bought into a boom town at boom prices, and the whole of this boundary carries a single Beach Boulevard address rather than a street grid of its own.