Windwood

Windwood occupies 23.3 acres off Orangethorpe Avenue in north Anaheim, on eight streets over six tenths of a mile: Candlewood, Cedar Glen, Oak Knoll, Pine Ridge, Rainwood, Snow Wood and Willow Woods. The whole of it stands on a single parcel of 200,734 square feet, and against that one parcel the city's address layer records 407 addresses, 327 of which carry a unit designator, so the housing here is attached and shares its ground entirely.

The city's footprint layer measures 75 buildings inside the boundary, all of them typed as detached dwellings. The general plan designates the whole 23.3 acres Residential Low Medium at up to 18 homes to the acre, and 18.8 acres are zoned Multiple-Family Residential at a floor of 2,400 square feet of lot area per unit. Unusually for this section, 1.5 acres of the boundary fall in flood zone AH, with the rest in the 0.2 percent annual chance zone. Windwood lies in ZIP 92807 and sits in Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School District.

Citrus is where Orangethorpe gets its name, and citrus gave way to houses. Anaheim had been founded downriver in 1857 by fifty German families who paid two dollars an acre for 1,165 acres of the Ontiveros rancho and named the place by joining Ana, for the river, to heim, the German word for home. They made it the largest wine producer in California for twenty five years until a vine disease wiped out every vineyard in 1884, and they replanted in oranges, lemons and walnuts. Those groves lasted until the 1950s and 1960s, when Disneyland and the freeways took the county in one generation.

Windwood dates from 1973, all of it in the one year, three hundred and twenty seven spaces on twenty three acres. Its streets are named for trees and the shade under them: Candlewood, Cedar Glenn, Oak Knoll, Pine Ridge, Willow Woods, Rainwood and Snow Wood. Orangethorpe runs along the front and is the only street here that remembers what actually grew on this ground.