Galleria Apartments

Galleria Apartments occupies 7.06 acres fronting Harbor Boulevard, and all 182 of its addresses sit on that one street. The county assesses the property as a single land parcel of 307,705 square feet with about 138,166 square feet of building on it, so the homes are not separately assessed. The city's landscape survey maps two swimming pools inside the boundary.

The general plan designates the whole property High Density Residential, which allows 15 to 30 homes to the acre, and FEMA places all of it in Zone X as an area with reduced flood risk due to levee. Garden Grove Unified files this land in study area 104A of its own school locator, which feeds Mamie L. Northcutt Elementary, Stephen R. Fitz Intermediate and Los Amigos High.

A single address on Harbor Boulevard covering 182 homes across seven acres, with two pools, built in 1987. Harbor is the long north south spine that runs the length of Orange County, and this stands on the eastern side of Fountain Valley where the city meets it. The name is Italian, borrowed from the covered shopping arcade, and by 1987 it was the sort of name apartment builders reached for.

None of it could be safely built on until the river was tamed. The Santa Ana flooded in 1938, put parts of Anaheim and Orange under as much as four feet of water and killed close to sixty people, and the Army Corps responded with Prado Dam in 1941 and a concrete channel that carries the lower river past Fountain Valley to the sea. The city incorporated in 1957, held the builders off until its master plan was done, and was largely complete by the time this went up.