Tiburon Apartments

Tiburon Apartments holds 143 addresses on 6.47 acres, with 141 separately assessed, on fourteen streets that split neatly between gemstones and mountains. Amethyst carries 35 of the addresses, Turquoise 14, Jade nine, Ruby seven, Diamond seven and Zircon six, while Mt Carmel, Mt Pico, Mt Kenya, Mt Lister, Mt Musala, Mt Robert, Mt Erebus and Mt Olancha carry the rest. The assessor records three bedrooms on 113 of the homes, four on 23 and two on five, with a median building area of 1,656 square feet on a median lot of 1,900 square feet.

The general plan designates the whole site Medium Density Residential, which allows up to 15 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.

Tiburon is Spanish for shark, and whoever named the streets inside was clearly enjoying themselves. Six of the fourteen are gemstones: Amethyst, Diamond, Jade, Ruby, Turquoise and Zircon. The other eight are mountains, and not local ones. Mount Kenya sits on the equator in Africa, Musala is the highest peak in Bulgaria and in the whole Balkan Peninsula and takes its name through Ottoman Turkish from an Arabic phrase meaning near God, and Erebus and Lister are both in Antarctica, Erebus being the southernmost active volcano on earth, named in 1841 by Sir James Clark Ross after his ship. There are 143 homes on six and a half acres, built in 1972.

The farm town was Talbert, which became Fountain Valley when it incorporated in 1957 and took its name from artesian water that would rise out of a driven pipe. The first tract of houses was finished in 1963, the population was near 32,000 by 1970, and by 1980 it had passed 55,000.