Westbluff

Westbluff covers 77.1 acres in northwest Fullerton with 362 addresses on 384 parcels and 2.49 miles of private street. Nineteen street names serve it and most of them read as English place names: Ashton, Aubrey, Awlsbury, Brighton, Camden, Cranbrook, Foxborough, Newcastle, Northampton, Roxbury, Summersworth and Wyckersham among them.

The city zones 75.07 acres PRD Planned Residential Development, with 1.1 acres of public land and 0.63 acres of R-1-7.2 one-family ground, and the general plan gives 71.69 acres to Low-Density Residential and 1.1 to parks and recreation. Emery Park is at 1201 Sunny Ridge Drive on 8.23 acres, open since 1980, with picnic tables and a playground. Robert C. Fisler Elementary is 0.57 miles out with 892 students in grades K through 8, D. Russell Parks Junior High 1.11 miles at 854 and Sunny Hills High 0.96 miles at 2,337.

Westbluff is one of the larger single owner developments in west Fullerton, seventy seven acres of detached houses put up by William Lyon during the 1970s. The association counts 359 homes and dates its own founding to 1974. Lyon was one of the big Southern California homebuilders of that era, and the plan here is his signature: houses on modest lots, with the space that would have been back yard given over instead to shared greenbelt, recreation and walking routes that the association still maintains.

The street signs are a roll call of the American and English east: Williamsburg, Brighton, Camden, Roxbury, Northampton, Newcastle, Wheaton, Ashton and Wyckersham, with a single Seville thrown in. That naming is as much a period marker as the floor plans. A buyer walking these blocks in 1975 was being sold an idea of settled, older places, a long way from the citrus and oil country the ground had actually been.