Trinidad Island

Trinidad Island covers 88.1 acres measured against the city's published boundary, and it is the largest of the Harbour's island communities on the city register. The address layer records 361 addresses inside it, 336 typed residential, on 18 named streets running to 2.49 miles. Only one address in the whole boundary carries a unit designator, so the housing is detached almost without exception, and the assessor classes all 336 as single-family residential. Four pieces of city park land sit inside the line: Conrad Park at 2.71 acres, Trinidad Park at 0.75, French Park at 0.33 and Prince Park at 0.22.

The homes are large and the lots are not. The assessor's median building here is 3,186 square feet against a median lot of 6,112, and 285 of the dated structures are two story. Two hundred and four of the 336 homes carry a pool on the assessor record. The whole boundary sits inside the city's Coastal Zone appeal jurisdiction, in appeal zone 1, and city zoning reads 58.4 percent residential low density with 22.3 percent open space, the open space being water. The city bus stop layer records no stop inside the boundary or within 250 meters of it.

Trinidad Island is one of the five islands dredged out of the marsh that became Huntington Harbour. None of this was land until the 1960s. The Lomita Gun Club, founded in 1903, sat on these sloughs, and a dozen more duck clubs worked the surrounding wetland before Lewis W. Douglas Jr. of Christiana Oil Corporation began planning a residential marina here in 1960 and brought in the architect William L. Pereira to lay it out. Construction started in 1963, the channels were cut 15 to 20 feet deep, and the material that came up out of them was shaped into Admiralty, Davenport, Gilbert, Humboldt and Trinidad.

Trinidad was the late one. Of its 336 homes, 279 date to the 1970s, with the first of them finished in 1976, more than a decade after the first island lots went on the market. That timing shows in the plan, which is looser and greener than the earliest harbor blocks, and it shows in the street names, which read like a list of boats rather than a list of colleges. Venture, Sagamore, Seascape, Aquarius, Typhoon, Sundancer, Ragtime, Escapade, Quickstep and Running Tide all sit within a few blocks of each other.