Deerfield

Deerfield is a village the City of Irvine publishes on its own map, OBJECTID 46 in the Villages layer, enclosing about 257 acres or 0.40 square miles. It sits entirely inside Planning Area 11, which the city labels El Camino Real, and it shares an edge with Walnut, The Ranch, Woodbridge and El Camino Real without overlapping any of them. The city's address layer holds 1,282 address points inside the line, 1,255 of them flagged residential, across 48 street names, and the parcel layer puts 700 parcels inside carrying fifteen separate recorded tract identifiers. Deerfield is a village assembled from fifteen recorded maps, so the governing documents that apply to one address will not describe another, and four master associations cover 69 percent of the ground between them: Deerfield Community Assn. at 48.2 percent, Fawn Glen and Doe Trail Condos at 7.3 percent each and Deerfield Apts. at 6.1 percent.

One City of Irvine park stands inside the village, and it is the busiest ten acres here. Deerfield Community Park runs about 10.1 acres at 55 Deerwood West, open 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily, with four lighted tennis courts, two lighted sand volleyball courts, two racquetball courts, a disc golf course, a fitness par course, two children's play areas, a Little Free Library, four barbecues and a reservable picnic shelter, alongside the Deerfield Community Center and its 2,209 square foot multipurpose room, kitchen and craft room. About 3.22 miles of the city bikeway network run inside the boundary, 0.83 of them off street. The village feeds Irvine Unified with two of its three campuses standing inside the line: Deerfield Elementary at 2 Deerfield Avenue, Venado Middle at 4 Deerfield Avenue, then Irvine High on Walnut Avenue.

The ground under Deerfield was ranch before it was anything else. James Irvine and his partners assembled about 110,000 acres out of three Spanish and Mexican land grants between 1864 and 1878, and his son incorporated The Irvine Company in 1894 and turned the operation toward field crops, olives and citrus; by 1918 sixty thousand acres of the ranch were in lima beans. Deerfield is not one of the villages that made the city. The City's own history names Turtle Rock, University Park, Culverdale, the Ranch and Walnut as the villages completed by 1970, and it was the residents of those five who voted on 28 December 1971 to incorporate a city considerably larger than the town of 50,000 that William Pereira and Irvine Company planner Raymond Watson had drawn. Deerfield went up immediately after that vote, through the middle of the 1970s, and was finished by 1976.

It is a compact demonstration of the argument Pereira was making. The plan set villages between six-lane arterial roads and kept the traffic on the outside, and Deerfield takes that to its conclusion: the park sits in the middle, the residential streets end at a park, a trail or a school instead of carrying anyone through, and a child can walk to class without crossing an arterial. Ten acres at 55 Deerwood West are what the whole village is arranged around, now holding four lighted tennis courts, two sand volleyball courts, racquetball, a disc golf course, two play areas and the Deerfield Community Center. Neighborhood guides describe the resulting street pattern as a pinwheel, and the houses that came with it are recognizably of their moment: low rooflines, earth-tone stucco, sunken living rooms, atriums.