Great Park

Great Park Neighborhoods runs to roughly 2,100 acres of the former Marine Corps Air Station El Toro, wrapped around the Orange County Great Park, a public city park of about 1,300 acres that the developer expects to finish at nearly twice the size of New York's Central Park. The masterplan is entitled for as many as 11,800 homesites and about 4.1 million square feet of commercial space, and it is still being built. Every owner in Beacon Park, Cadence Park, Novel Park, Parasol Park, Pavilion Park, Rise Park, Solis Park and Luna Park belongs to the Great Park Neighborhoods Community Association, managed by FirstService Residential from an office at 120 Newington, and a home that also sits inside a sub-association pays a second assessment on top of that, for which no figure is published.

The association's facilities are for residents only and sit across the village rather than in one clubhouse. Eight pool facilities are operated under the master association, among them a 50 meter lap pool at Rise Pool and, at The Pools on Newington, a 25 yard competition pool alongside a resort pool, three jacuzzis, a wader pool and cabanas. Ten indoor and outdoor spaces can be reserved for a nominal fee, pool use is capped at five guests per household and pool parties are not permitted. Over the fence, the public Great Park adds a 194-acre sports complex with 24 soccer and lacrosse fields, a championship soccer stadium seating 2,500, 25 tennis courts, four lighted basketball courts and a baseball and softball complex. Three Irvine Unified K-8 campuses stand inside the village, Beacon Park at 200 Cultivate, Cadence Park at 750 Benchmark and Solis Park at 101 Abacus, and all three feed Portola High, which graduates 94.6 percent of its students.

This is the piece of the Irvine Ranch the Marine Corps took. The ranch was assembled from Spanish and Mexican land grants beginning in 1864, and by the early twentieth century James Irvine's fields were the top producer of lima beans in the world. In May 1942 Lieutenant Colonel William Fox was looking for West Coast sites for Marine air stations and settled on Irvine's land, which held what the Corps called the largest lima bean field in North America. The Marines paid Irvine 100,000 dollars for 4,000 acres, construction began in August 1942, and Marine Corps Air Station El Toro was commissioned on 17 March 1943. It became a permanent master jet base by 1950 and the front door to the Pacific for Marines going to Korea and Vietnam. It was also the airfield for Richard Nixon's Western White House in San Clemente, and after he resigned in August 1974 the flight that carried him out of Washington set him down here. The station closed on 2 July 1999.

The base was listed for closure in 1993, and Orange County spent the following decade arguing about whether to turn the airfield into a commercial airport. Measure W settled it in 2002 in favor of a central park and nature preserve with development around it, and the name Orange County Great Park comes from that ballot measure. In 2005 the property sold for 650 million dollars to Heritage Fields, a venture that included Lennar, and the landscape architect Ken Smith won the international competition to design the park. His plan kept a length of the original runway in place as a reminder of what the ground used to be. The park is planned at roughly 1,300 acres, which makes it the largest municipal park in Orange County, and the housing built on the development side of the deal became the Great Park Neighborhoods, starting with Pavilion Park in 2013.