Northpark

Northpark is one village in the City of Irvine's record and two master associations in practice. The City's homeowner association layer records Northpark Master Assn. under MASTER_ID 4.1, 254.9 acres across seven polygons, managed by Crummack Huseby Property Management, and Northpark Square Master Assn. separately under MASTER_ID 4.2, 151.2 acres across four polygons, managed by Powerstone Property Management. Six sub-associations sit under the first and three under the second, each with its own management company, so the monthly cost of a specific address is a master assessment plus that address's own sub-association assessment. Both masters sit inside a single City village polygon of 1,042.9 acres that the City publishes under its own name for the ground, Lower Peters Canyon, in Planning Area 4.

The community's own resident portal lists one clubhouse, five swimming pools, six parks, three tot lots, one full basketball court with two half courts and three tennis courts, and puts the Northpark community at 1,620 dwellings, 859 of them single family and 761 condominium and townhome. The portal publishes counts without names, addresses or hours. Two City of Irvine public parks sit inside the village boundary and inside neither association: Hicks Canyon Community Park, 16.7 acres at 3864 Viewpark Ave with two soccer fields, a trail, two picnic areas and restrooms, and David Sills Lower Peters Canyon Park, 10.3 acres at 3901 Farwell with eight tennis courts, a soccer field and a softball field. The village is served by Tustin Unified rather than Irvine Unified, and the district's own locator returns Hicks Canyon Elementary for kindergarten through fifth grade, Orchard Hills for sixth through eighth and Arnold O. Beckman High for ninth through twelfth, all three campuses standing in Irvine 92602.

The City of Irvine still files this village under the older name of the land, Lower Peters Canyon, which is why a records search for Northpark often comes back empty. The canyon was part of Rancho Lomas de Santiago, and the Spanish called it Canon de las Ranas, Canyon of the Frogs, after the marsh it drained into at what is now Upper Newport Bay. Its English name belongs to James Peters, who from 1891 dry-farmed barley and beans in the upper canyon. In 1899 sportsmen from Orange and Santa Ana laid out a nine-hole course here with greens of oil-soaked sand and fairways of bare native soil, and the red clubhouse on the ridge was conspicuous enough that people took to calling the place Golf Canyon. The Irvine Company finished the upper reservoir in 1931 and the lower one in 1940, and during the Second World War the Army trained out of a camp pitched in the eucalyptus groves here, Camp Commander, fighting mock battles against a second camp over in Irvine Park.

The village on top of that is The Irvine Company's, built between 1999 and 2003 on 603 acres. When the first model homes opened in July 1999, buyers arrived on tour buses and entered a lottery for the chance to buy one. The plan's signature is a street pattern you are meant to walk rather than drive: the cul-de-sacs here are uncapped, with no house at the closed end, so each one opens instead onto a path that runs through to the next street and on to a neighborhood park, and the long paseos carry those parks back to the community park at the center. Hicks Canyon Wash decided where the parks went. Thirty-one acres went to parkland, and the eucalyptus windrows along Irvine and Bryan avenues, already about fifty-five years old when the village went up, were left standing rather than cleared, which is why the two busiest edges of Northpark look older than anything inside it.