El Modena Barrio

El Modena covers 336 acres at the base of the eastern foothills, with 1,623 addresses on 12.16 miles of public street across 1,438 parcels. Two thirds of the boundary sits inside the Orange city limit and the remainder is unincorporated Orange County, which decides who provides services and issues permits on a given lot. The zoning mixes 73 acres of single family on 7,000 square feet, 29 acres of residential duplex, 22 acres of limited business and 12 acres of multiple family, with a median parcel of 0.154 acres, and 289 of the addresses carry a unit designator.

El Modena Park covers 7.9 acres at 555 South Hewes Street and the city records it as active use, with Fire Station 4 at 201 South Esplanade Street and 0.62 miles of the city bike network also inside the boundary. The city's historic survey covers 227 resources here; across the 82 that carry a construction year the median is 1920 and the range runs 1888 to 1980, with Contemporary on 80 parcels and Bungalow on 79 the most common recorded styles. Elementary splits three ways on the city's parcel record, 703 parcels to Esplanade, 518 to Jordan Academy of Language and Computer Science and 192 to Prospect, then every parcel goes to Santiago Charter Middle and El Modena High.

Two communities are stacked on this ground. Californio and Mexican families were here first, working the land well before California became American. Then in the 1880s Quaker settlers arrived and organized a chapter of the Society of Friends, and the meetinghouse they raised still stands, now a Mexican restaurant on East Chapman. The first building was blown apart by Santa Ana winds within weeks of going up in 1887, so they built a sturdier one in 1888 and used it for about eighty years.

The name took three tries. California was being marketed as a new Italy, so the settlers called the place Modena after the Italian city, and the Post Office Department refused it. The first post office, opened in 1887, was named Earlham after the Quaker college in Indiana many of these families had come from, and within a year somebody put the Spanish article in front of the Italian city and El Modena stuck. In 1910 a grammar purist persuaded Washington that the masculine article needed a masculine ending, and the post office spent sixty years as El Modeno while nobody else changed a thing. The rejected name never left the map either, and Earlham Street still runs here, alongside Kenyon, Colby, Philo and Hamlin.