Artesia Pilar

Artesia Pilar covers 677.5 acres, second only to Riverview West among the fifty neighborhoods on the city map, and the county records 2,124 parcels and 2,088 site addresses inside the boundary. Forty eight named streets run 22.25 miles within it and the median distinct legal lot measures 6,399 square feet. The zoning layer gives 214.2 acres to single family residence and 86.5 acres to two family residence, with 59.6 acres of light industrial and 101.1 acres carried as open space land.

El Salvador Park covers 8.9 acres inside the boundary, and the city records a municipal pool, a recreation center, a community garden, an all purpose field, a ball diamond and courts for handball and volleyball on it. La Artista Artesia Pilar Park is a pocket site of 0.2 acres and King Street Urban Greening is carried on the open space layer at 0.21 acres. Santa Ana Unified covers 98 percent of the boundary and the city school layer places seven campuses inside it, among them George Washington Carver Elementary, Fremont Elementary, Middle College High and Santa Ana College.

People who grew up here call this the Artesia Pilar barrio, or Colonia Artesia, rather than anything the city prints on a map. The land sits a short walk west of the townsite William Spurgeon laid out in 1869, and it stayed in farm rows long after the town itself filled in.

The heart of the neighborhood is El Salvador Park, and its paperwork tells the story. The city called it the Eighth and Artesia Park Site in 1956, shortened that to Artesia Park by October of the same year, and in February 1958 the City Council renamed it El Salvador at the request of E. H. Armstrong, who chaired the local People to People program, a State Department effort to build sister city friendships abroad. Construction was well under way by 1957. Finnegan and Wilde drew the community building, the R. L. Steinmetz Co. was hired in November 1959 to put it up, and handball courts were added in 1962. The park sits between John C. Fremont Elementary and the houses, with a corner grocery on one side.