Central City

Central City covers 233.1 acres and the county records 1,040 parcels and 972 site addresses inside the boundary, at a median distinct legal lot of 6,213 square feet. Twenty seven named streets run 10.33 miles within it, among them Bishop St, Cubbon St, Hesperian St, Nottingham Ave, Forest Cir and Graham Ln.

The zoning layer gives 138.7 acres to single family residence, with 5.5 acres inside the Bristol Street Corridor Specific Plan and 5.4 acres of general commercial. Two city parks sit inside the boundary: Ed Caruthers Park, a neighborhood site of 1.2 acres with a skate park, fitness equipment and a shade shelter, and Salvador Quintana Park with a basketball court, a fitness court and a playground. Santa Ana Unified covers all of the boundary and Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary sits inside it.

The houses arrived in one great push. Santa Ana grew from roughly 4,900 people in 1900 to more than 100,000 by 1960, and this neighborhood is a product of the steepest part of that climb. Of the homes here with a known build year, the overwhelming majority date to the 1950s, three bedrooms apiece on lots of about an eighth of an acre, laid out on a plain grid between Bristol Street and Raitt.

Two of its parks carry stories worth repeating. Ed Caruthers Park opened at Raitt and Myrtle on October 17, 2023, named for Edward Julius Caruthers Jr., a long time Santa Ana athlete who won the silver medal in the men's high jump at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. Salvador Quintana Park opened at 712 S. Bristol Street on May 9, 2026, named by the city council in October 2025 for a man who had worked on the Nitta family's farm here in the 1930s. When Japanese American families were sent to the camps he looked after the Nitta property, carried supplies to the camps, and after the war sold the land back to Mr. Nitta for one dollar.