Floral Park

Floral Park covers 206.1 acres and the county records 677 parcels and 661 site addresses inside the boundary, at a median distinct legal lot of 8,257 square feet. Nineteen named streets run 7.32 miles within it, among them Heliotrope Dr, Victoria Dr, Riverside Dr, North Park Blvd, Bonnie Brae and Greenleaf St. The zoning layer gives 134.5 acres to single family residence, 9.9 acres to professional and 6.4 acres to two family residence.

The city draws its Floral Park historic district across this boundary, and the historic properties register lists 235 properties inside it, 34 of them landmarks and 60 keyed. Two city facilities sit inside the boundary: Fisher Park at 2.6 acres with a log cabin and a formal garden, and the Sarah May Downie Herb Garden, a pocket site of 0.1 acres. Santa Ana Unified covers all of the boundary and Willard Intermediate is 0.19 miles from it.

The ground at the north end of Santa Ana was orange, avocado and walnut groves, worked from a handful of large farmhouses. Floral Park began to fill in during the early 1920s, right after World War I, when soldiers came home, married their sweethearts and went looking for a house to raise a family in. They brought European tastes home with them, and in the prosperous years that followed it was said that every man could have his castle and could have it in whatever style he wanted. That is exactly what got built here: Spanish Colonial Revival houses with red tile roofs and soft stucco under the palm trees, English Tudor Revival cottages, French Normandy, and Early American designs including Federal, Cape Cod and Georgian. Architects borrowed features from one style and dropped them into another, so a great many of the houses are one of a kind.

Several orange groves were still standing in the 1930s and early 1940s. After the Second World War the last of them came out and a new building boom filled the remaining land with custom ranch houses, big light-filled rooms, sliding glass doors onto the back yard and long horizontal plans. Garages moved up against the house because families now had two cars. More than 200 individual houses here are listed on the Santa Ana Register of Historic Properties, and in February 2023 the United States Department of the Interior added Floral Park to the National Register of Historic Places, finishing a campaign the neighborhood had been running since 2008. The listed district runs roughly from Santiago Creek and Broadway to Seventeenth and Flower.