Morrison / Eldridge Park

Morrison / Eldridge Park covers 126 acres and the county records 384 parcels and 375 site addresses inside the boundary, at a median distinct legal lot of 7,839 square feet. Eighteen named streets run 5.07 miles within it, among them Fairbrook Ln, Fallbrook Dr, Fernwood Dr, Sherwin Ln, Sherwood Ln, Lowell Ln, Olive Ln and Memory Ln.

The zoning layer gives 70.4 acres to single family residence and 5.9 acres to open space land, and still carries 4.6 acres as general agricultural. Both parks the neighborhood is named for sit inside the boundary: Morrison Park, a community park of 5.1 acres with a ball diamond, a basketball court, a tennis court, a picnic area and a playground, and Colonel William W. Eldridge Park, a neighborhood site of 1.2 acres. Santa Ana Unified covers 88.2 percent of the boundary and Orange Unified covers 11.8 percent.

Until the middle of the 1950s this was orange groves with a few farmhouses standing in them, and the first tract went under construction in about 1955. The people who bought in stayed. Lester Davis, a Tustin farm boy who moved into town to raise his family, bought his house in the Vista Del Flores tract and was still living in it fifty five years later; he remembered counting seventy six children playing touch football in the street when school let out. When the park went in, the neighbors weighed the names Corrigan and Fairbrook before choosing Morrison, for Judge Kenneth Morrison, who sat in the juvenile courts and cared about the county's young people. One long-time resident remembered him working the bleachers at the Santa Ana Bowl with a bullhorn, a one man cheering section for the Saints.

The neighborhood's second park was called Fallbrook Park until 1998, when the city renamed it for Colonel William W. Eldridge, a long-time Santa Ana resident whose house had stood on ground that is now part of the park. Eldridge was a Marine Corps fighter pilot who flew in the Second World War, Korea and Vietnam. On 16 April 1945, then a first lieutenant on combat air patrol during the assault on Okinawa, he and his flight answered distress calls from a fighter director ship under suicide attack by about twenty five aircraft; he shot down four of them, and the Navy Cross followed.