Pico-Lowell

Pico-Lowell covers 241.6 acres and the county records 1,055 parcels and 997 site addresses inside the boundary, at a median distinct legal lot of 6,600 square feet. Twenty one named streets run 8.95 miles within it, among them Lowell St, Bishop St, Camile St, Booth St, Raymar St, Magnolia Ave and Highland St. The zoning layer splits the housing three ways: 67.2 acres of single family residence, 46.3 acres of two family residence and 45.6 acres of multiple family residence.

The general plan carries 159.9 acres as low density residential and 12.1 acres as general commercial, with 6.5 acres inside the Bristol Street Corridor Specific Plan. The city park and open space layers place no facility inside the boundary. Two campuses sit inside it on the city school layer, Pio Pico Elementary and Lowell Elementary, and Santa Ana Unified covers all of the ground.

The land came out of Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana, the 1810 Spanish grant to Jose Antonio Yorba that covered 62,516 acres along the east bank of the Santa Ana River. The rancho was partitioned in 1868, and the following year William Spurgeon bought 74 acres from Jacob Ross and laid out the town of Santa Ana just east of here. McFadden Avenue, which runs through the neighborhood, is named for James McFadden, who bought four thousand acres in the Delhi area in 1868 and named it for his family's hometown of Delhi, New York; he and his brother Robert went on to run the shipping and lumber trade at Newport and built McFadden's Wharf in 1888. The county carries a year built on 979 parcels here, 394 of them in the 1950s, 224 in the 1920s and 131 in the 1940s, with the middle year at 1949 and the oldest standing parcel dated 1897.

Pico-Lowell is named for its two schools, and the pair of them says a lot about who has lived here. Pio Pico, at 931 West Highland Street and now the Pio Pico Dual Language Academy, carries the name of Pio de Jesus Pico, born at Mission San Gabriel in 1801 and the last governor of Alta California under Mexican rule, from 1845 to 1846. He moved the capital to Los Angeles, controlled more than 500,000 acres at his height, and died in Los Angeles in 1894 with almost none of it left. James Russell Lowell Elementary, at 700 South Flower Street, is named for a New England poet and abolitionist who lived from 1819 to 1891, edited the first issues of The Atlantic Monthly and later served as United States minister to Spain and to England.