Portola Park

Portola Park covers 138 acres and the county records 420 parcels and 415 site addresses inside the boundary, at a median distinct legal lot of 7,201 square feet. Eighteen named streets run 4.1 miles within it, 17th through 21st Streets crossing Concord St, Eastside Ave, Greenwood Ave, Linwood Ave, Lyon St, Mabury St and McClay St.

The zoning layer gives 59.1 acres to single family residence and still carries 15.1 acres as general agricultural, with 13.5 acres of arterial commercial and 11.6 acres of open space land. Two properties inside the boundary sit on the city historic register, the Hasenyager House and the Sexlinger Farmhouse and Orchard. Three campuses sit inside the boundary on the city school layer, and two school districts share the ground: Santa Ana Unified covers 61.1 percent of it and Tustin Unified covers 38.9 percent.

Two blocks west of the park, at 1584 E. Santa Clara Avenue, stands the Sexlinger farmhouse and its orange grove, built in 1914 and farmed by the Sexlinger family for most of a century. The property later passed to Concordia University and Lutheran High School of Orange County. The five acres of orange trees had by then become a rarity in a county that once shipped citrus by the trainload, and when the owners moved to clear the land the City Council put the house and the orchard on the Santa Ana Register of Historic Properties in 2012. The owners disagreed with the listing and filed a notice of intent to demolish, and a preservation fight followed that drew money and volunteers from well outside the neighborhood.

The houses around the park went up mostly in the 1950s and 1960s, on the east side of a city that was growing very fast. Santa Ana held 45,533 people in 1950 and 100,350 by 1960, and streets like Lyon, Mabury, McClay and Wright filled in during those years. The park itself covers a little over nine acres and remains the center of the neighborhood.