Sandpointe

Sandpointe covers 239.1 acres and the county records 850 parcels and 834 site addresses inside the boundary, at a median distinct legal lot of 6,060 square feet. Twenty eight named streets run 7.77 miles within it, among them Alpine Ave, Aurora Ave, Columbine Ave, Curie Ave, Nobel Ave, Harvey Ave, Keller Ave and Murphy Ave. The zoning layer gives 116.3 acres to single family residence, 42.5 acres to open space land and 15.2 acres to planned shopping center.

Two community parks sit inside the boundary: Lillie King Park at 10.4 acres with an all purpose field, a fitness court, a volleyball court, a picnic area and a playground, and Sandpointe Park at 7.7 acres with a recreation center, a tennis court, a basketball court, a trail and a playground. Two campuses sit inside it on the city school layer, Taft Elementary and Douglas MacArthur Fundamental Intermediate, and Santa Ana Unified covers all of the ground.

Before there was a neighborhood here there was a swamp, and it had a name. Gospel Swamp was the marshy south end of Santa Ana, running from McFadden Avenue down through what is now the South Coast Metro area. The name came from the people. The settlers who took up this wet ground in the middle and late 1800s were largely Southerners and enthusiastic churchgoers, and the county had an unusual concentration of preachers out here. Historian Phil Brigandi credited George Lynch with coining the name after sitting through a sermon by the Reverend Isaac Hickey. The more polished residents of downtown Santa Ana called the people who lived out in the swamp Swamp Angels.

The houses arrived when the beans left. The Segerstrom family, who had farmed lima beans on this plain for generations, put South Coast Plaza on one of their own bean fields, with the May Company opening on February 21, 1966 and the mall following on March 15, 1967. Sandpointe went up in exactly those years, between 1966 and 1971, on the same flat ground and to the same postwar pattern. Whoever named the streets had science on the brain, and Curie, Pasteur and Nobel all run through the neighborhood.