Washington Square

Washington Square covers 185.2 acres and the county records 729 parcels and 689 site addresses inside the boundary, at a median distinct legal lot of 7,223 square feet. Fourteen named streets run 5.2 miles within it, among them Washington Ave, Westwood Ave, Rosewood Ave, Bomo Koral Cir, Louise St, Towner St and Freeman St. The zoning layer gives 101 acres to single family residence and 12.6 acres to two family residence, with 9.5 acres inside the Bristol Street Corridor Specific Plan.

The city park and open space layers place no facility inside the boundary. Thirty three properties here sit on the city historic register, twelve of them keyed, among them the Axworthy, Boyle, Chamberlin and Crocker Houses. Three campuses sit inside the boundary on the city school layer, Wilson Elementary, Heroes Elementary and Scholarship Prep, and Santa Ana Unified covers all of the ground.

It started with trees. Early in the last century what is now Washington Square was a run of orange and walnut orchards, most of it owned by the family of Jacob Ross, who had bought portions of the Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana from the Yorbas in 1868 and 1869 and sold much of the rest to William Spurgeon to make the town. A few farmhouses dotted the groves, and one of them is still standing: the Ross-McNeal house at 1020 North Baker Street, built in 1879 and listed as a landmark on the Santa Ana Register of Historic Properties. By 1905 Baker and Towner were the only streets in the neighborhood, they ran only as far north as Washington, and there were about a dozen homes among them. In 1915 there was a brick yard at the north end of Olive.

As the orchards aged and the trees began to fail, the land was sold to builders, and in 1925 the work of turning farm ground into a middle-class neighborhood began. Louis Braasch, Emmett Rogers and others built south of Washington and along Louise Street, and rather than the repeating tracts that cover most of Orange County they put up custom and semi-custom houses. Rogers sold lots and built to standard plans that owners could change to their own taste, which is why Tudor Revival and Spanish Colonial Revival sit next to American Colonial saltboxes and, after the war, ranch houses. By the early 1940s the last of the trees were gone, the ground above Washington was subdivided and the streets were pushed to Fifteenth; in the early 1950s they went through to Seventeenth. Builders had their own names for their pieces of it, Flower Square, Freeman Street Subdivision, Sunshine Park and Huntington Square, and most of the streets carry the names of city founders who lived here in the late 1800s. The city recognized the whole of it as Washington Square in 1985.