West Floral Park

West Floral Park covers 195.9 acres and the county records 636 parcels and 634 site addresses inside the boundary. The median distinct legal lot measures 8,293 square feet, or 0.19 acres, among the deepest in the city. Twenty four named streets run 6.57 miles within it, 17th through 22nd Streets crossing Marion Way, Greenbrier St, Lowell Ln, Louise St, Buffalo Ave and North Park Blvd.

The zoning layer gives 120.1 acres to single family residence and 16.9 acres to open space land, and the general plan carries 123 acres as low density residential. Eighteen properties inside the boundary sit on the city historic register, among them the A. T. Bates Ranch House, which carries the name of the tract the ground came from. Santiago K-8 sits inside the boundary and Santa Ana Unified covers all of it.

Before there were streets here there was a ranch. The farmhouse that served it still stands as the A.T. Bates Ranch House, which the city carries on its register of historic properties, and it faced Seventeenth Street at the end of a long dirt driveway. That driveway is now Westwood Avenue. The rest stayed in citrus and open ground for another half century. Houses only began to appear in the late 1940s, first along Nineteenth Street and Riviera Drive, and Riviera itself started life as an extension of Riverside.

By 1950 building was under way on several streets at once, in California ranch, Cape Cod, traditional and mid-century modern designs on lots that run about 8,300 square feet and in places up to a third of an acre. A handful of builders shaped the place. Allison Honer put up houses on Nineteenth and Twentieth and scattered others through the neighborhood. Roy Russell lived in one house while he marketed the next; he developed Louise Street for buyers moving up, held every house there to a minimum of 2,000 square feet, and built his own at 4,000. Art Herrick, who was Emmett Rogers's son in law, built most of the houses on Riviera, Westwood and Rosewood, and Rogers himself was the contractor behind much of neighboring Washington Square in the 1930s. Hugh Neighbour built a good many and lived on Santa Clara. Marion Street carries a real name: the Buchheim family grew oranges on this ground and in 1956 traded their land to Neighbour for a new house at 1113 Riviera, and the street was named for Marion Buchheim.