West Grove Valley

West Grove Valley covers 84.4 acres and the county records 320 parcels and 319 site addresses inside the boundary, at a median distinct legal lot of 6,195 square feet. Seventeen named streets run 3.07 miles within it, and the naming leans nautical: Ballast Ave, Kedge Ave, Sail St, Starboard St, Tampion Ave and Flight Ave sit beside Na Pali Dr, Crystal Ln and Lehnhardt Ave.

The zoning layer gives 50.2 acres to single family residence and 10.1 acres to open space land, and the general plan carries 50.7 acres as low density residential. The city park and open space layers place no facility inside the boundary. Garden Grove Unified covers the whole boundary rather than Santa Ana Unified, and two campuses sit inside it on the city school layer, Saint Barbara Elementary and the Ari Guiragos Minassian Armenian school.

McFadden Avenue, which cuts across the middle of West Grove Valley, was assembled out of two older roads, a stretch called Sugar Street and the original Fairview Street, before the county settled on a single name for the whole run. It honors James McFadden, who came to Santa Ana in 1868, bought a large tract of land, and then talked the rest of his family into following. From the late 1880s the McFaddens ran a lumber business out of Newport that supplied the wood for many of Santa Ana's early houses and for a good share of the bridge, railway and dock building in the young county. That same road marked the northern edge of the marshy district nineteenth century locals called Gospel Swamp.

Whoever named the streets inside the tract was thinking about boats. Ballast, Kedge, Sail, Starboard and Tampion all run through this small grid, a kedge being a light anchor and a tampion the plug that stops the muzzle of a gun. Flight Avenue and Na Pali Drive sit alongside them. The houses arrived in one push in the 1960s, the decade Santa Ana went from 100,350 residents to 156,601, having already climbed from 45,533 in 1950. Beans, walnuts and oranges were the staple crops that had carried the valley since the town was laid out, and this is the sort of ground that went under pavement to make room for the new arrivals.