Wilshire Square

Wilshire Square covers 163.1 acres and the county records 700 parcels and 695 site addresses inside the boundary, at a median distinct legal lot of 6,251 square feet. Seventeen named streets run 5.96 miles within it, among them Edendale Ct, Glendale Ct, Russell Ave, Oxford St, Borchard Ave, Old McFadden Ave and Hobart St. The zoning layer gives 84.4 acres to single family residence and 15.2 acres to two family residence, with 3.8 acres in the South Main Street Commercial District.

The city park and open space layers place no facility inside the boundary. Eighteen properties here sit on the city historic register, sixteen of them contributive, among them the Bowman, Cheney, Friend and Gordon Houses. Two campuses sit inside the boundary on the city school layer, Julia C. Lathrop Intermediate and Saint Anne School, and Santa Ana Unified covers all of the ground.

Wilshire Square opened for business in late 1922, a few days before Christmas, when the first lots went on sale. Over 3,000 trees went into the ground at the same time, and a quarter of the lots sold before the year was out. That planting is the reason the streets look the way they do a century later: sycamores, cedars, deodars and jacarandas over wide roadways, period street lighting and deep front lawns. The neighborhood takes its name from Wilshire Avenue, which runs through the middle of it, and its borders are McFadden Avenue on the north, Edinger Avenue on the south, Main Street on the east and Flower on the west.

The first house here went up in 1915, before the lots were laid out. The Depression put an end to sales for a while, but building picked up again through the 1930s and that is when most of the roughly 600 houses were built, with a second wave running to about 1942 and very little added after the 1940s. They were custom built by master craftsmen rather than run off a single plan, which is why one block gives you Tudor Revival, Spanish Colonial, Mediterranean, Craftsman bungalow and the plain, well-proportioned houses of the late 1930s that get called minimal traditional.