Northwest Stanton

Northwest Stanton is zone STN01 on the Orange County Fire Authority's published layer, one of four compass quadrants the Fire Authority draws across the city for emergency management, and it covers 488.4 acres. The zone record carries 3,548 addresses and an estimated 8,870 residents, and the county assessor lists 1,631 parcels inside it, on 16.52 miles of street across 109 named streets, more than any quadrant but Southwest despite this being the second smallest by land. Of the homes the assessor gives a bedroom count, 876 carry three bedrooms, 153 carry two and 146 carry four, and 1,866 buildings stand on 129.1 acres of footprint at a typical height of 13.1 feet.

Four of the city's nine parks sit inside this quadrant. Stanton Central Park at 10660 Western Avenue covers 12 acres with a water play area, a playground, tennis courts, a skate park, reservable picnic shelters, baseball and soccer fields, an exercise loop trail and two half basketball courts; Veterans Memorial Park at 10970 Cedar Street carries monuments to each military branch, a central memorial monument and a wall of inspiration for local veterans; Zuniga Park at 10902 Date Street covers 0.61 acres with a playground, a full basketball court and a handball court; and Martha Weishaupt Linear Park at 10961 Date Street holds 0.19 acres of passive green space. All 488.4 acres sit in federal flood zone X. Savanna Elementary with Anaheim Union High covers 480.6 acres of the quadrant, and the published attendance boundaries put 99.4 percent of it in Western High, enrolling 1,446, and Orangeview Junior High, enrolling 612, with Hansen Elementary at 416 students covering 45.4 percent, Twila Reid at 490 covering 32.7 and Cerritos at 368 covering 21.5.

In 1911 Anaheim proposed putting a sewage farm on the J. M. Gilbert Ranch southwest of town, and the ranchers who would have had to live beside it fought it. Philip A. Stanton, a former Speaker of the California State Assembly, told them the surest defense was to become a city, and on 23 May 1911 the vote carried 76 to 65. The new municipality covered about ten square miles with some 750 residents, the largest in Orange County by area, and one of its first acts was an ordinance banning sewer farms outright. With the threat gone the city had little left to do, and the voters chose to give up their charter so the state could build roads through the territory. The clerk filed the papers on 8 August 1924. Stanton did not become a city again until 4 June 1956, when annexation by its neighbors became the new threat. Victor Zuniga was elected mayor of the second city, and Zuniga Park on Date Street carries that surname a few blocks from the civic heart of this quarter. In October 1959, on the recommendation of the Stanton Women's Civic Club, the jacaranda was named the city tree and the bird of paradise the city flower, which is why the older streets here bloom purple in June.

Two naming schemes run through this quarter and they tell you which decade you are standing in. One grid is a roll call of American colleges: Yale, Vassar, Rutgers, Purdue, Tulane, Syracuse, Duke, Emory, Scripps, Wabash and Trinity, with College Drive tying them together. The other is a nursery catalog: Aspen, Blue Spruce, Juniper, Tamarack, Dogwood, Sandalwood, Peppertree, Evergreen, Beechwood and Royal Oak. A short Spanish run of Via Jardin, Via Jacara and Via Irana cuts across both. Roughly 616 of the homes went up in the 1950s and another 464 in the 1970s, so the college blocks and the tree blocks were built a generation apart. Stanton Central Park on Western Avenue, twelve acres with a skate park, tennis courts and a water play area, and Veterans Memorial Park on Cedar Street are the two anchors.