Del Monte Heights, Seaside, CA

Del Monte Heights is where much of Seaside lives, about 3,500 homes laid out in a grid of modest streets east of Downtown Seaside. It covers a little over a square mile, and most of it is plain residential blocks. Building here began in the early 1940s and carried on for decades, so the stock runs from tiny cottages of a few hundred square feet to four-bedroom houses near two thousand. A few are as recent as 1992. Remodels and additions do most of the work of telling one block from the next, and older cottages sit beside bigger houses on the same streets. David Cutino Park is the neighborhood's anchor, at San Pablo Avenue and Noche Buena Street. It was rebuilt recently across 6.62 acres, with a skate park, a lighted ball field, a playground and courts for basketball and handball. Smaller parks are scattered between the blocks, so a patch of grass is rarely far away. Dinner usually means heading out. German Restaurant Stammtisch, at 1204 Echo Avenue downtown, is open evenings and not every day of the week. Over on Fremont Boulevard, Gusto does lasagna and wood-fired pizza, and Noodle Bar is where people go for pho and a five-spice chicken bowl. For coffee, the counters along Broadway are the closest stops. Fremont and Del Monte Boulevards are the working streets, and errands pull toward them. Highway 1 is nearby, which puts Monterey a few minutes away, and the Del Rey Oaks line sits just beyond. Very little sits inside Del Monte Heights itself, so most blocks are quiet and short on places to eat or buy a coffee. The parks do the job a town square would do elsewhere, and Cutino, with its lighted field, is the one place on the east side built for an evening outside.