Easton Addition, Burlingame Homes for sale, recent sales and a Property Nerd’s guide

Before it was a Burlingame neighborhood, Easton was its own town. The land was part of Rancho Buri Buri, a land grant of some 15,000 acres. Its southern section became Black Hawk Ranch, and Ansel Mills Easton later subdivided it as the Town of Easton. The earliest subdivision map on file with the county dates from 1905 and covered the blocks between California Drive and El Camino Real, Sanchez Creek to Broadway (those blocks are in the Burlingame Terrace guide). Later Easton Addition maps carried the grid west across El Camino Real, and county legal descriptions still call the lots here "Easton Addition".

Easton tried hard to sell lots. He built a store at Chula Vista Avenue and Buri Buri Road (now Broadway), opened a public school for north-side children (the city's history dates it to 1908 at Cortez Avenue and Easton Drive; the historical sites map puts a 1909 school on Cabrillo Avenue), and got a train stop, first called Easton and later renamed Broadway. In 1913 he started his own streetcar line from Carmelita Avenue and California Drive up to Hillside Drive and Alvarado Avenue, the corner that is now this guide's southwest tip. Sales stayed slow, and the line stopped running in 1918. Burlingame annexed the Town of Easton in 1910, creating the city's central section from Sanchez Creek to Mills Creek, but the real building rush did not come until the 1920s.

The trees came before the houses. The Howard-Ralston tree rows of elms and eucalyptus, planted along El Camino Real between 1873 and 1876 to a design by landscape gardener John McLaren, line this neighborhood's whole El Camino edge and have been on the National Register of Historic Places since 2012. The city's historical sites map notes a heritage grove of McLaren plantings on Easton Drive as well. Another National Register listing is a 1958 modernist house on Drake Avenue (a private home, no public access).