Corona del Mar Village

Corona del Mar Village is the old town grid, running from Coast Highway down to Ocean Boulevard and the bluff. The city draws it at 195.1 acres holding 3,243 addresses on 2,543 parcels, which is more ground and more front doors than any other association in the district. Its 22 named streets are almost all flowers, and they run in alphabetical order across the grid from Acacia and Begonia through Carnation, Dahlia, Fernleaf, Goldenrod, Heliotrope, Iris and Jasmine to Larkspur, Marguerite, Marigold, Narcissus, Orchid, Poinsettia and Poppy. Two thirds of the acreage is zoned for two units rather than one, and 1,149 of the addresses carry a unit designator, which is where the half numbers on the mailboxes come from.

Corona del Mar State Beach adjoins the boundary, and so do Inspiration Point at 1.39 acres, Begonia Park at 2.05 acres, Bayside Park at 2.69 acres and Old School Park at 0.62 acres. The California Coastal Trail runs 0.41 miles inside the footprint and the city marks two designated public view points within it. Street trees are counted here in a way they are nowhere else in the city, with 2,998 entries in the city Corona del Mar tree inventory. Children go to Harbor View Elementary, which enrolled 344 students on the 2024-25 federal count, and then to Corona del Mar High for grades 7 to 12, which enrolled 2,106. For the city's own administration the city places it in evacuation zone 44, park service area 10, census tract 627.02.

The village is where all of this started. In 1904 George E. Hart, born in New Hampshire in 1859, bought about 700 acres of oceanfront from the Irvine Ranch at 150 dollars an acre and named it Corona del Mar, Spanish for Crown of the Sea. He wanted a chain of beach towns running down the coast. That July he advertised lots from 100 dollars, with beach lots at 750. The land underneath had been Rancho San Joaquin, granted to Jose Andres Sepulveda in 1837 and enlarged in 1842, sold after the drought of 1864 and consolidated by James Irvine in 1875, which is why one man could sell a town in a single transaction.

The grid you walk today is not quite Hart's. He laid the place out with numbered streets and an Electric Way for a railway that never arrived. When F. D. Cornell took the development over in 1916 he renamed the north to south streets alphabetically after flowers, from Acacia through to Poppy, and turned the east to west streets into numbered avenues. That is why you can navigate Corona del Mar by the alphabet and by counting. The first houses had gone up in 1910, when Mary Everett and Alice Alden bought corner lots at Iris and Ocean Boulevard. Everett's house, Happy House, stood until 2003; Alden's, the Quarterdeck, lasted nearly 110 years before it came down in 2017. The Hotel Del Mar had opened in July 1907, advertised as three stories with 30 guest rooms, though the third story was really a dormer and there were 18 rooms.