Irvine Terrace

Irvine Terrace lies on the bay side of Coast Highway and covers 92.2 acres holding 390 addresses on 391 parcels, one address to a lot. Its 22 streets are almost all terraces, among them Dolphin Terrace, Santanella Terrace, Bonnie Doone Terrace, Bayadere Terrace, Tahuna Terrace, Serenade Terrace, Galatea Terrace and Sabrina Terrace. Zoning is R-1 across 91.1 acres, single unit residential at the lowest density band the certified Local Coastal Program uses, and the median parcel measures 0.215 acres.

The 8.56 acre Irvine Terrace Park adjoins the boundary and the 10.49 acre Back Bay View Park sits 247 feet away. The whole of the boundary sits inside the Coastal Zone, all 92.2 acres of it, and none of that ground is designated for short term lodging. The city bikeway layer runs 0.73 miles inside the footprint. Children here go to Abraham Lincoln Elementary, which enrolled 336 students on the 2024-25 federal count. For the city's own administration the city places it in evacuation zone 43, park service area 10, census tract 627.01.

Before there were terraces here there were horses. A photograph in UC Irvine's Orange County history collection is captioned with the plain fact of it: everything north of Avocado in Corona del Mar was grassy slope and the Harris Stables, on what is now Irvine Terrace. The ground was part of the ranch James Irvine assembled in 1875, and it stayed open, with dirt roads and scattered outposts, while the village below filled in around the flower streets.

The Macco Corporation began building on it in 1953, in the section old-timers still call the Old Terrace. The grading is the reason the neighborhood looks the way it does: the lots were cut in tiers so that row after row of them looks over the harbor, Balboa Island and Catalina rather than into the back of the house in front. Irvine Terrace proper opened in 1956. The county carries a construction year for 380 homes inside this boundary and 338 of them fall in the 1950s, with 82 in 1957 alone.