Bristol/Paularino

Bristol Street gives this neighborhood half its name and is one of the seven commercial corridors the Costa Mesa General Plan names, carrying South Coast Plaza at its northern end. The plaza holds the largest single concentration of retail in the city and accounts for 30 percent of its commercial floor space. The city also still carries the Baker Street and Paularino Avenue Specific Plan, adopted as SP-78-02 over 17.9 acres to settle a conflict between the general plan and the zoning code in favor of higher density housing.

Paularino Park covers 3.5 acres and Paularino Elementary sits at 1040 Paularino Avenue on a site of 11.3 acres, enrolling 371 students on the 2024-25 federal count. It is one of 20 Newport-Mesa Unified campuses inside Costa Mesa on that count, together enrolling 9,235 students, and the district sets the assigned campus by address. Citywide the park system runs to 41 named park and open space polygons, the largest Fairview Park at 219 acres.

Paularino is the oldest name on this part of the map and it belongs to a man. An agricultural colony was laid out here in 1886, along what is now Baker Street between Newport Boulevard and Harbor Boulevard, and it took its name from a rancher who farmed the area. Paularino is an anglicization of Polloreno, the surname of Eduardo Polloreno, worn smooth by a generation of neighbors saying it. The colony itself faded before the century turned, but the name stuck to the avenue, the park and the school.

Baker Street next to it is named for the Baker family, who farmed at what is now Bristol and Baker. In 1949 the Paulo Drive-in Theatre opened on the northwest corner of Newport Boulevard and Paularino Street and gave the area a landmark for a generation of Costa Mesa teenagers. Around it the fields went on producing into the 1950s and 1960s, when demand for suburban houses turned thousands of farmed acres in Costa Mesa into single family blocks.