South Coast/Wimbledon Village

South Coast Plaza shapes this end of town. The center covers 132 acres on the city's record, holds the largest single concentration of retail in Costa Mesa and accounts for 30 percent of its commercial floor space, while the Town Center beside it holds nearly 20 percent of all the office space the city has planned for. Building heights across the Town Center master plan area, east of Bristol Street and north of Interstate 405, are held to the limit Federal Aviation Regulations Part 77 sets unless a structure can be shown to pose no hazard to air navigation, which is the condition that has governed building height here since the master plan was approved.

Wimbledon Park covers 4.9 acres and is the park the city names for this neighborhood; citywide Costa Mesa publishes 41 named park and open space polygons, the largest Fairview Park at 219 acres. The General Plan places the neighborhood's higher density housing in the northeast of the South Coast Metro area. Newport-Mesa Unified School District runs all 20 public campuses the 2024-25 federal count places inside Costa Mesa, together enrolling 9,235 students, and assignment is set by address.

This corner of Costa Mesa was a bean field, and the family who farmed it never left. Charles John Segerstrom and his wife Bertha arrived from Sweden in 1898 and began buying land. By the middle of the twentieth century the Segerstroms held about two thousand acres here and were among the largest lima bean growers in the country. Fifty acres of that ranch are still in beans today, kept in production deliberately, a green rectangle surrounded by everything that replaced it.

The switch from farming to building came in the 1950s and 1960s, and in 1967 the first phases of South Coast Plaza opened in the middle of the fields with May Company as the anchor. What followed turned the area into the county's cultural address as well as its shopping one. South Coast Repertory moved into a new theater in Town Center in 1978, the Orange County Performing Arts Center opened in 1986, and the Renee and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall followed in 2006. Building heights across Town Center were held down to keep the towers clear of the approach to John Wayne Airport.