Arch Beach Heights

Arch Beach Heights climbs the hillside above South Laguna on a grid of short streets, La Mirada, Miramar, Katella, Noria, Baja, Oro and Diamond among them, reached from Alta Vista Way and Summit Drive. The City of Laguna Beach draws it as evacuation zone 1 and records 987 households inside it, the largest household count of any zone in the city. Across 208 acres the assessor counts 1,370 parcels on eighty-seven named streets, and the city zones 1,345 of its 1,386 parcels R1.

Thirty-seven acres inside the boundary are open space preserve, and the hillside is the only residential neighborhood in Laguna Beach governed by a specific plan of its own. The city's Historic Resources Inventory lists 22 resources here, thirteen of them filed under Alta Vista Way and its vicinity. Laguna Beach Unified serves the hillside from four campuses and 2,291 students, with El Morro and Top of the World elementaries feeding Thurston Middle and then Laguna Beach High.

William Henry Brooks and his brother Lorenzo Nathan Brooks settled here in 1876. Nate Brooks homesteaded at Arch Beach in 1879 and laid out the townsite, dug a five hundred foot tunnel into the hills to bring water down, and built good roads at his own expense to connect it to the little village of Laguna. Samuel Armor’s 1921 county history called Brooks the father of Laguna Beach.

In 1886 Hubbard Goff built the Arch Beach Hotel on the bluff at the end of Diamond Street. The next year the town went on the market on the expectation that the Santa Fe would run its coast line south through Arch Beach, and the first pier in Laguna went up at the foot of Diamond Street. A post office followed in 1889. The railroad was built inland instead, the Panic of 1893 burst the boom, and the town lost its post office. In 1897 Joseph Yoch had the abandoned hotel cut into three sections and hauled into town, where it was joined to his own hotel to make the thirty room Hotel Laguna.