Newport Harbor

The City of Newport Beach maps a single Newport Harbor area around the lower bay, and 14 association polygons carry that area name. The larger neighborhoods inside it keep guides of their own, Balboa Island, Lido Isle and Bayshores among them, so this page covers the water itself and the small enclaves on and beside it. Beacon Bay sits on the north shore off Bayside Drive with 94 residences and no gate. Linda Isle, created in 1933 and developed in the 1960s, is a 107-lot island community reached by a gated bridge from Bayside Drive, 106 residences on the city's record. Harbor Island, developed in 1926, holds 35 lots and 31 recorded residences behind its own gated bridge. Bay Island is a cooperative platted for 25 units and developed with 24, one a caretaker's, reached only by a gated pedestrian bridge with motor vehicles prohibited and residents parking in a 48-space structure at 501 West Bay Avenue. Bayside Cove is a gated community of 59 units.

The city describes Newport Harbor as one of the largest recreational harbors in the United States. It holds more than 9,000 recreational vessels and more than 1,200 mooring permits, and the city is responsible for more than 850 permitted residential piers along the bayfront. The tidelands beneath all of it are held in public trust for all Californians, with the city as managing trustee for the State, and the Harbor Department runs daily patrols, coordinates the anchorages and mooring fields, and operates the guest marina at Marina Park. Beacon Bay Beach is publicly accessible from Beacon Bay Drive by walkways at the Cape Cove, Shelter Cove and Reef Cove street ends. The school assignment splits at the water: Beacon Bay, Linda Isle and Harbor Island run to Lincoln Elementary and then the Corona del Mar 7-12 campus, while Bay Island runs to Newport Elementary, Ensign Intermediate and Newport Harbor High.

The harbor is a piece of engineering, not a piece of geography. In 1860 a United States Coastal Survey schooner described the entrance as a mouth fifty yards wide, blocked by a bar, with a frightful swell running at all stages of the tide and dangerous to cross in a boat of any kind. Ten years later Captain Samuel S. Dunnells took the little sternwheel steamer Vaquero over that bar anyway, unloaded his cargo and proved the place could be worked. James Irvine, his brother Robert and James McFadden agreed the new port should simply be called Newport. The McFaddens ran the landing from the 1870s, built their long wharf out into the open ocean in 1888 because the bay itself was too shallow and too changeable to trust, and added their own railroad in 1891.

Making a real harbor of it took another half century and federal money. A west jetty went in at the entrance in 1917 and work on the east jetty began in 1927, with Collins dredging along the bay shore in the years between. The full job ran from 1934 to 1936: sandbars dredged out, the jetties extended, and about two thirds of the cost carried by the Federal Emergency Relief Act, with a total near two million dollars against a local share of six hundred and forty thousand. President Franklin Roosevelt opened the finished harbor by telegraph from the White House on 23 May 1936.