Crystal Cove

Crystal Cove covers 702.3 acres of Newport Coast in 15 separate parts on the boundary the City of Newport Beach publishes for it, and the city address layer records 813 addresses inside that line across 53 streets. Fifty three streets, and nearly all of them are named for water: Sidney Bay Drive and Archipelago Drive carry the most addresses, and the rest run through Timor Sea, Tasman Sea, Scotia Sea, Baffin Bay, Sidra Cove, Atlantis Cove, Secret Cove, Twilight Bluff, Surfspray Bluff and Gondoliers Bluff. The median of the 1,055 parcels the city draws here runs 16,727 square feet. The city records 873 buildings inside the boundary carrying 726 dwelling units, and the city registry marks the association gated.

Crystal Cove is the largest association in Newport Coast, drawn in fifteen separate parts across more than seven hundred acres against the two hundred and fifty five of the next largest. The county park layer places 113.36 acres of Laguna Coast Wilderness Park inside that same line. The city land use layer files most of the ground as Planning Area 4A - Residential Medium Density. The school district line runs through the boundary: clipping the county district layer returns 531.6 acres in Laguna Beach Unified and 170.7 acres in Newport-Mesa Unified. The district locator, probed once per 300 foot grid cell inside the boundary, returns El Morro Elementary, Thurston Middle School, Laguna Beach High School, Harbor View Elementary and Corona del Mar Middle and High School.

Crystal Cove has the longest story of anywhere in Newport Coast because people actually lived down on its beach. James Irvine II allowed friends, family and ranch employees to put up cottages in the sand, and 46 of them from the 1920s and 1930s still stand as a historic district. Cottage 34 was built in 1932 as a Japanese community center and school, a reminder that Japanese farming families worked large parts of coastal Orange County before the war. Up the highway a 1927 land lease started as Tyrone's Camp, filled with trailers in the 1940s, was renamed El Morro in 1954, and was finally cleared in 2006 to become a public campground.

California bought the oceanfront in 1979, creating a state park of roughly 2,300 acres, and the rest of the coast was settled by a 1988 compromise that set aside more than 6,000 acres of continuous open space and kept only 1,600 acres private. The gated neighborhoods on the bluff above the park came late and quickly. Watermark, 33 homes by Taylor Woodrow, went up in 2001 and 2002. The Strand followed between 2003 and 2005 with 42 homes. Oceana, 47 homes by Standard Pacific, was finished in 2004 and 2005.