The Terraces

The Terraces of Corona del Mar covers 10 acres between Fifth Avenue and the Buck Gully rim and holds 101 addresses on 106 parcels. Six street names appear on the record: Lilac, Daffodil, Geranium, Poppy Lane, Poppy Avenue and Fifth Avenue, which carries the entrance. All 0.68 miles of street inside the footprint are recorded as private by the city, and the association is not gated.

The whole of the boundary is zoned Planned Community under the text the city titles the Corona del Mar Senior Project, which is the legal designation carried on the zoning layer. The general plan gives 6.6 acres Multiple-Unit Residential and 3.4 acres Open Space, so a third of the ground is held open along the canyon edge. The 299.84 acre Upper Buck Gully open space adjoins the boundary and the 7.86 acre Grant Howald Park sits 669 feet away. Harbor View Elementary serves the boundary and enrolled 344 students on the 2024-25 federal count. For the city's own administration the city places it in evacuation zone 48, park service area 11, census tract 626.42.

Corona del Mar's flower names are the work of one man with a marketing problem. F. D. Cornell took over the unsold half of George E. Hart's 1904 oceanfront purchase in 1916, tried and failed to rename the whole place Balboa Palisades, and settled for renaming the streets that run down to the water after flowers in alphabetical order from Acacia to Poppy. The Terraces, built seventy years later at the inland end of that grid, took the same idea onto its own private lanes and called them Lilac, Daffodil, Geranium and Poppy.

It was built in the middle of the 1980s as an age restricted community, and the city still zones it under a planned community text written specifically as a senior project, which is a designation almost nothing else in Corona del Mar carries. About a hundred two bedroom condominiums were built in a Cape Cod idiom, with attached garages and a shared pool. It stands a few hundred feet from the OASIS Senior Center, across Fifth Avenue.