Huntington Harbour

Huntington Harbour is the largest boundary on the city's association register, covering 559.5 acres measured against the polygon the city publishes. The city's own Harbour Commission puts the wider Harbour at approximately 7,000 residents across 1.4 square miles and calls it one of the largest residential harbors in California. Six islands sit inside it: Admiralty, Davenport, Gilbert, Humboldt and Trinidad were made, and Sunset Island formed naturally. Inside the association boundary the city address layer records 2,035 addresses, 1,717 of them typed as residential, reached by 71 named streets that run to 12.24 miles.

The Harbour holds more than 500 bayfront homes and over 3,000 private boat slips, with four public beaches, two public launch ramps, a fire station and a marine safety rescue boat operations station inside it. Six pieces of city park land fall inside the association line, the largest Harbour View Park at 4.02 acres and Seabridge Park at 3.91, with the Harbour View Clubhouse among them. The water runs 15 to 20 feet deep, which the Harbour Commission notes leaves it three to four degrees warmer than the ocean in summer and three to four colder in winter. Commercially the Harbour is small by design: a shopping center on Algonquin Street called the Huntington Harbour Mall, and Peter's Landing at 16400 Pacific Coast Highway. Just over 94 percent of the association boundary falls inside the city's Coastal Zone appeal jurisdiction, in appeal zone 1.

Before any of this was a neighborhood it was water. The Lomita Gun Club was founded in 1903 on the land and the sloughs that Huntington Harbour now occupies, and at one time at least thirteen separate hunting clubs worked the Bolsa Chica, Huntington Harbour and Los Patos marshes, drawing wealthy men down from Los Angeles for the duck season. What turned that swamp into streets was one man's idea. Lewis W. Douglas Jr. formed Christiana Oil Corporation in 1952 and took it public in 1956, and in 1960 he began planning a residential marina across 860 acres of swamps and sloughs. He hired the architect William L. Pereira to draw the master plan.

Construction began in 1963 at a reported cost of 200 million dollars. Dredges cut the channels, which run 15 to 20 feet deep, and the spoil was built up into five islands, Admiralty, Davenport, Gilbert, Humboldt and Trinidad. The Huntington Harbour Yacht Club followed in 1965. Douglas was Yale, class of 1948, and he named streets after the university's residential colleges, which is why a drive through the harbor takes you along Branford, Calhoun, Pierson, Silliman, Trumbull, Saybrook, Morse and Stiles. Davenport Island carries the name of his own college.