Belcourt - Ford Road

Belcourt - Ford Road is one of twenty community association areas the City of Newport Beach maps, 201 acres between Jamboree Road and MacArthur Boulevard above the back bay, and it is the one area where every mapped association is gated. Six operate here: One Ford Road with 378 residential units under Seabreeze Management, Bayridge Park with 168 under Powerstone, the Belcourt Master Community Association with 102 under Keystone Pacific, and the Belcourt Terrace, Belcourt Park and Belcourt Hill associations with 57, 54 and 50. No city public park falls inside the area, all 68 polygons of the city park layer having been tested against it, so the recreation grounds here are association property and access comes with the address.

One Ford Road covers 100 acres behind two gate-guarded entries. The firm that designed its grounds lists an association clubhouse with a rim-flow junior Olympic pool, a second adult pool area with a fireplace, a basketball court and a children's play area, a one-mile loop walk with a sand volleyball court, and a golf garden, a croquet garden and a water garden, drawn on a landscape budget that exceeded $25 million. Belcourt Terrace runs a staffed guardhouse at a controlled entrance with a pool and adjoining spa. Newport-Mesa Unified assigns addresses in both Belcourt and One Ford Road to Lincoln Elementary in Corona del Mar and then to Corona del Mar High School, which teaches grades 7 through 12 on one campus.

Belcourt came first. The J. M. Peters Company built it between 1980 and 1982, with eight subdivision maps recorded in that stretch and three more for Bayridge Park by 1984, which is why Belcourt reads as several separate gated associations beside a master rather than one tract. The ground under both halves is still zoned the Aeronutronic Ford Planned Community, after the aerospace campus that stood on it: Ford put its defense arm, Aeronutronic, on 99 acres at Jamboree Road and Ford Road in 1956, in buildings designed in 1958 by the modernist architect William Pereira, who went straight from that commission to the master plan for the whole Irvine Ranch in 1960 and then the campus of UC Irvine. The plant built rocket engines, missile guidance systems and computer hardware, and made the consoles for the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, until Ford sold the operation to Loral in 1990.

Pacific Bay Homes built One Ford Road across the old campus between 1998 and 2001, a hundred acres behind two guarded gates, with community architecture by MVE + Partners, and it has not changed shape since. Its streets are named for championship golf courses, which is worth noticing on the drive in: Old Course, Long Bay, Spanish Bay, Gleneagles, Crooked Stick, Jupiter Hills, Colonial, Oak Tree, Edgewood and Thunderbird. Ford Road itself keeps the name of the company whose engineers used to turn off it every morning.