Newport Center

Newport Center is the district the Irvine Company designed between 1961 and 1965 around what is now Newport Center Drive, and the company counts more than 250 businesses with over 20,000 employees here alongside nearly 200 stores and restaurants. Fashion Island sits at the middle of the ring, carrying more than 150 boutiques and restaurants, drawing close to 16 million visitors a year and holding Orange County's only Neiman Marcus. The housing sits around the edge of that circle and there is no master association over it: the city maps six separate community associations inside the area, Bayside Village at 397 residential units, the gated Villa Point at 231 under Stonekastle Community Management, Harbor Cove at 150, Island Lagoon at 133, Granville at 70 under Vintage Group, and Meridian at Newport Beach.

The civic campus stands on the district's north edge. City Hall is at 100 Civic Center Drive, and Civic Center Park covers 14 acres with a 1.23-mile walking trail along a natural wetlands area, a rotating sculpture exhibit, a bridge joining its two parcels with a view to the Pacific, and the city's only dog park at its north end. The Newport Beach Central Library at 1000 Avocado Avenue runs to 71,000 square feet since its 2013 expansion connected it to the Civic Center. On the seaward edge, Newport Beach Country Club at One Clubhouse Drive hosts the Hoag SENIOR PLAYERS Championship, which its organizers call Orange County's premier PGA TOUR Champions event, next set for March 2027. Newport-Mesa Unified assigns these addresses to Abraham Lincoln Elementary and then to the Corona del Mar 7-12 campus.

The Irvine Company hired William Pereira in 1960 to master plan the ranch, began work on what it then called Newport Town Center in 1966, and opened Fashion Island on 9 September 1967. It cost twenty million dollars, covered seventy five acres, held fifty two shops and four department stores in Buffums, Robinson's, The Broadway and JCPenney, and parked five thousand five hundred cars. Welton Becket and Associates designed the center; Pereira and Gin Wong designed the Robinson's. The koi pond went in the following year and is still there. The Irvine Company put its own headquarters two minutes' walk away in 1969.

It has been rebuilt in place twice. The Atrium Court was carved out of the old JCPenney in 1982, and in 1989 Jon Jerde reorganized the whole plan around a circular courtyard with pedestrian avenues radiating off it, adding the Island Terrace food court, a seven screen cinema and an animated fountain by WET Design. The homes came late and slowly: the condominium buildings around the ring were added from the early 1970s onward, so residents here live inside a shopping district rather than beside one.