Westcliff

Newport Beach's own General Plan uses Westcliff, with Cliff Haven, as its example of the pattern that followed the older beach grids: curvilinear streets and ranch style homes on larger lots. The city maps the neighborhood inside the area it names Dover - Westcliff - Newport Heights, one of twenty citywide, and its association layer places the Westcliff and Baycrest streets inside the Mariners Community Association, recorded at 1,192 residential units, not gated, with no management company on file. Fourteen association polygons share that area, the largest after Mariners being the Newport Heights Association at 1,178 units, Cliff Haven at 528 and Newport Garden Villas at 461, and only one of the fourteen, the 119-unit Castaways Homeowners Association, is flagged as gated.

Errands sit at the northern corner, where Westcliff Plaza, an Irvine Company center at 1000 to 1150 Irvine Avenue anchored by Ralphs, meets Irvine Avenue at Westcliff Drive and 17th Street. On the western edge, the Donna and John Crean Mariners Branch Library at 1300 Irvine Avenue shares its block with Mariners Elementary and with Mariners Park and the VJ Community Center, 5.99 acres carrying an athletic field, a ball diamond, a basketball court, a handball court, two tennis courts, play equipment and picnic tables. Westcliff Park adds 3.01 acres with a bay view at Polaris Drive and Morning Star Lane, Bob Henry Park 4.8 acres at 900 Dover Drive whose two ball fields the city calls heavily used, and Castaways Park 16.77 acres of bluff top at 700 Dover Drive with both a bay and an ocean view. The school chain is Mariners Elementary, then Ensign Intermediate, then Newport Harbor High.

Newport Beach grew from the water inland, and Westcliff is where the pattern changed. The peninsula and the islands were laid out as tight grids because they were sold to summer people who arrived by boat and by red car. When the town climbed onto the mesa above the harbor in the 1950s it built something different: curving streets, ranch houses, bigger lots, driveways instead of alleys. Most of the housing here went up in one confident stretch through that decade, which is why the whole area reads as one period even though it is really more than twenty separate tracts filed under a dozen different names, among them Baycrest North, Harbor Highlands, Westcliff East, Westcliff West, Westcliff Grove and Newport Glen.

The one building here that architects travel to see is at 1901 Westcliff Drive. Richard Neutra designed the Mariners Medical Arts complex in 1963, three low structures joined by gardens, covered walkways and reflecting pools, with vertical metal sun louvers and steel spider legs holding the roofs out past the walls. The Orange County chapter of the American Institute of Architects gave it a 25 Year Award of Excellence in 2002, and when the owner proposed knocking it down in 2008, Neutra's son Dion said it was his father's favorite of the buildings like it the practice did in Orange County.