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Had the McFadden brothers gotten their way in the late 1800s, Newport Beach today would be the gateway to a massive commercial harbor, and pleasure seekers would have to find another place to loll on the sand.
The multi-million-dollar home prices of today’s Newport Beach could not have been imagined in 1875 when James and Robert McFadden, brothers and entrepreneurs from Illinois, bought the Newport Landing, a small wharf near the existing Coast Highway bridge over the harbor. The bay already was the launching point for exported goods, and the McFaddens hoped to turn it into a shipping hub. Realizing the ocean side of the peninsula offered better access than the bay, the McFaddens soon built a pier, and they connected their wharf to the city of Santa Ana by buying unwanted swampy plots and laying railroad tracks. When the McFadden Wharf was finished in 1888, buildings started to spring up around it. The Dory fishermen began selling their catch from booths under the pier, and housing and businesses popped up to serve beach-bound tourists who were flocking to the area by the early 1900s. In spite of the beach’s popularity, the McFaddens sold the wharf in 1899, after a burst of federal funding to the San Pedro harbor made it impossible for their shipping business to compete. But if businessmen don’t always win, real estate developers generally seem to have better luck. The area now known as McFadden Square was built in spite of the ultimate failure of its namesakes’ business plans. A few decades after the wharf was sold, the area was a self-sufficient village with its own grocery, barber shop and clothing store, as Al Irwin remembers it. Irwin was born here in 1918 and still lives on West Oceanfront with his wife, Lois. Irwin’s father began constructing a building at West Oceanfront and 22nd Street in 1923, but he died the following year, before it was done. Instead of turning it into a Masons’ meeting house and renting rooms to Masons as his father had planned, Irwin’s mother rented space to businesses on the ground floor and offered rooms to beachgoers and long-term residents. A fish and chips restaurant, a malt shop and small stores filled out the block. The City Hall at the time was nearby on Oceanfront, and the first grammar school in the area was near 19th Street and Balboa Boulevard, Irwin recalled. In the 1930s people would visit a barge just offshore for gambling, and day fishing trips starting at the pier were popular in the 1940s and 1950s, he said. Over the years McFadden Square became more of a tourist destination, and today it’s a mix of well-known restaurants, such as the Crab Cooker, and bars, such as Blackie’s, places to rent bikes and surfboards, and boating businesses. “This has now become a recreational type town,” Irwin said. “People love to come here, they love the beach, they love the water.” McFadden Square’s future is likely to be as a hub of new mixed-use developments, with businesses and residences in the same buildings. Also in the city’s plans is a public boardwalk that will extend to Lido Village. But the most important need, said City Councilman Tod Ridgeway, is parking. Perhaps a victim of its own success, McFadden Square in the summer is jammed with cars and people headed for the beach, restaurants and shopping. Ridgeway has been working for more than three years to put a parking structure in, and the project is finally close to fruition. “That is the most important thing that could happen,” he said. “It’s terribly under-parked.” |
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