Forty years ago today, Fashion Island opened its doors.
The shopping center, now an integral part of Newport Beach, was a gamble at the time. Its makers sought to create a groundbreaking mall for a community that was still breaking ground.
Newport Center, the area that extends from Pacific Coast Highway through the middle of the city, barely existed in any developed form.
A popular quip over the years was that half the mall’s prospective shoppers were fish.
“It still marvels me to sit here and look out this window,” said Ray Watson, the Irvine Co.’s former planner and the guiding hand behind Fashion Island, gazing from a top-floor office at the center he helped build.
“Every tree you see here was planted by us.”
Things haven’t always gone smoothly for Newport Beach’s prime retail spot. Fashion Island, which opened the same year as nearby rival South Coast Plaza, has struggled at times to lure customers and to keep pace with changing demographics.
Two decades ago, some in the retail community wrote the mall off as a failed experiment.
The Irvine Co. stuck with its creation, however. As it approaches the half-century mark, Fashion Island is bigger, more diverse and better attended than ever — and like so much of Newport-Mesa, it’s ever-changing.
PLOT POTENTIAL
In the mid-1960s, Newport Beach hardly resembled the wide-ranging city it is today. San Joaquin Hills and Newport Coast had yet to be annexed. The stretch of land now occupied by Fashion Island boasted little beyond hills, crops and grazing cattle.
“I remember when it was just a mound of dirt,” said Steve Marowitz, the owner of the Newport Children’s Bootery, one of four original shops still at the mall.
“We used to ride our bikes on that hill and tear up big sheets of cardboard to ride down the hillside.”
The Irvine Co. saw potential in that plot, and in 1960 hired Watson, who worked for an architectural firm in Northern California, to oversee its planning. For the next few years, the company worked with the city to get approval for a shopping center that it insisted would change the face of the region.
The mall broke ground Aug. 20, 1965.
