The Balboa Pavilion, A Red Car Stop That Outlasted the Railroad

On July fourth, nineteen oh-six, the Pacific Electric Red Car opened its Newport Beach extension and nearly one thousand people made the one-hour journey from Los Angeles to the Balboa Peninsula on the first day. They arrived at the Balboa Pavilion, a Victorian building with a cupola and a long sloping roofline, designed to anchor a new resort community on land that real estate documents had previously classified as swamp and overflow. The Red Car had just transformed a marsh into a destination.

The Pacific Electric network, at its peak, was the largest electric railway system in the world, connecting Los Angeles to communities across the basin, running on schedules that made the distances of Southern California navigable without a car. Newport Beach was one terminus. The Balboa Pavilion was the reason to go there.

The Red Car does not run anymore. The Pacific Electric network was dismantled beginning in the nineteen forties and through the nineteen fifties, replaced by freeways and General Motors bus lines, in a process that generated decades of dispute about whether the transit system was killed by economics, by the automobile industry's lobbying, or by some combination that included both. The debate produced one of the most extensively documented transportation controversies in California history, a subject that urban planners, historians, and transit advocates have been arguing about in books, papers, and policy hearings for seventy years.

The Balboa Pavilion is still there. It is the oldest surviving building in Newport Beach, and it still serves as a marine facility: ferry tickets, boat rentals, whale-watching excursions. The swamp it was built to sell has become one of the most valuable coastal real estate markets in California. The Red Car that made it possible left no tracks.