NEWPORT BEACH : Mailboxes Leave Stamp of Character

A secret in the bluff-top communities of Newport Heights and Cliff Haven overlooking Newport Bay is not just the serene, rural atmosphere of the area but the odd collection of mailboxes proudly lining neighborhood sidewalks.

One is a replica of a locomotive. Another is shaped like an anchor. Down on Catalina Drive, nearly every house has a peculiar box, such as the big blue-green and yellow swordfish outside one house that is likely to catch the eye of passersby.

Residents have invested countless dollars and hours of craftsmanship to perfect the odd letter boxes, although to them, it’s just another amenity in their neighborhood.

“I really haven’t given it much thought,” said Janine Gault, president of the Newport Heights Community Assn., the area homeowner’s group. “It’s just something that’s always been here.”

There’s no keeping up with the Joneses’ mailboxes in the neighborhood, no community block party to judge the year’s best letter holder. Just rows and rows of little boxes perched atop poles lining the curbs of the winding residential streets of big, old bluff-top homes.

The two neighborhoods are in the area roughly between Newport Avenue and Dover Drive and between West Coast Highway and the Costa Mesa boundary at 15th Street.

The mailboxes on the side of the winding roads in Newport Heights harken back to the area’s days as a rustic hideaway community, where houses are tucked off the road and often veiled by towering evergreens and lush foliage. Though remodeled million-dollar mansions now intermingle with older, restored homes, the area has still retained some of that earlier charm, and the street-side mailboxes seem to fit well with the leftover rural image.

The Cliff Haven community, by contrast, bears little trace of an earlier era. Many of the mailboxes there have been modernized with the neighborhood, which is now filled mostly with large, modern houses overlooking West Coast Highway and Lido Channel.

Despite the matter-of-fact attitude the residents seem to have about their unusual mailboxes, it’s clear that they were as carefully planned as a neatly manicured landscape or a prized rose garden or anything else that most other homeowners spend time and money on.

There’s the model of a small farm scene in the 1600 block of Kings Road, where pulling the pink pig’s curly tail opens one box’s door. There are several custom-crafted miniature replicas of the owners’ real homes, such as the little redwood-house mailbox in front of a matching redwood house on Catalina Drive.

“My wife said: ‘Why don’t you do something with it?’ ” said resident John Snelgrove, who custom-made his box to match his brick English Tudor home. “I kind of liked what we had. . . . It was this scuzzy old metal box, very non-Newport Beach.”

But Duane Munson, the city personnel director and a resident of the area, whose blue-and-white, country-style house mailbox perfectly resembles his home, said the elaborate mailboxes are what gives the community character.

“When I looked at (the mailboxes), I thought: ‘That is a neighborhood that has a good personality,’ ” he said.