~5 min read

Good morning. First full week of fall, and Orange County is handling it the way we handle everything: 74° water, 80° afternoons, and a marine layer that's gone by ten. This weekend the county throws a beach festival, a moon festival, a Greek festival and a carnival — in that order, if you're ambitious. ☕

This week in OC: Newport Beach incorporated in 1906, which makes this its 120th year as a city. The same year, three things went up almost at once: the Balboa Pavilion, the Balboa Pier, and the Pacific Electric Red Car line that ran straight down to the Pavilion and unloaded weekenders from Los Angeles onto the sand. The Pavilion is still standing — the oldest building in town and the only one of the three you can still walk into. Newport gets the whole issue this week, and you'll find out why Jamboree Road is called that (below).

In today's Buzz:

— Kevin

Ohana Fest turns 10, and Pearl Jam closes it out. This is the single biggest thing happening in Orange County this weekend. Eddie Vedder started Ohana as a hometown experiment; ten years later it's one of the marquee weekends on the California music calendar, and it happens literally on the sand at Doheny State Beach — not near the beach, not a park with an ocean view. Stages facing the water.

Friday is Eddie Vedder & Friends with Maná (plus Billy Idol and Bad Religion). Saturday is Tyler Childers with Alabama Shakes. Sunday is Pearl Jam, with Fontaines D.C., the Pixies and a reunited Rilo Kiley. Thirty-five-plus sets a day across three stages.

Even without a ticket, this is the weekend Dana Point turns into a different town — and the weekend to know which roads to avoid.

Here's what to know:

More: ohanafest.com

Forward this to whoever still has the Ten poster in their garage.

Worth leaving the house for (Fri Sept 25 – Sun Sept 27). Unusually cheap week: most of this list is free or $3.

🎸 Ohana Fest — Fri–Sun (Dana Point). The Big Thing. See above. ($) (Tickets) → ohanafest.com

🌕 Mid-Autumn Festival at the Great Park — Fri Sept 25, 5–9:30pm (Irvine). Sixth annual, run by the City of Irvine with the South Coast Chinese Cultural Center. Music and dance performances, cooking demos (mooncakes, noodles, Japanese tea), a mooncake walk, mahjong, paper cutting, night-market games and food vendors — under the harvest moon. Free admission. The best free night out on this list. → cityofirvine.gov

🇬🇷 San Juan Capistrano Greek Festival — Sat Sept 26, 11am–10pm & Sun Sept 27, 11am–9pm. St. Basil Greek Orthodox Church takes over the SJC Community Center (25925 Camino Del Avion): gyros, pastries, live music, folk dancing, Greek wine and beer, kids' activities. $3 admission, under 12 free, free parking. The cheapest ticket of the weekend by a mile. ($) → sjcgreekfest.com

🎡 Westminster Fall Festival — Thu Sept 24 – Sun Sept 27 (Westminster Civic Center, 8200 Westminster Blvd). Fifth annual: carnival rides, live entertainment, food. Free admission; rides extra. The nights to pick: Friday's America 250 drone show at 8:30pm, and Saturday's Moon Lantern Celebration, 5–9pm. Thu 5–9 · Fri 5–11 · Sat 12–11 · Sun 12–9. ($ for rides) → westminster-ca.gov

🎃 Moonlight Masquerade at Roger's Gardens — daily 9–6, now through Halloween (Corona del Mar). The Halloween boutique locals plan a whole morning around, and this year it's Venice after dark — you walk in under the Bridge of Sighs and into the Palazzo of Whispers. Free to wander, and worth it even if you buy nothing. → rogersgardens.com

🍽️ Farmhouse at Roger's Gardens turns 10 — Thu Sept 24, 6–8:30pm (Corona del Mar). If you're reading this Thursday morning, this is tonight: Farmhouse is closing out its 10th anniversary with a garden party for the farmers and growers behind the menu — tasting stations, each paired with a wine or cocktail, live music in the gardens, Second Harvest Food Bank as the beneficiary. Check for remaining tickets. ($) (Tickets) → rogersgardens.com

🍺 Still running: Oktoberfest at Old World Village (HB), Wed–Sun through Nov 8. ($) → oldworldhb.com

(Double-check times before you go — events move.)

Pumpkin patch season just flipped the switch — and Saturday is the day it gets real. Irvine Park Railroad's Pumpkin Patch (Irvine Regional Park, Orange) has been open since Sept 12, but Saturday Sept 26 is the first weekend that requires reservations — and they're required every weekend through Oct 31. A weekend reservation is $16–$22 a person and includes a train or wagon ride plus the patch; weekdays (10–6) need no reservation. Activity tickets are $8 each or 15 for $100, and park entry is $5 a car on weekends. If you were planning to wing it Saturday morning, don't. → irvineparkrailroad.com

Tanaka Farms (Irvine) — pumpkin fields, wagon rides, corn maze, barnyard, pumpkin cannon, through Nov 1. Parking passes are required on weekends — book a date and entry time before you go. Weekday mornings are the quiet window. → tanakafarms.com

Free and under the moon: Mid-Autumn Festival at the Great Park, Fri 5–9:30pm. Lanterns, night-market games, kids' crafts, paper cutting, a mooncake walk, free admission. This is the one I'm taking my three to — it's free, it's outside, it ends at a reasonable hour, and nobody has to sit still.

Last call: Festival of Children, South Coast Plaza (Crystal Court), closes Sun Sept 27. 25th year, free, indoors and air-conditioned — the backup plan that's actually good. → festivalofchildren.org

Evergreen backups: free miniature train rides at Goat Hill Junction, Fairview Park (Costa Mesa) · Centennial Farm at the OC Fairgrounds · Crystal Cove tide pools at low tide · the Balboa Fun Zone Ferris wheel — still the cheapest view of the harbor.

Mariners' Mile gets a movie star. Flecha Cantina is open at 2800 W Coast Hwy, Newport Beach — the modern-Mexican brand co-owned by Mark Wahlberg and hospitality vet Randy Sharpe, built around Flecha Azul tequila. Big cocktail program, Newport Harbor out the window, happy hour weekdays 3–6, weekend brunch from 10. It's the brand's fourth location after Huntington Beach, Las Vegas and San Diego — and Mariners' Mile is having a whole fall: Nēsos (Greek, 800 W Coast Hwy) and The Nice Guy (2607 W Coast Hwy) are inbound too. → flechacantina.com

Weeds, but make it Mexico City. Maleza — the modern Mexican kitchen and mezcal bar born inside the Drift hotel in Palm Springs — just opened its first standalone restaurant at The CAMP in Costa Mesa (2937 Bristol St). Irvine-based TMC Hospitality runs it, with Chef Marco Arreguín in the kitchen: housemade salsas, moles and tortillas, a raw bar (hamachi aguachile, tuna tostada), tacos, and big plates like grilled whole fish. The patio is the point — ipe decking, fire torches, and oversized windows that open the whole room to the outside. Lunch and dinner Wed–Sun. → malezarestaurant.co

Coming soon: DICK'S House of Sport is headed to Costa Mesa.

The Cannery — 3010 Lafayette Ave, Newport Beach (Cannery Village). The oldest seafood story in Newport still on a plate. The blue-and-white building on the Rhine Channel went up in 1921 as the first commercial fish cannery in Newport, on the stretch between 30th Street and Lido Park Drive where the commercial boats still tie up. It's been a restaurant for fifty years, and in the late '90s it was slated for condos until a local philanthropist bought the building, saved it, and handed it to a veteran restaurateur to run.

The move: the heated patio on the water at golden hour, while yachts slide past on the channel. It's dock-and-dine, so you can arrive by boat, which is an extremely Newport sentence to type. Happy hour in the Jellyfish Lounge runs 3:30–6pm daily. Dinner Sun–Thu 5–8:30, Fri–Sat 5–9; weekend brunch 11–2:30.

The tie-in: it's two blocks from Lido Marina Village. Park at Lido, walk the Cannery Village blocks, end on the patio. → cannerynewport.com

Round one (issue #2) did the ferry, the Fun Zone and the Lido. Round two (#9) did Pirate's Cove, Lido Isle, the Back Bay and the Rendezvous Ballroom. Round three is the "wait, that's why it's called that" round — things you drive past constantly and have never once questioned:

Next issue: Irvine (round two, owed since issue #7) or Costa Mesa (round three). Reply and vote.

Market pulse (week of Sept 21, 2026): the headline is "Mortgage Rates Hold Above 7%" — the 30-year fixed sits at 7.19% — and the effect finally showed up where we said it would: pending sales fell to 1,793, the first reading under 1,800 since February. Inventory barely moved (5,045). Closings actually jumped to 432. But the single-family median closed price dropped $50,000 in one week, from $1,550,000 to $1,500,000, and median days on market ticked up to 46. Condos went the other way — median $809,000, up a touch. The segment to watch is still the bottom: 1,904 listings under $1M, and their days on market jumped from 42 to 45 in a week. That's the payment-driven buyer walking away. Above $2.5M, sellers are now taking 3.4% under list; under $2.5M it's 1.5%. Two different markets, one county. → ocrealestateinc.com

The wild one: 1220 W Bay Ave, Balboa Peninsula — $57,500,000. A three-story, roughly 12,700-square-foot glass house on a 7,100-square-foot lot — the house is nearly twice the size of the land it sits on, stacked. Built in 2023, designed by Paul McClean, with 100 feet of frontage on the Newport Channel, a private dock for multiple boats, two pools on two different levels, a 3,000-plus-square-foot rooftop deck, a theater, a VR racing room, storage for 942 bottles of wine and a full wellness center. From the roof you can see passing yachts, Saddleback, Lido Isle and the Fashion Island towers at once. The receipt: it listed in 2024 for $68 million. It's asking $57.5M now — a $10.5M haircut on the most expensive kind of house in Orange County. Even at the very top, the market is negotiating. Listed by Tim Smith, Coldwell Banker. → redfin.com

(Soon we'll feature a real for-sale home here every week. OC agent with a listing people should gawk at? Reply to this email — let's talk.)

(angle this week: OC Famous)

The Duke lived on Bayshore Drive.

John Wayne lived in Newport Beach, on Bayshore Drive, for about 14 years — until he died in 1979. Not a vacation house. His actual home, looking across at Balboa Island, filled with the stuff he dragged home from shoots: rocks, shells, kachina dolls, Western art, antiques. He said he didn't much care whether anyone else liked them.

The boat is the good part. The Wild Goose was a 1942 Navy minesweeper (USS YMS-328, Aleutians, WWII) that he bought in 1962 for $116,000 and converted into a floating den. He kept it in Newport Harbor and used it the way other people use a garage — fishing, diving, poker with Dean Martin and Maureen O'Hara. He sold it shortly before he died in 1979 — the same year Orange County renamed its airport after him. The airport you fly out of and the yacht in the harbor are both, in a sense, the same 1979.

The kicker: the Wild Goose is still here. It runs charters and dinner cruises out of Newport Harbor today, and the route goes right past the old house. You can stand on John Wayne's boat for the price of a ticket. → cityexperiences.com

And he wasn't alone. Newport in that era was thick with them: James Cagney bought Collins Island in 1938 (the Coast Guard used it during the war; he sold it in 1948), and Humphrey Bogart, Shirley Temple and Roy Rogers all lived here or kept boats here.

Which OC celebrity sighting do you still tell people about? Hit reply — the best ones run right here.

That's the week. Take the train to Ohana, book the pumpkin patch before Saturday, and look at Jamboree Road differently forever.

Three tiny favors:

1. Hit reply with your OC celebrity sighting (or any OC memory). I'm collecting for the reader-takeover issue.

2. Refer 2 friends with your link below and I'll send you the OC Insider's Guide (free). It's genuinely good.

3. Forward this to the person who has driven Jamboree every weekday for nine years and never once wondered.

See you next week.

— Kevin

Want your OC business in front of these readers? This spot's open. Reply to this email and let's talk.