"We can't live in the past forever," said Seymour Beek, president of the Balboa Island Ferry, when asked why a company that has run the same three wooden boats since before the Great Depression is finally going electric. He wasn't being sentimental about it. He runs a business his father started in 1919, and a hundred and seven years of unbroken service tends to teach a person that change looks smaller in the moment than it does in the history.
That's the frame worth holding onto this year, because Balboa Island doesn't usually announce itself. West Coast Highway has spent 2026 collecting national restaurant names and mixed-use residential towers, the kind of change you can see from a car window. Balboa Island's changes are smaller and easier to miss one at a time: a ferry conversion, a coffee shop, a second gelato counter, a building permit. None of them alone would make a headline. Landing in the same twelve months, on the same few hundred feet of Marine Avenue and the dock at its end, they add up to the busiest stretch the island has had in years.
The crossing that hasn't changed since 1919 is about to
The ferry is the through-line, because it's the one piece of infrastructure nearly everyone on the island uses without thinking about it. Since 1919, when Joe Beek won the contract to carry one car at a time across roughly 800 feet of harbor, the Balboa Island Ferry has run continuously, three boats now, three cars each, six-thirty in the morning until midnight, 365 days a year. Cross by bridge instead and the same trip runs up to six miles.
On February 14, 2026, Orange County Supervisor Katrina Foley's office announced that the ferry had finalized funding agreements with the South Coast Air Quality Management District and the California Air Resources Board. Roughly $7.9 million in grants will go toward what Beek says will ultimately cost more than $10 million, covering both new electric vessels and the charging infrastructure to run them. State rules requiring harbor craft to go zero-emission gave the ferry a compliance deadline three diesel boats built the better part of a century ago couldn't meet on their own, and Foley's office had been working the problem since 2023, when it convened a stakeholder group aimed specifically at keeping the ferry running.
What won't change is the point. Beek says the new boats will keep the same footprint, three cars, benches for foot passengers, even a smokestack, and that most riders won't notice a difference day to day. There's no completion date yet. Designers in San Diego are still working out the electric vessel design. What's certain is that a piece of harbor infrastructure that has looked and run the same way since before most of the island's homes were built is now formally, financially committed to changing.
The ferry's foot traffic already shapes the block closest to the dock. At Balboa Island Market on Agate Avenue, right where cars queue for the crossing, owner Christina Strangio has described lines backing up the street when only three cars fit per boat, with waiting drivers stepping into the market while they wait. That's a business built partly on a queue. Whether that pattern holds once the boats run electric is one of the smaller questions this conversion raises.
Marine Avenue's first new coffee tenant in years
A few blocks from the ferry landing, Marine Avenue picked up something it hadn't in a while: a new coffee shop. Jasper Coffee is currently in soft opening on the avenue, and it's notable mostly because that stretch of Marine Avenue rarely turns over a coffee tenant at all. The island's commercial strip is short and its storefronts don't change hands often, so a genuinely new entrant in that category is itself the story, separate from whatever ends up on the menu.
A second gelato counter, with a fundraiser attached
Two doors down the same commercial stretch, change showed up as expansion rather than a first-time tenant. Gelato del Mar, the Newport Beach gelato shop that started in Corona del Mar, opened its second location at 226 Marine Avenue on August 27, 2026. Owner Peter Klebanoff brought in Zay'z Artisanal Deli for tastings of house-made focaccia and Corona del Mar's WELL Alkaline Water for the opening event, and ran a raffle for a custom-wrapped Balboa Island surfboard with proceeds going to the Newport Beach Museum Balboa Island, the small nonprofit that offers free admission and relies on private donations to preserve the island's history. It's a minor detail, but it says something about how a new business on the island chooses to introduce itself: not with a grand-opening ad push, but by routing its first event's fundraising dollars to the museum a few blocks away.
The two-story structure nobody expected
The fourth change is the one most likely to still be visible a year from now, after the ribbon-cuttings are forgotten. At 224 Marine Avenue, Arc Balboa Island is under construction, a full-service restaurant from owners Marin Howarth von Blom and chef Noah von Blom, who also run Arc Butcher & Baker and Arc Food & Libations in Costa Mesa. The project replaces a 1936 cottage-style building on the site and, per the plans submitted to the city, brings a 1,102-square-foot two-story structure to the rear of the lot along with a 484-square-foot outdoor-only patio. Construction is expected to wrap by the end of 2026, with a liquor license application already filed.
What makes the project worth watching isn't the menu, described as approachable New American with a curated beer and wine list. It's the building. A two-story structure on a compact Balboa Island commercial lot is a different scale than most of the island's storefronts, which have stayed low and close to their original footprints for decades. Whether Arc's build becomes something other Marine Avenue property owners point to, or stays a one-off, is a question the next few years of permit filings will answer, not this one.
Four things, one stretch of street
Every one of these four changes fits on a walk you could do in fifteen minutes: from the ferry landing up Agate to Marine Avenue, past Jasper Coffee and Gelato del Mar's new counter, down to the construction fencing at 224 Marine Avenue. None of them would be unusual on their own for a commercial strip this size in a single year. A ferry upgrade, a new coffee tenant, an expansion, a rebuild, these happen on retail blocks everywhere eventually. What's unusual is that Balboa Island, which tends to hold its commercial mix static for years at a stretch, is absorbing all four at once. The island isn't being redeveloped. It's just having, by its own slow standard, an unusually active year.
If you're trying to figure out how any of this touches what a specific Balboa Island property is worth, or you just want a read on a block grounded in what's actually happening there rather than a headline count, Jade Larney is a conversation worth having before you assume the comps tell the whole story.
