"If you do something at a high quality, the rest will take care of itself." That's what Henry Pyle told STU News Newport Beach back in 2021, right after his family's firm, Chartwell Real Estate Development, closed on the Balboa Fun Zone. Five years later, the bulldozers are actually showing up. A $115 million revitalization of the Fun Zone is set to begin construction in 2026, and the language around it keeps reaching for the same line the Pyle family itself used at the 2021 purchase: an 80-year-old landmark is about to change.
Do the math from 1936, though, and the wheel just turned 90. Even the family's own announcement rounds down. And the bigger problem with the "landmark" framing is that it skips the part of the story that actually explains why this rebuild doesn't feel like a betrayal to anyone who's lived here long enough to remember the last one. The Fun Zone has already been torn down, defaulted on, handed to a science museum, and sold again. This isn't its second act.
The Wheel Isn't as Old as the Sign Says
Al Anderson built the original Fun Zone in 1936 on a boatyard he leased from owner Fred Lewis, installing a used 45-foot Ferris wheel he'd bought secondhand from a company in Seattle. Anderson bought the land outright in 1948 and ran it until 1972. What happened on the block for the next thirteen years is thin on the record, just "a series of owners and operators" by the Fun Zone's own account, until Jordan Wank bulldozed the entire block in 1985 and rebuilt it from scratch. The buildings that reopened in 1986, not Anderson's originals, are the ones still standing on East Bay Avenue today. So when people say the Fun Zone hasn't changed in decades, what they usually mean is that this specific 1986 version hasn't changed much, which is a different and much shorter claim.
It also almost didn't survive that long. In 1988, a Japanese investment group called Doo & Sons bought the property from Wank with plans to redevelop it into condominiums. The city council said no. Doo & Sons stopped making their payments, and the property slid into receivership. The men who kept it running were Bob Speth and Joe Tunstall, two former Fun Zone kids who'd already formed Balboa Fun Zone Rides Inc. back in 1949 to operate the Ferris wheel and carousel under a 25-year lease. Tunstall later said that during the receivership years he'd call every few months just to find out who was even supposed to receive the rent check. Their company bought the property outright in 1994, once the receivership finally cleared. The block that's about to get a nine-figure facelift was one zoning decision away from becoming condos nearly forty years ago.
The Ownership Merry-Go-Round
The churn since Anderson's day reads less like a stable institution and more like a relay race, with each new owner inheriting a slightly different Fun Zone than the one before.
| Era | Who held it | What actually changed |
|---|---|---|
| 1936–1972 | Al Anderson | Built the original Fun Zone and ran it for over three decades |
| 1985 | Jordan Wank | Bulldozed the block and rebuilt the buildings still standing today |
| 1988–1994 | Doo & Sons, then receivership | Condo plan rejected by the city; owner defaulted, property in limbo |
| 1994–2005 | Balboa Fun Zone Rides Inc. (Speth and Tunstall) | Bought the property outright once the receivership cleared |
| 2005–2021 | Newport Harbor Nautical Museum, rebranded ExplorOcean in 2013, merged into Discovery Cube Orange County in 2016 | Same ownership lineage under three names; forced to sell during COVID |
| 2021–present | Pyle family via Chartwell Real Estate Development | Current owners, planning the $115 million project |
Somewhere in that stretch, the 75-year lease on the original carousel expired in 2011 and the horses left for Bishop's Pumpkin Farm in Wheatland, California, where they still spin today. And the original Bay Arcade, the one longtime residents worked their first job in, closed for good in August 2017 after 70 years, only to reopen in 2024 under new operators Albert Hall and Derek Poirier following a full remodel that kept the historic bones. The Fun Zone has spent ninety years proving that almost nothing about it is permanent except the fact that someone keeps deciding to rebuild it rather than let it go.
What's Never Actually Left
Strip away the buildings and the leaseholders, and a short list of things have run continuously through every single ownership change since the 1930s and 40s, regardless of who held the deed.
- The Fun Zone Boat Company has run narrated harbor cruises from the same dock since the 1940s, past sea lions, yachts, and John Wayne's former waterfront estate.
- The Balboa Pavilion, the Cape Cod-style structure built in 1905, has outlasted every rebuild around it and still anchors Harborside Restaurant today.
- The Balboa Island Ferry has carried cars and passengers across the same 900-foot crossing since 1919, independent of whatever was happening onshore at the Fun Zone.
- A Ferris wheel has spun on or near this exact spot since 1936, even though the current wheel and its surrounding structure date to the 1986 rebuild, not Anderson's original.
That's the actual throughline. It was never the plywood arcade cabinets or the specific carnival rides. It's the boat dock, the pier, the ferry crossing, and a wheel that keeps getting replaced but never disappears.
What Changes This Time, and What Hasn't Been Signed Off Yet
Coverage of the plan describes refreshed promenades, new restaurants and boutique retail, and reimagined public gathering spaces, with the developers promising to keep the site's vintage character intact. What hasn't been nailed down publicly is a specific groundbreaking date within 2026, a phasing schedule, or whether the Ferris wheel keeps turning while work happens around it. That's worth checking directly with the Balboa Fun Zone as the year progresses rather than assuming.
What is confirmed is the family doing the building. Henry Pyle led the 2021 acquisition on behalf of a family that's lived in Newport Beach since the 1960s, and his sister Annie, a designer, has been developing the formal plan since then. That's roughly on schedule with what Henry told a local reporter in 2021, that getting a plan approved and implemented would take a couple of years. The $115 million plan reportedly won approval in 2024 and construction is arriving in 2026, a three-year path to approval and a five-year path to groundbreaking, a reasonable enough gap for a project this size on a coastal parcel. During COVID, the family's own foundation, OneRoot, gave more than $450,000 in gift cards to restaurant and retail workers across Newport Beach and Costa Mesa, which is less a marketing detail than a reason the city was comfortable handing this particular waterfront block to a private buyer rather than fighting over it the way it fought Doo & Sons in 1988.
Go Before, Not Instead Of
None of this means the Fun Zone disappears the moment construction starts. The boardwalk still hosts Makers in the Zone, a local artisan and craft market, on the third Thursday of most months, and Harborside Restaurant inside the Pavilion and Newport Landing Restaurant and Oyster Bar by the ferry landing are both open for business right now. If you haven't ridden the wheel in a while, or you want to see the current arcade before its next version shows up, this year is the one to do it in, not because the Fun Zone is ending, but because the version you'd be visiting is about to give way to whatever comes after it.
The wheel has outlived a receivership, a rejected condo conversion, two rebrands under a science museum's ownership, a pandemic, and at least one full demolition. Reading the $115 million project as the end of something misses what the last ninety years actually show: the Fun Zone survives by changing hands to people willing to rebuild it, and the family doing it this time has been showing up on this stretch of Balboa since the 1960s. That's a better bet on continuity than any single building ever was.
If you're watching how projects like this ripple through property values on the peninsula, or you're just curious what a home near the harbor is worth while the neighborhood keeps reinventing itself, the Teicheira Team knows this stretch of Newport Beach block by block. Reach out any time you want a straight answer.
