ALONZO ERASTUS HORTON stepped off a San Francisco steamer and strolled
ashore in 1867 on land that would become the center of a new San Diego, he
was awed by what he found. "I have been nearly all over the world," said the
man who would one day be known as the father of New San Diego, "and this is
just the prettiest place for a city I ever saw."
It was an exclamation to be echoed by millions of others, visitors and
residents, with unceasing repetition, for more than a century. Alonzo Horton was not the first, but he was surely the single most
influential San Diego real estate speculator in the history of a city whose
story may be told in real estate speculation. Nor was Horton the first to be
attracted by San Diego's natural harbor and almost-supernatural beauty.For centuries, dating back to 9000 B.C., this area belonged to the Southern
California coastal region's first Americans, now called the San Dieguito.
These San Dieguito were descended from Asians who crossed the land bridge in
the Bering Strait in search of game, and from others who moved over the
Sierra Nevadas and down the Pacific slope. Not unlike the modern
Californians, they sought and found the best places to live.About 1000 B.C., the Diegueño or Kumeyaay Indians came to the region, mixing
with the Indians already here. And until the 16th century A.D., when Juan
Rodríguez Cabrillo, exploring for Spain, sailed into San Diego Harbor, this
uncharted paradise belonged to them.Cabrillo, the first European to reach the Southern California soil, had not
come to colonize it.
Cabrillo discovered San Diego while searching for a
northwest passage to link the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. And after his
arrival on September 28, 1542, the eve of the feast day of St. Michael the
Archangel, Cabrillo named his discovery San Miguel.
And then, for decades,
San Miguel was ignored by outsiders.Sixty years later, another explorer, Sebastián Vizcaíno, sailing north along
the California coast for Spain, arrived in San Miguel on November 12, 1602,
and renamed it San Diego, for the patron saint of his flagship, San Diego de
Alcalá. But Spain was not interested in settling California. Quicker riches
and the enhancement of a growing empire elsewhere in the Pacific and in the
Orient drew the explorers away from San Diego. Another 167 years would pass
before the colonization began.
Spain's reluctant decision to colonize Mexico's Baja California and the rest
of California in the mid-1700s was made in an effort to discourage Russian
fur traders, who had sailed across the Aleutians and were moving down the
coast of northwest America.
Rather than wage a full-scale military operation
against the local Indians to establish control, Spain instead lent military
support to the mission priests, who attempted to make Christians of the
Indians. In the process, not incidentally, they raised the flag of Spain.With Jose de Galvez, an adviser to the Spanish king, Charles III, organizing
a force to establish a stronghold at Monterey in Alta (upper) California,
Spain began its push north from the Baja California peninsula.
And with the
Catalonian captain, Don Gaspar de Portolá, leading the military forces, and
the Franciscan priest, Fray Junípero Serra, leading the charge for the
church, a string of missions, presidios and pueblos was established.
San
Diego, whose natural harbor was at the halfway point between Loreto in Baja
California and Monterey, was the first base for the expedition.The overland march from Loreto to San Diego was beset by disasters. Food ran
out; water was scarce; Indian servants deserted or died. But Serra and
Portolá arrived in San Diego in the summer of 1769, and Serra wrote of the
area, "It is beautiful to behold and does not belie its reputation." Portola
and a group of men continued the march on to Monterey Bay, but Serra stayed.
And on July 16, 1769, the first California mission, San Diego de Alcalá, was
dedicated. Later, Serra went on to establish a chain of 21 California
missions, with some 5,000 Indian converts within their walls, before his
death in 1784.The Spanish mission system survived and prospered into the 19th century,
with a healthy commerce in the trading of hides, wine, grain and
leatherwork. But after Mexico declared its in- dependence from Spain in
1821, forces were set in motion that would doom the old system. In 1833,
after long pressure from the Spanish-Mexican settlers of California, the
Mexican government began parceling out the mission property to political
favorites.
In 1846, Mission San Diego de Alcalá and its 58,000 acres were granted by
Mexico Governor Pio Pico to Don Santiago Arguello. At that time, the town of
San Diego, settled at the foot of the presidio in an area now known as Old
Town, had a population of about 350.By then, however, the war between the United States and Mexico had reached
the West Coast. And San Diego, with its strategic Southern California port,
was taken by U.S. forces meeting minimal resistance. When the war ended in
1847, San Diego, established as the first Spanish mission in California
almost 80 years earlier, and under Mexican rule for the past 25 years,
became a part of the United States.But the ceding of San Diego to the United States brought no immediate boom.
In fact, by the end of the Civil War, San Diego's population had dropped by
half. The gold rush brought settlement to northern California. A land rush
ultimately settled Southern California.IT WAS LAND, and the dream of building a new city, that brought Alonzo
Horton, a wealthy trader and landowner, to San Diego in 1867.
Horton, who
had been living in San Francisco, built his first city, Hortonville, in
Wisconsin before moving west. But while Horton may have been awed by the
land that would become his "New San Diego" on the bay, he had this to say of
the dying town at the foot of the old presidio 3 miles to the north: "I
would not give you $5 for a deed to the whole of it.
I would not take it as
a gift."But Horton did make a deal. Of that beautiful site to the south, he bought
960 acres, at 271/2 cents an acre, and promptly returned to San Francisco to
set up a land sales office boosting San Diego as the city of the future.At the age of 54, Horton had the ambition of a young man. He first heard of
San Diego at a lecture in San Francisco on the ports of California. In an
interview in 1905, he told of his decision to move to San Diego: "I could
not sleep at night for thinking about San Diego, and at 2 in the morning, I
got up and looked on a map to see where San Diego was.
And then I went back
to bed satisfied. In the morning, I said to my wife, 'I am going to sell my
goods and go to San Diego and build a city.'"Horton was not the first to envision a city where downtown San Diego lies
today. Before the National Boundary Survey between the United States and
Mexico was completed in 1849, surveyor Andrew Gray had camped at the spot
where Alonzo Horton would step ashore 18 years later. Gray was enthusiastic
about the prospects for a new city.He was introduced to William Heath Davis, a San Francisco businessman who
had married into an old San Diego family.
The men formed a partnership and
bought 160 acres of land from city trustees for $2,304. Davis built a wharf
out into the bay from the foot of Market Street, and the U.S. government
built a supply house and a store there. Gray and Davis convinced a
government official in San Diego to secure defenses on the Indian and
Mexican frontier and to build new barracks in the town.
The official, not
surprisingly, became an immediate partner in the new city.But late the following year, a fire in San Francisco wiped out Davis'
empire. His estimated loses were $700,000. Money for building a city
evaporated. The government barracks remained, but even they were lost in a
flood in 1862. Davis' wharf was demolished for firewood by the stranded
troops. When Horton arrived in 1867, the town, known by then as "Davis'
Folly," was barren. The story of San Diego over the next 20 years was a story of boom and bust,
with an economy built principally on land speculation. The periods of boom
were generally fueled by news of a railroad for the city. And by the
mid-1880s, when a rail line finally connected San Diego to the east through
Barstow, San Diego was soaring. The population had reached 35,000. The
streets and saloons were crowded. Hotels and rooming houses were full.
But the bubble was soon to burst again. San Diego had its railroad, but it
was never more than a spur line. The real traffic went through to Los
Angeles. San Diego's wharves and warehouses had not filled with the goods of
the world. The big cargo ships never came, and the Santa Fe had pushed on to
Los An-geles. The boom had fed on itself, and there was little industry or
trade to support the thousands of newcomers. Not everyone could sell real
estate forever. Some continued to try, but by the late 1880s, San Diego was
again "Bust Town."In the first six years of the new century, San Diego would recover the
population it lost in the crash of 1889. John D. Spreckels, the sugar heir
who had invested heavily in San Diego, would remain a San Francisco resident
during those years, and pour millions of the Spreckels family money into a
city he would dominate, sometimes in absentia, for the next two decades.
Spreckels owned the streetcar system, two of the town's three newspapers
(The San Diego Union and the Evening Tribune), most of Coronado and North
Island and the landmark Hotel del Coronado, which had been built at a cost
of more than $1 million in 1888 and which Spreckels had taken over when its
builder had been unable to repay a loan of $100,000.In 1900, San Diego's only link with the outside world was the Santa Fe's"Surf Line" running south from rival Los Angeles. It would be nearly 20
years before a rail line was finally completed through San Diego's own
mountains to the east. But by then, Los Angeles had firmly established
itself as Southern California's transportation center, even creating a
man-made harbor to steal commerce from San Diego's natural deep-water port
WHILE SAN DIEGANS CONTINUED to tie their dreams to railroads and commercial
shipping over the next decade, it would be the military that would
irrevocably shape the city's future. The Spanish-American War had given
evidence of San Diego's stra tegic importance in times of national
emergency. And the city's clear flying weather and natural harbor was to
attract the military again in World War I.When Congress declared war on Germany in 1917, San Diego was chosen as the
site for the War Department's Army division in the Southwest, and Camp
Kearny was established. The Army's Rockwell Field was opened on Coronado's
North Island that year, and later transferred to the Naval Air Service.
By
the end of the war, Rockwell Field had 101 officers, 381 en listed men and
497 planes. And San Diego's future as a Navy city was charted.Pioneer aviators, such as Glenn Curtiss, were attracted by San Diego's
favorable year-round flying conditions. And the U.S. Navy, attracted by
Curtiss' demonstrations here, showed new interest in San Diego for the
development of naval aviation.Meanwhile, tourism began to emerge as a factor in San Diego's economy and
its future.
An exposition in 1915-16, tied to the completion of the Panama
Canal, was responsible for building much of the city's 1,400-acre Balboa
Park and brought hundreds of thousands of visitors, some of whom never left.
A fledgling movie industry began to take hold. The first home of the
renowned Scripps Institution of Oceanography was established in La Jolla.Tourism continued to boom throughout the 1920s and '30s, with Coronado and
La Jolla drawing the film colony south, and Tijuana, across the border in
Mexico, attracting crowds to its legal gambling houses. What was to become
the world-famous San Diego Zoo found a permanent home within Balboa Park by
the early 1920s, with help from local benefactress Ellen Browning Scripps,
sister of publisher E.W. Scripps.
Charles Lindbergh built his Spirit of St. Louis in San Diego in 1927, and
San Diego staked its claim to a share of the fast-developing aircraft
industry. Other pioneering aviators such as Claude Ryan, B.F. Mahoney and
Reuben Fleet were attracted to San Diego. With a contract to build flying
boats for the Navy, Fleet moved his Consolidated Aircraft Corporation from
Buffalo to San Diego, laying the foundation for the future Convair and
General Dynamics Corporation-and securing San Diego's future as a major
contributor to the U.S. defense industry.With World War II on the horizon, San Diego's military presence boomed, with
the development of the Army's Camp Callen near La Jolla and Camp Elliot on
Kearny Mesa. The San Diego area became home to the 11th Naval District
Headquarters, the Naval Training Center, Miramar Naval Air Station, the
Marine Corps Recruit Depot and Camp Pendleton.
The PB2Y Catalina flying boat, built by Consolidated, became the primary
patrol plane of the Navy, carrying a major share of Navy combat action in
the early months of the war in the Pacific. More than 200 PB2Y Coronado
patrol bombers were built by Consolidated for use during the war.
The end of the war left behind thousands of veterans who had discovered San
Diego and decided to make it their home. Many of them found jobs in the
city's growing defense and aerospace industry, which fueled San Diego's
economy for the next two decades.In the 1960s, with the aerospace industry here in a decline, San Diego
entered another down period. Time magazine, in fact, carried a story in 1964
that labeled San Diego "Bust Town, U.S.A." But even as aerospace was going
into a decline, the seeds were being planted that would ultimately grow into
San Diego's future economy. Two of those seeds took root in La Jolla: the
opening by Dr. Jonas Salk of his Salk Institute, and the opening of the
1,000-acre University of California at San Diego campus.
San Diego survived the bust of the 1960s, just as it had survived others
throughout its long history. And once again, real estate speculation,
coupled with an ever-growing tourism industry and a military presence that
continued strong, spawned continued growth and redevelopment through the
1970s and '80s.In 1996, as the region comes out of one of its deepest recessions and aims
toward a new century, most experts are in agreement on San Diego's promising
future. While our land will always be of prime value (the speculators will
always be with us), and while tourism will continue to flourish (it's our
number-three industry), San Diego's destiny seems inextricably tied to its
burgeoning growth in the high-tech, biotech and communications fields.
And
those clean, cutting-edge industries of the 21st century should help
maintain what San Diego has preserved of the paradise discovered by the San
Dieguito, the Kumeyaay, Cabrillo, Vizcaíno, Portolá, Serra and Horton.
________________________________________________________________
IMPORTANT DATES
1542—Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo sails into San Diego Bay on September 28; names
his discovery San Miguel.
1602—Sebastián Vizcaíno, on an expedition exploring California, arrives in
San Miguel and renames it San Diego
de Alcalá.
1769—Gaspar de Portolá and Fray Junípero Serra arrive in San Diego; on July
16, Serra blesses Presidio Hill as the site of Mission San Diego de Alcalá,
California’s first Spanish mission.
1797—San Diego mission becomes most populous in California, with 1,405
Indians.
1821—Mexico wins independence from Spain.
1822—California swears allegiance to Mexico. Presidio families begin
home-building process that establishes Old Town San Diego.
1835—San Diego becomes a pueblo; the presidio is all but
abandoned.
1846—Captain Samuel F. Dupont orders U.S. flag raised in San Diego on July
29.
1849—U.S. Boundary Commission arrives in San Diego.
1850—California admitted to Union on September 9; San Diego incorporated
with population of 650, becoming California’s first county. William Heath
Davis starts building a new San Diego—a failure that will become known as“Davis’ Folly”—on the waterfront.
1867—Alonzo Erastus Horton arrives on April 15 and purchases 960 waterfront
acres that will ultimately establish New San Diego.
1871—County seat moves to Horton’s new town.
1880—San Diego’s population reaches 2,637.
1884—First transcontinental railroad reaches San Diego.
1886—Construction begins on Hotel del Coronado.
1890—From peak of 40,000 in 1887, San Diego’s population drops to 16,159.
1892—Sugar magnate John D. Spreckels arrives on scene and buys city transit
system.
1900—Spreckels opens Tent City in Coronado.
1906—Spreckels and local businessmen form corporation to build San Diego &
Arizona Railroad.
1911—Glenn Curtiss starts flying school on North Island.
1915—Panama-California International Exposition begins. Balboa Stadium
opens.
1917—Camp Kearny established; U.S. Marine Base and Naval Hospital approved;
Rockwell Field and Naval Air Station open on North Island.
1919—San Diego & Arizona Railroad finally completed.
1920—San Diego’s population reaches 74,683.
1927—Charles Lindbergh completes his flight from New York to Paris in Spirit
of St. Louis, built by Claude Ryan in San Diego.
1928—Lindbergh Field, San Diego’s municipal airport, is dedicated.
1932—Chamber of Commerce lures Consolidated Aircraft from Buffalo, New York,
to San Diego.
1935—San Diego’s second international exposition, the California-Pacific
International Exposition, opens on May 28 in Balboa Park, site of the first
expo.
1941—San Diego Naval Air Station begins training pilots for U.S. Air Force
(a total of 31,400 during World War II).
1942—Consolidated Aircraft merges with Vultee to become Convair. Camp
Pendleton near Oceanside purchased by Navy for Marine base.
1950—San Diego’s population reaches 334,387.
1956—General Dynamics takes over Convair. Campus in San Diego’s La Jolla
area proposed for a University of California site.
1957—First Atlas missile built in San Diego successfully test-fired.
1960—San Diego County population tops 1 million; city population hits
573,224.
1962—Salk Institute opens in La Jolla.
1964—University of California at San Diego opens 1,000-acre La Jolla campus
to first class of undergraduate students.
1967—A new, $27 million San Diego Stadium opens in Mission Valley as home to
the AFL San Diego Chargers and the San Diego State University Aztecs
football team.
1968—The minor-league San Diego Padres become a Major League Baseball team
and play their first game in the new San Diego Stadium.
1969—San Diego–Coronado Bay Bridge opens, replacing ferry service across San
Diego Bay.
1970—San Diego becomes California’s second-largest city, with population of
697,471.
1972—San Diego is chosen site of Republican National Convention; in a
last-minute about-face, Republicans announce plans to move convention site
to Miami Beach.
1975—Mayor Pete Wilson launches plans for a dramatic redevelopment of
downtown San Diego.
1976—The city’s redevelopment arm, the Centre City Development Corporation,
is established.
1978—World-famed Old Globe Theatre in Balboa Park burns to ground in arson
fire.
1980—The San Diego Trolley, first line in the city’s new light-
rail transit system, is dedicated. San Diego population reaches 875,000.
1981—Mayor Pete Wilson presides at Centre City Development Corporation
ground-breaking for the Horton Plaza retail redevelopment project.
1982—After a massive fund-raising drive to rebuild it, a new, three-theater
Old Globe complex opens in Balboa Park. Pete Wilson elected to U.S. Senate,
first U.S. senator from San Diego.
1984—Padres win National League Pennant; World Series games first played in
San Diego.
1984—San Diego Trolley opens with first light-rail line to Mexico border.
1985—Horton Plaza retail center opens as $140 million cornerstone of
downtown redevelopment.
1988—San Diego hosts its first Super Bowl.1989—San Diego Convention Center opens.
1990—Pete Wilson elected governor of California, the state’s first governor
from San Diego. San Diego population tops 1.1 million.
1994—Mayor Susan Golding and a civic delegation launch a
successful bid to host the 1996 Republican National Convention; the city and
the Port District reach agreement on a major expansion plan for the San
Diego Convention Center.
1995—Mayor Golding announces plans for the expansion of San Diego Jack
Murphy Stadium.
1996—San Diego hosts Republican National Convention, first national
political convention in city’s history.
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