San Diego of Saloons & Sails: The Gaslamp Quarter, USS Midway, and Harbor
A walk through California's birthplace—from Victorian gas lamps and Wyatt Earp's gambling halls to aircraft carriers and bay views
San Diego · 7 stops · 10 min audio · Generated
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1. Gaslamp Quarter Historic Gateway: The Victorian Metropolis
Fifth Ave & L St, San Diego, CA 92101
Photo: Brian Keenan
Stand beneath the glowing neon archway spanning Fifth Avenue at L Street that proudly proclaims: Gaslamp Quarter - The Historic Heart of San Diego. Look down the avenue lined with flickering replica gas lamps and ornate late nineteenth-century brick facades with bay windows and cast-iron filigree.
In eighteen sixty-seven, visionary real estate promoter Alonzo Horton stepped ashore and purchased eight hundred acres of coastal scrubland for about thirty-three cents an acre, declaring: I thought San Diego must be a heaven on earth, but why are people living three miles from the water? Horton laid out New Town directly on San Diego Bay, creating the bustling commercial center you see today.
During the late nineteenth century, this neighborhood was infamous as the Stingaree, a wild red-light district crowded with one hundred and twenty saloons, opium dens, and gambling halls where unwary sailors were proverbially stung as easily as stepped-on stingrays.
Walk up Fifth Avenue to Island Avenue toward the William Heath Davis House.
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2. William Heath Davis House: The Prefabricated Pioneer
410 Island Ave, San Diego, CA 92101
Pause before the charming two-story yellow clapboard house with green shutters at the corner of Island Avenue and Fourth Avenue. Built in eighteen fifty, this humble saltbox structure is the oldest surviving wooden building in downtown San Diego.
Long before Alonzo Horton arrived, merchant William Heath Davis attempted the first New Town development. Because Southern California lacked timber mills, Davis had this entire pre-cut wooden house manufactured in Portland, Maine, and shipped in pieces aboard a sailing clipper all the way around the treacherous southern tip of South America at Cape Horn!
Later, Alonzo Horton lived here while developing New Town, and in eighteen seventy-three, Alonzo's wife Anna opened it as San Diego's very first hospital. Paranormal researchers consistently rank it among the most haunted historic dwellings in Southern California, with sightings of an enigmatic Victorian lady walking the staircase.
Walk one block north along Fourth Avenue to the ornate twin towers of the Louis Bank of Commerce.
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3. Louis Bank of Commerce & Wyatt Earp's Saloons: Wild West High Rolling
835 5th Ave, San Diego, CA 92101
Look up at the magnificent four-story granite and pressed-brick facade of the Louis Bank of Commerce at eight thirty-five Fifth Avenue. Completed in eighteen eighty-eight, this Baroque Revival masterpiece was San Diego's very first granite building, crowned by two soaring mansard roof towers topped with carved American eagles.
During the real estate boom of the late eighteen eighties, legendary frontier lawman Wyatt Earp—fresh from his famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona—arrived in San Diego with his wife Josie. Earp leased and operated four popular gambling saloons in the Gaslamp Quarter, including the Golden Poppy and the White Elephant, where he dealt faro and twenty-one to railroad magnates and prospectors.
Upstairs in the Louis Bank of Commerce operated the Golden Poppy Hotel, an upscale brothel run by Madam Cora, where each room was decorated in a different color scheme to match the gown worn by the courtesan occupying it.
Walk west along Broadway down toward the shimmering waters of San Diego Bay.
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4. San Diego Bay Embarcadero: Pacific Sails and Tuna Fleets
North Harbor Drive, San Diego, CA 92101
Step onto the wide, breeze-cooled pavement of the Embarcadero along North Harbor Drive and take in the sparkling blue waters of San Diego Bay. Gaze across the channel toward the naval docks of Coronado Island and Point Loma sheltering the deep natural harbor.
In September fifteen forty-two, Portuguese explorer Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, sailing under the flag of Spain, navigated his flagship San Salvador into this very bay, becoming the first European expedition to set foot on the coast of what is now the state of California, naming the natural haven San Miguel.
For much of the twentieth century, San Diego was the Tuna Capital of the World: hundreds of purse-seiner boats operated by Portuguese and Italian immigrant families set sail from these piers to fish across the eastern Pacific, canning millions of pounds of tuna annually in waterfront canneries.
Walk south along the waterfront toward the colossal silhouette of the aircraft carrier USS Midway.
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5. USS Midway Museum: The Steel City on the Sea
910 N Harbor Dr, San Diego, CA 92101
Stand beneath the towering gray steel hull of the USS Midway, stretching three hundred meters along Navy Pier. Commissioned in September nineteen forty-five just days after the end of World War Two, this sixty-four-thousand-ton colossus was the largest ship in the world for a decade and served the United States Navy for forty-seven continuous years through the Vietnam War and Operation Desert Storm.
The Midway was literally a floating city at sea, carrying four thousand five hundred sailors and pilots, with its own post office, hospital with operating rooms, radio and television station, bakery baking three thousand loaves of bread daily, and four steam catapults capable of hurling a thirty-ton supersonic jet from zero to two hundred and sixty kilometers per hour in just two seconds!
During Operation Frequent Wind in April nineteen seventy-five, as Saigon fell, South Vietnamese pilot Major Buang miraculously landed his tiny two-seater Cessna bird-dog plane on the crowded deck without an arresting tailhook, after crew members pushed ten million dollars worth of military helicopters over the side into the sea to clear a runway for his family.
Walk south along the pier toward the famous twenty-five-foot sailor kissing statue.
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6. Seaport Village & Tuna Harbor: Coastal Charm and The Unconditional Surrender
849 W Harbor Dr, San Diego, CA 92101
Walk past the twenty-five-foot bronze sculpture Unconditional Surrender, depicting the iconic Times Square kiss between a celebrating sailor and a dental nurse on V-J Day in nineteen forty-five, and enter the meandering cobblestone pathways of Seaport Village. With its weatherboard cottages, Spanish tile roofs, and winding lagoons, this fourteen-acre waterfront park captures California's seaside nostalgia.
Step inside the pavilion housing the historic Seaport Village Carousel: built by master carver Charles I. D. Looff in Brooklyn in eighteen ninety-five, it features fifty-four hand-carved wooden animals, including horses, camels, and giraffes with real horsehair tails, preserved and spinning to organ music for well over a century.
In seventeen sixty-nine, the Spanish expedition of Gaspar de Portolà and Father Junípero Serra camped on this very shore. Many sailors succumbed to scurvy and were buried on the sandy beachhead, giving this point its historic Spanish cartographic name: Punta de los Muertos, or Dead Men's Point.
Head eastward past the convention center toward the cultural jewel of Balboa Park.
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7. Balboa Park: The Spanish Colonial Crown of California
1549 El Prado, San Diego, CA 92101
Cross the soaring Cabrillo Bridge into the grand arcaded boulevard of El Prado in Balboa Park. Ahead of you rises the two-hundred-foot California Tower, glistening with blue and gold Andalusian ceramic tiles and intricate carved stone churrigueresque ornamentation. At twelve hundred acres, this urban park is even larger than New York's Central Park.
In nineteen fifteen, San Diego became the smallest city ever to host a world's fair: the Panama-California Exposition, celebrating the opening of the Panama Canal. Architect Bertram Goodhue rejected the traditional neoclassical white-temple designs of earlier fairs and instead created a romantic dreamscape of Spanish-Colonial and Churrigueresque palaces with shaded arcades and reflecting lily ponds, igniting a nationwide craze for Spanish Revival architecture.
Listen closely in the afternoon: the resonant tones of the Spreckels Organ, the largest outdoor pipe organ in the world with over five thousand pipes housed in a grand pavilion, fill the park with classical melodies performed for free every single Sunday since nineteen fourteen.
Sit beside the water lilies as hummingbirds dart among the bougainvillea. You have experienced the wild frontier spirit, naval glory, and timeless Spanish beauty of San Diego.
