San Diego

San Diego, a port of entry on the Pacific Ocean, is the seat of San Diego County, California. It sits beside San Diego Bay, a twelve-mile-long natural harbor. Located only twelve miles from the US-Mexico border, San Diego was the first Spanish settlement in California. Despite its burgeoning development, crowded freeways, and long commutes, it is considered one of the most livable cities in the United States.

Landscape

Situated along San Diego Bay, San Diego lies 125 miles southeast of Los Angeles and is the last US city on the road to Mexico. The sheltered bay and the city's desert surroundings contribute to San Diego's sunny, mild climate. The average elevation is 13 feet above sea level, although the terrain is pleasantly varied with rolling hills.

Streets in the main part of San Diego are planned on a simple grid. North-south streets are numbered, and east-west streets are named in alphabetical order. Traffic approaches the city on Interstate 5 (I-5, the San Diego Freeway) from Los Angeles or the Mexican border, on Interstate 15 (I-15) from Las Vegas, and on Interstate 8 (I-8, the Ocean Beach Freeway and the Mission Valley Freeway) from Arizona.

Today, the city of San Diego occupies 342.4 square miles (886.8 square kilometers). Old Town, the site of the original Spanish settlement, and Balboa Park, the city's cultural center, are separated from the harbor by the San Diego Freeway to the west. Mission Bay Park extends north of Point Loma, a hook-shaped peninsula that shelters San Diego Bay. Conspicuous in the harbor is Coronado Island, home to a grand Victorian hotel and its unlikely neighbor, the Naval Air Station (NAS) North Island. The bridge to Coronado ends, on the mainland side, in Logan Heights, a historic Mexican American community.

People

The US Census Bureau estimated the population of San Diego to be 1,381,162 as of 2022, making it the second-largest city in the state, behind only Los Angeles. As of 2022, 48.7 percent of San Diegans over age twenty-five had at least a bachelor's degree, while 89.7 precent had graduated high school. The median age of city residents was 35.4, and the median annual household income in 2022 was $98,657.

As of 2022, the population of San Diego was approximately 41.5 percent White, 17.4 percent Asian or Asian American, 5.9 percent Black or African American, less than 1 percent Native Hawaiian or American Indian, and 12.8 percent multiracial. About 30.1 percent of the population identified as Hispanic or Latino. The multicultural nature of the city is apparent everywhere, though nowhere more so than in the innumerable range of well-patronized ethnic restaurants available throughout the city.

Additionally, some communities in San Diego proudly emphasize their ethnic roots. Downtown San Diego is home to Little Italy, for example, and Barrio Logan, the southern portion of Logan Heights, was once the second-largest Mexican American enclave in the United States. Among the city's many other neighborhoods, Old Town celebrates the city's colonial Spanish past, and throughout the city are large and small museums preserving pieces of a complex international heritage. Mission Bay, northwest of downtown, is home to beaches, campgrounds, boating facilities, and SeaWorld San Diego, the first SeaWorld theme park.

Economy

As of December 2023, the unemployment rate in San Diego County was 4.3 percent, slightly lower than the national rate of 3.7 percent. The largest employment sectors in the city of San Diego were health care and social assistance; professional, scientific, and technical services; accommodation and food services; retail trade; educational services; and manufacturing. Newer key industries in the city include telecommunications, wireless technology, cybersecurity, software development, renewable energy, and biotechnology.

Tourism has become vital to the city's economic health. A historic 28.8 million visitors traveled to San Diego in 2022, of whom about 16.5 million stayed overnight. Tourists spent approximately $13.6 billion, and tourism-related businesses employed approximately 194,000 workers. About 556 hotels, motels, and bed-and-breakfasts operated in San Diego.

Spectator sports draw visitors and locals alike to San Diego's sports venues. San Diego County Credit Union (SDCCU) Stadium (formerly Qualcomm Stadium) is home to the San Diego State University football team, the Aztecs. It was previously also the home of the San Diego Padres baseball team and the San Diego Chargers football team, but the Padres moved to Petco Park in downtown San Diego in 2004, and the Chargers moved to Los Angeles in 2017. The city's American Hockey League (AHL) team, the San Diego Gulls, plays at the Valley View Casino Center (formerly the San Diego Sports Arena) in Point Loma.

Because of the area's mild climate, golf can be played year-round on San Diego's nearly ninety golf courses, many of which provide dramatic views of the sea or the desert. Sport fishing is also popular, and charter boats are available. San Diego is also popular among outdoor enthusiasts who enjoy boating, surfing, water skiing, paragliding and hang gliding.

Landmarks

Fortunately for tourists, many of San Diego's popular landmarks are found in clusters. The twelve-hundred-acre Balboa Park, for instance, contains thirteen museums and other attractions. Among the most unusual of these are the Aerospace and the Automotive Museums and, housed in several small buildings, the Museum of Man. Another is the Marston House, a 1905 Craftsman-style house furnished with handmade furniture. Several of these museum buildings were constructed for one of two major international expositions, the Panama-California Exposition and the California Pacific International Exposition, which took place in Balboa in 1915–16 and 1935–36, respectively.

Very near Balboa Park is the San Diego Zoo, one of the first zoos to maintain its animals in simulated natural environments. The zoo is home to more than four thousand animals, including giant pandas, and features an African rain forest and a children's zoo. The zoo's vast size is made more manageable by moving sidewalks and an aerial tramway.

San Diego is a major theater town. In Balboa Park alone there are three remarkable theaters: the Shakespearean Old Globe Theater, Cassius Carter Center Stage (a theater in the round), and the outdoor Lowell Davis Festival Theater. Among local theater companies, standouts are the San Diego Repertory Company and the Southeastern Community Theatre. Publicly supported musical organizations include the San Diego Symphony, performing at Copley Symphony Hall, and the San Diego Opera.

Old Town San Diego Historic Park is a six-block, semi-preserved, semi-restored Spanish Mexican colonial town featuring museums and other exhibits. The Old Town Plaza invites strolling and reflection..

The historic Gaslamp Quarter in downtown preserves the residential and commercial architecture of late Victorian San Diego. Most buildings have been converted to shops or restaurants. The atmosphere is charming, and a museum is available to explain the area's history.

The Cabrillo National Monument on Point Loma honors the landing of European explorer Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo at San Diego Bay in 1542. Visitors to Point Loma can also admire a vintage nineteenth-century lighthouse and, from December to February, watch migrating Pacific gray whales.

History

On September 28, 1592, two Spanish ships, the San Salvador and the Victoria, sailed into a fine natural harbor in the coastline north of Mexico. Their commander, Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, either Portuguese or Spanish by birth, named the harbor San Miguel, after the saint whose feast day it was, and claimed it for the Spanish crown. In 1602 a second Spanish commander, Sebastián Vizcaíno, charted the Pacific coastline and systematically changed most of the names Cabrillo had chosen. He renamed San Miguel Harbor in honor of San Diego (or Didacus) of Alcalá, the little-known saint after whom his ship was named. The land along the harbor of San Diego was inhabited by several indigenous tribes, largely peaceful, who lived by hunting, fishing, and gathering food.

In 1769, following orders from Spain to colonize its claimed land, Gaspar de Portolà established a presidio, or fort, beside the harbor. Accompanying him was a Franciscan priest, Junípero Serra, who established the first mission in California near the presidio, naming it Mission San Diego de Alcalá. One by one, moving north, Serra and his successors built twenty more missions, which together not only introduced Christianity and agricultural skills to California's first inhabitants but also created a communications network for the otherwise isolated Spanish settlers.

In 1825, Mexico, which had declared independence from Spain, assumed control of Spanish settlements in Alta California (as it called the territory above Baja California), and chose San Diego as the capital of both Alta and Baja California. As a capital city, San Diego attracted colonists from Mexico, who carved out homesteads near the presidio. San Diego's inhabitants now included Spanish nationals and their children, Mexican families, and Christianized Native Americans.

Then, in 1845, war broke out between Mexico and the United States, and a year later Commodore Stockton secured San Diego Bay for the United States. The peace treaty signed by the two nations in 1848 ceded Alta California to the United States. In 1850, when California became the thirty-first state, San Diego was incorporated as a city. It was no longer a capital, however, and as San Francisco and Los Angeles grew larger and more prosperous, San Diego, beside its natural harbor, remained a quiet, essentially agricultural city.

By 1900, four successive events had changed San Diego. In 1867, Alonzo Horton bought one thousand acres of land near the harbor at twenty-seven cents per acre, then sold parcels virtually at cost to anyone willing to build on them. The result was "New Town," the core of the modern city. The second event was the discovery, in 1870, of gold in eastern San Diego County. The excitement brought speculators to the city, and business development that lasted far longer than the gold rush. The third event was a devastating fire in 1872, which destroyed much of "Old Town," although some adobe structures from the original Spanish settlement survived. The fourth event was the arrival in the 1880s of the Santa Fe railroad, and with it tourists, hotels, and more inhabitants. By 1900, the city's population was nearly eighteen thousand and climbing.

In the new century, San Diego pioneered a new industry: aviation. In 1911, Glen Curtiss achieved the first successful seaplane flight in San Diego Bay. Charles Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis was built by San Diego craftsmen.

The Panama-California Exposition (1915–16) and the California Pacific International Exposition (1935–36) successfully attracted visitors and drew worldwide attention to San Diego's equable climate and natural beauty. Balboa Park, the site of both expositions, was set aside as a 1,100-acre preserve in 1868.

After World War I, the US Navy selected San Diego, with its strategically located harbor, as the headquarters of its Pacific Fleet. However, it was not until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that the impact of that decision became clear. In the spring of 1942, nearly 1,200 San Diegans of Japanese descent were rounded up and sent to remote internment camps for the war's duration. San Diego itself was transformed from a city famous for its temperate climate and beauty to a fully mobilized industrial and military center. During that period, it served as the training center for the Navajo Code Talkers, whose language skills were vital to the war effort. After the war, the military presence remained, with Miramar Naval Air Station, the nation's largest naval air base, and, nearby, the US Marines' Camp Pendleton. Military personnel, even after leaving the service, brought their families to San Diego and settled down.

After the war, San Diegans, optimistic with victory, voted for a $2 million initiative to begin recovering a large, polluted, silted-up area called Mission Bay. After years of patient work, the result was declared an engineering and political triumph, the start of a new phase in the history of San Diego.

Because of its proximity to the US-Mexico border, San Diego has grappled with unauthorized immigration and drug trafficking in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Its first border fence was installed in the 1990s and a secondary wall in the early 2000s. In late 2018, hundreds of Central American migrants seeking asylum attempted to breach the border there, fueling calls for a border barrier to be extended.

Lack of affordable housing became another major problem for the area. By 2022, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development ranked San Diego County eighth in the nation for the size of its homeless population, with more than ten thousand.

Trivia

• Quarantine laws kept animals brought to the 1915–16 exposition from returning home; hence, the San Diego Zoo.
• San Diego hosted the Republican National Convention in 1996.
• SeaWorld San Diego was host to the original orca Shamu, who died in 1971. Since then, the name Shamu has been used for various orcas who performed in a "stadium" that held seven million gallons of water. In 2016, SeaWorld announced it was ending its orca breeding program and phasing out its theatrical orca performances.

Bibliography

Amero, Richard W. Balboa Park and the 1915 Exposition. Edited by Michael Kelly, History Press, 2013.

"April 8, 1942: San Diegans Leave for Internment Camps." The San Diego Union-Tribune, 8 Apr. 2018, www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/150-years/sd-me-150-years-april-8-htmlstory.html. Accessed 3 May 2019.

Bokovoy, Matthew F. The San Diego World's Fairs and Southwestern Memory, 1880–1940. U of New Mexico P, 2005.

Burnett, John. "Border Patrol Makes Its Case for an Expanded 'Border Barrier.'" NPR, www.npr.org/2019/01/11/684037990/border-patrol-makes-its-case-for-an-expanded-border-barrier. Accessed 3 May 2019.

Crawford, Richard W. San Diego Yesterday. History Press, 2013.

"Fast Facts about the City of San Diego." The City of San Diego, www.sandiego.gov/humanresources/programs/assistance/factshistory/facts. Accessed 20 Feb. 2024.

"Industry Research." San Diego Tourism Authority, www.sandiego.org/about/industry-research.aspx. Accessed 20 Feb. 2024.

"Key Facts and Figures." The City of San Diego, www.sandiego.gov/economic-development/sandiego/facts. Accessed 20 Feb. 2024.

Pryde, Philip R., editor. San Diego: An Introduction to the Region. 5th ed., Sunbelt Publications, 2014.

"San Diego (City), California." QuickFacts, US Census Bureau,https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/sandiegocitycalifornia/PST045221. Accessed 20 Feb. 2024.

Warth, Gary. "Homelessness in San Diego Rose 22% Last Year. More Are Women, Seniors, and Veterans." The San Diego Union-Tribune, 8 June 2023, https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/homelessness/story/2023-06-08/homelessness-in-san-diego-county-rose-22-percent-last-year-more-of-them-are-women-seniors-and-veterans. Accessed 20 Feb. 2024.