Jan 2012 Update on transportation Planning in San Diego: Link
Dropping in for a weekend from the rust-belt to the sun-belt, from Baltimore to hip San Diego, what are the visitor's necessarily superficial findings. How is San Diego?
Maybe this: San Diego is located somewhere between drab and glory; trajectory towards glory.
Drab one might ask, how is that? Eternal sun, palm trees, ocean, surf: anything but drab! Well, just a tiny bit drab, mostly to comfort Baltimore.
When the morning mist doesn't lift and downtown shows it's Monday morning sleepy face, then the surface parking lots stand out like missing teeth, so do the vagrants and homeless lurking just about everywhere and the overwhelmingly uninspiring seventies office buildings staring bleakly at each other across the wide streets; too wide for comfort and yet rarely do they boast a bike lane. The civic plaza with theater and municipal offices and catty corner from a gigantic parking garage is a sad substitute for a meaningful public space and even the trendy mobile vending trucks (“roach coaches”) and coffee stands can't help that.
But then, the many new apartment buildings and the cranes that tower over several construction sites exude promise and energy. So does the bright red trolley system winding through town. The baseball stadium complex took a chapter from Baltimore and sits downtown without much parking, one side open to the Gaslamp Quarter with its renovated facades and restaurants a testament to historic preservation as economic development. It isn't as quaint or old as Fells Point but besides the sports bars, rock places and beer shacks which have patrons sitting at the bar as early as ten o’clock in the morning, there are very decent ethnic restaurants such as a Thai white table cloth place patronized by what appear to be Thai lunch guests. (continued below pictures)
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| viaduct from Balboa Park to the west as seen from landing plane |
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| the area known as Little Italy |
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| New housing in Little Italy |
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| Transit Oriented Development at City College station |
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| New housing on eastern section of downtown |
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| New housing near Harbor. Train Station in foreground |
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| Houses in South Park |
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| Henry Moore sculpture at Balboa Park |
The working harbor is smallish (foreign trade: Baltimore #14 in the nation, San Diego #72) and the airport is outright cozy with only one runway and just a spitting distance between the drop off curb and the jet way. Landing there provides a substitute for a helicopter tour so well in focus comes the city. This is also quite noticeable on the ground, jets drowning out conversations over a long swath of prime real estate.
The Pacific ocean cools the town with a permanent breeze and provides the scenic vistas and is such a relief from the desert hinterland that can be kept green only by heroic efforts.
Hillcrest, North Park and South Park placed like pearls around Balboa Park, are close-to- the- city neighborhoods with mostly single family homes tightly packed into the gridded streets, interlaced by an occasional canyon and by those ubiquitous freeways. Each has it's own commercial strip and center, the commercial hub is University Avenue which comes close to being a vibrant urban boulevard in several places even if this is not downtown! The commercial offerings, bakeries, wine stores, healthy food markets etc. prove that these middle of the road communities are gentrifying at a rapid pace. The neighborhood streets are way more diverse than in the east, stylistically but also ethnically. The lesbian couple homeowner with chicken in the yard next to the divided up rental house for professional start ups next to a couple of Mexicans with nine kids and two abandoned cars in the backyard next to new home-buyers who made their house sparkle. You want to buy one of these small bungalows? It will set you back 400 grand at least, maybe 650 if the place has been already renovated. For sale signs are sparse, no matter the housing crisis and a fiscally broken State.
Styles abound: American Craftsmen, Spanish Mission, Spanish Revival, Adobe Indian and Colonial Indian (Bangla style bungalows), occasionally an American foursquare (“Colonial”). Most with some sort of porch. Tall palm trees are dotting the sidewalks and skyline. Front yards are often lush and chock-full of exotic plants. Where the landscaping efforts fail, things look quickly trashy; all the cute eclectic neighborhood architecture notwithstanding. The brown dust easily gets the upper hand as a reminder that all of the glory here needs man and water.
Water. So much is that an issue in Southern California that the writer turned predictor of the future, James Howard Kunstler, shrugs San Diego off as a basket case in his recent article in Orion Magazine, in which he tries to describe the future of cities. http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/6336. I think Kunstler is as wrong regarding San Diego as in the rest of his predictions of gloom and doom. He does not allow for technical innovation as a game-changer. But that would be another story altogether.
However, the rich culture of this place created and formed by Indians, Spanish conquistadores, seafarers, Mexicans, narcotics king-pins and adorers of sunshine and surf for over 240 years (the Balboa Park was the location of two world fares in 1915 and1935 includes today the city’s beautiful cultural mile) would be a great example of human ingenuity succeeding against the odds. The story is still very incomplete. So incomplete, in fact, that the visitor from history rich old lady Baltimore could easily find solace in the fact that San Diego, although twice the size of Baltimore, is still not yet a real metropolis. But be careful, this place is still growing, even if the facade is flimsy at times. There are no 40,000 vacant houses here, no obvious ghettos and not as many children left behind in failing schools. The City Paper like alternative magazine might be thinner, the list of concerts might be shorter and the harbor has fewer attractions than Baltimore’s; but the gay and lesbian pride parade is bigger and that is a good sign of things to come.
Friday night, art walk in North Little Italy: a thin veneer of history in the shape of historic little houses incongruously strewn about among parking lots, auto shops competes with an equally thin but obviously growing veneer of a new class bursting onto the scene. The new gentry lives in mixed use apartment buildings sprouting like mushroom and ignoring the din of the landing planes coming in incessantly at a mere 150 feet, ignoring also the horns of the freight and commuter trains cutting across the streets to the west. Outdoor dining is de-rigeur and so are warehouses and shops converted to designer stores and galleries. Free alcohol fuels the crowds in the galleries, young, good looking, trim, tan and well mostly dressed, the cognoscenti recognizing art on the walls and the art of public celebration of life. The gallery scene on Kettner Boulevard changes abruptly into an also alcohol fueled gathering of Harley fans in a motorcycle showroom with Dixie band. Outside next to the parked machines a few historic police cars of the SDPD. This beautifully illustrates the diversity at work in San Diego.
Or on Coronado: a beautiful sandy beach at the San Diego Bay protected by the Loma Point peninsula is a playground for the rich who reside in meticulously manicured million dollar estates overlooking the sunset in the west or the bay and downtown silhouette in the east. The beach is populated by those families that fuel the area's economic development, Asian and Latino immigrants who by now outnumber Caucasians. They park their battered minivans or Hyundais in front of the big villages and there is no trace of class warfare at all.
The demise of San Diego due to water shortage seems as distant and unlikely as the Big One that could wipe all this out in an instant.
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| Culture (Balboa Park, Museums) |
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| Nature: Surf in the USA |
