San Diego History · Middletown and Uptown
A San Diego neighborhood was platted in 1850 and nobody built on it for seventy years.
Surveyed before Horton bought downtown. Filled in during the 1920s. All records sourced and cited.
Surveyed before Horton bought downtown. Filled in during the 1920s. All records sourced and cited.
Middletown was surveyed, subdivided into streets and blocks, and drawn on paper in 1850.
That is seventeen years before Alonzo Horton bought the land that became downtown. The City of San Diego's own historic context statement says it plainly: the tract "predated even Horton's Addition."
Almost nothing was built on it until the 1920s.
Three things before the story runs. A group of speculators led by a lawyer bought six hundred and eighty seven acres to make it. The plan had five public squares and an open community lot called the Triangle. And in 1887, thirty seven years in, a book was still telling readers the place was about to fill up fast.
California had just been admitted to the United States, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo had been ratified, and the ranchos were losing their grip on the land.
The city's history also records what that meant for the people who had been here longest. Native Americans, in the document's words, "could neither own nor purchase land, were often relegated to marginal rancherias, most often on the fringes of development." One of those rancherias sat at the southwestern corner of what is now the Uptown planning area, near India and Cedar.
Into that, a group of real estate speculators led by an attorney named Thomas Sutherland bought six hundred and eighty seven acres near the western edge of the area and established the Middletown tract.
They did the work. The tract was surveyed. It was subdivided into streets and blocks. The plans called for five public squares and an open community lot known as the Triangle.
Then the city document delivers the ending in one sentence. "At the time, however, San Diegans had little incentive to relocate from their settlement at Old Town, and plans for Middletown failed to materialize."
They built a town and nobody came.
Thirty seven years later, Douglas Gunn published a book about San Diego County full of photogravures and descriptions of everything worth selling in it.
Here is what it said about this ground.
"The construction of the electric street railway (now in progress) is causing this small intervening space to fill up very fast. The Middletown mesa will soon be crowned with fine residences, as the view afforded is one of the finest on the Bay."
Soon. The electric street railway was in progress. The view was one of the finest on the bay, which was true then and is true now.
The same book notes that the California Southern Railroad ran around the Middletown shore of the bay on its way into town.
All of it accurate, and all of it about forty years early.
The city's historic context gives the reason, and it is not mysterious.
"Poor access to streetcar lines precluded its development until other sections of the Planning Area had been built out."
A hillside tract on the far western edge of town, with the finest view on the bay, was worth nothing to a buyer who could not get to work from it. Everything closer in got built first. Middletown waited for the last streetcar.
Between the 1920s and the 1930s several hundred homes went up on the westward facing slopes.
They were mostly single family houses. A small commercial node called Five Points grew up at the intersection of Washington and India streets and anchored the place.
Seventy years after the survey.
For contrast, in the same decade the deed restrictions in Mission Hills next door expressly prohibited hotels, apartments, and houses worth less than thirty five hundred dollars.
Then the State Division of Highways built Interstate 5 along the western and southern edges of Uptown.
The city's assessment of how that was handled is not diplomatic. The route was intended to convenience suburban commuters, and, in the document's words, "little effort was made to mitigate its impact on existing communities, and in effect entire blocks in Middletown were razed to accommodate the freeway and its accompanying overpasses, underpasses and ramps."
A neighborhood that took seventy years to get built lost entire blocks of itself inside a decade.
Five Points is still the corner. The freeway is still the western edge. And the street grid you drive on is the one Thomas Sutherland's surveyors laid out in 1850, which has now outlasted the speculators who ordered it, the town that ignored it, the street railway that was going to fill it, and the highway department that cut pieces out of it.
The five public squares and the Triangle are on the 1850 plan. The record does not say they were ever built.
Two facts govern property here and neither is a market condition.
The street and block pattern is a mid nineteenth century subdivision, which means lot sizes, orientations and alley arrangements that came out of a surveyor's assumptions in 1850 rather than anything modern. And the western edge is a freeway, which is permanent, with everything that implies for noise, access and what the parcels nearest to it are.
Both are findable before you write an offer and neither will change.
Current numbers for the area are in the Mission Hills market report, and the wider area is in Metro and Central.
Not the first subdivision in San Diego. The city's document says Middletown predated Horton's Addition, and that is the claim this piece makes. It does not say Middletown was the first subdivision in San Diego, and neither does this piece. Other 1850 townsite schemes existed on the same bay.
The squares are on a plan, not on the ground. Five public squares and the Triangle appear in the city's description of what the 1850 plans called for. The record consulted here does not say any of them were built, and this piece does not claim they were.
Who was selling. Picturesque San Diego was a promotional book about the county, and its author, Douglas Gunn, went on to become mayor of San Diego. Its enthusiasm about the Middletown mesa is quoted here as what a booster was saying in 1887, not as a neutral forecast.
The photograph is the view, not the tract. The 1887 photogravure on this page is San Diego looking west toward Point Loma. It shows the half built condition of the town in that year, which is the point, but it is not a labeled view of the Middletown tract boundaries.
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