Sixty five cross streets named for missions and beaches, an owner who stayed off the brochure, a street lost under the jetty, and a first name nobody has explained. All records sourced and cited.
Walk north from the jetty at the bottom of Mission Boulevard and read the street signs. Aspin Court. Anacapa Court. Allerton Court. Asbury. Then Avalon, Balboa, Brighton, and on up to Ensenada.
That is not an accident. The cross streets of Mission Beach were laid out in 1914 as an alphabet, A at the south end and Z at the north. South Mission is where it starts.
The first name in it is the one nobody has ever explained. And the man who owned the land it is written on made sure his name did not appear anywhere in the sales material.
I sell houses for a living, and this is the most interesting street plan in San Diego. Here is how it was laid out.
The bay behind Mission Beach was not called Mission Bay when the lots went up for sale. It was False Bay, the name it had carried since the Spanish called it Puerto Falso. Zelma Bays Locker, writing in the Journal of San Diego History in 1975, notes that the boom of the 1880s passed it by. Coronado, La Jolla, Pacific Beach and Ocean Beach were all promoted. The strip between False Bay and the ocean was written off as low dunes.
"Mission Bay" became official for the bay on June 2, 1915, by decision of the U.S. Geographic Board. So the first lots were sold on a bay that was still officially named False Bay.
Some time before 1914, John D. Spreckels bought parts of Pueblo Lot 1803, which covered all of present day Mission Beach. By then Spreckels owned the Hotel del Coronado and was the richest man in town.
His name is nowhere on the early sales material. The 1914 brochure for Mission Beach was put out by the Mission Beach Syndicate, "George L. Barney, Manager." The syndicate first shows up in the 1915 city directory, with offices in the American National Bank Building at Fifth and Broadway.
Locker found the owner in two places. A 1924 biography of Spreckels mentions the streetcar line he built to "the new Spreckels popular resort at Mission Beach." And a man named Harry Turner recalled taking a real estate license after 1916 to work as tract agent for Barney and Rife, sales agents for a subdivision "owned by the Spreckels interests."
That is how the sandbar was sold. Barney's name was on everything. The owner's name was on nothing.
The subdivision was surveyed in June 1914 by D. A. Loebenstein and adopted by the Common Council on December 14, 1914, as Map 1651.
Mission Boulevard runs down the middle. Ocean Front Walk and Strandway run along the ocean side, Bayside Lane and Bayside Walk along the bay side. The genius, in Locker's view, was in the sixty five short streets that cross it.
Thirteen of them were about twenty four feet wide and could take a car. Each was called a Place, and each was named for a California mission, in the same south to north order as the missions themselves.
The other fifty two were walkways ten feet wide. Each was called a Court, and each was named for a beach, a port, a resort or an island somewhere in the world. Cars reached those lots from unnamed alleys behind them.
Missions plus beaches. Mission Beach.
The Courts were named in alphabetical order, south to north, and grouped by letter, so every A sits together at the bottom and every Z at the top. Two letters were skipped, U and X. Most of the names come from England and New England.
One more thing shows up when you walk it. At the south end there are only three Courts between each pair of Places. By the north end there are as many as seven. More Courts means more lots on the same stretch of sand. Locker thought she knew why, and she said so in two words: "human nature."
Here is the order from the jetty north, as the Places and Courts sit on the map.
San Diego Place. Aspin, Anacapa, Allerton and Asbury Courts. San Luis Rey Place. Avalon, Balboa and Brighton. Capistrano Place. Catalina, Coronado and Deal. San Gabriel Place. Devon, Dover and Ensenada. Then San Fernando Place, and the blocks the roller coaster took.
Catalina Court is not on the signs any more. The City renamed it Cohasset Court on May 12, 1930.
San Diego Place is not on the signs either. It was the first cross street north of the old wooden bridge to Ocean Beach, and Locker says it was still a dedicated street in 1975 with no street sign anywhere in Mission Beach. Where it should be, Mission Boulevard ends at the jetty. In her words, the name of the first California mission is "lost under a pile of rocks."
Those blocks are north of South Mission, but they belong here. In November 1924 an amended map, Map 1809, erased the Courts between San Fernando and Ventura Places to make room for Spreckels' Mission Beach Amusement Center. Flushing, Folkstone, Galloway, Gloucester, Harbor and Huntington Courts went with them. The center opened May 30, 1925.
The map on this page is from the Sanborn Map Company, which drew fire insurance maps of American towns block by block. Its Mission Beach set is dated May 1929.
The first sheet has a small key map of the whole peninsula, and every Court in South Mission is lettered on it. Aspin, Anacapa, Allerton, Asbury. Catalina is still Catalina, a year before the rename. And San Diego Place is printed at the very tip, under the point where the bridge came in.
The key map also shows which blocks got their own detailed sheets, the ones that draw every insured building. In 1929 those sheets ran from Camino del Sur in the amusement center north to the Pacific Beach line. South of that, the map gives the streets and block numbers and nothing else. So the printed index of streets on the same sheet starts at B, with Bayside Lane. Not one South Mission Court is in it.
The streets were set in 1914. The water at the bottom of them was not finished for another half century.
The best record is an engineering paper William J. Herron of Moffatt and Nichol wrote for the 1972 Coastal Engineering conference. Before 1946, he says, Mission Bay was a natural estuary of more than 4,000 acres, with an entrance only about six feet deep. Then the work started.
Dredging and filling inside the bay began in 1946. The north jetty was finished in September 1950. The old wooden bridge from Ocean Beach was torn down, the demolition completed on January 25, 1951. The flood control channel was finished in February 1951. From March 1951 to November 1954 the federal work shut down for the Korean War. The outer entrance channel reached full width and depth in July 1955. Construction of the inlet was completed in 1959, and the whole project in 1963.
So the jetty that swallowed San Diego Place came thirty six years after the street plan it cut off.
That leaves Aspin.
Fifty two Courts, and Locker traced almost every one to a real shoreline. Anacapa is one of the Channel Islands. Asbury is Asbury Park in New Jersey.
Aspin, the very first Court in the alphabet, is the one she could not place. It is spelled Aspin on the official 1914 list. Her best guess was Aspinwall, the old name of the port of Colón in Panama, which was in the news with the canal opening in 1914. She rejected it herself. Aspinwall had been renamed Colón in 1890, and she called the idea "unlikely."
I can add one name she did not mention, and it proves nothing. The title to the Coronado peninsula, where the Hotel del Coronado was built, ran back to a man named William H. Aspinwall, who took it in 1869. I wrote about that on the Hotel del Coronado page. The developer of Mission Beach owned that hotel. Whether anybody laying out the Courts in 1914 had Aspinwall in mind, I do not know, and I have found no record that says so.
So the first word in the South Mission alphabet is still a mystery after more than a hundred years. You can stand on it anyway. It is the first Court north of the jetty.
The Courts are still ten feet wide, and the lots are still the ones Barney's syndicate sold. Current numbers for the area are in the Pacific Beach and Mission Beach market report. The old bridge to Ocean Beach has its own story, The Fishing Bridge.
Who sold the lots. Locker's sources name the Mission Beach Syndicate, with George L. Barney as manager, and later Barney and Rife as sales agents. Another local account names a different company as the developer. I have asked about it and have not settled it, so this page names the sellers Locker documented and does not call any one company the developer.
When the north jetty was finished. Herron gives September 1950. Locker, citing the City's engineering department, gives 1953. Herron was writing an engineering case history of the inlet itself, so this page uses his date, but the two do not agree.
What Aspin means. Nobody has established it. Locker rejected Aspinwall, Panama. Aspin is lettered on the 1929 key map but is not in that map's index, because the index lists only streets with building sheets. The Aspinwall name in the Coronado title is my observation, not a finding, and no source connects it to the Court.
How many Courts there are. Fifty two on the 1914 map. The 1924 amended map removed several, and a later Court, Wavecrest, appeared at the north end with no record of its adoption. The count on the ground today is not fifty two.
What was dredged. Herron documents dredging and filling inside the bay and the building of the jetties and channels. This page does not claim that the platted blocks of South Mission are themselves fill.
The date of the map. The map images are from 1929, fifteen years after the 1914 survey. They show the streets as they stood in 1929, which is why Catalina Court still appears on them.
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