San Diego History · Coronado and North Island
North Island was an island, and the Navy filled the channel with the bay.
Glenn Curtiss got the use of it for free in 1911. The channel was gone by 1944. All records sourced and cited.
Glenn Curtiss got the use of it for free in 1911. The channel was gone by 1944. All records sourced and cited.
You can drive onto North Island. For most of its history you could not, because there was water in the way.
A tidal channel called the Spanish Bight separated it from Coronado. The federal architectural record describes the original ground precisely: Coronado was two separate pieces of land totaling four thousand one hundred and sixty five acres, a two square mile peninsula and an island, joined to it only by a sand bar that went under at high water.
The Navy filled the channel. The material that filled it came out of the hole they were digging next to it, because an aircraft carrier needs somewhere to turn around.
Three things before the story runs. A Spreckels company handed Glenn Curtiss the use of the entire island for nothing, for three years. The first American seaplane flew off it, and the man who became the Navy's Pilot Number One learned to fly there. And before the island stopped being an island, dredging made it six hundred and twenty acres bigger.
Hampton L. Storey and Elisha Babcock bought the property in 1886 to build the Hotel del Coronado.
The federal government's first piece of North Island was eighteen acres, condemned to build a jetty that would keep the harbor channel from silting shut. In 1901 it took another thirty eight acres for Fort Pio Pico, a coastal defense fort and the first military reservation on the island.
Everything else out there was sand and brush.
Glenn Curtiss heard about San Diego at a Los Angeles aviation meet in 1910. The San Diego Aero Club worked on him, and the Spreckels owned Coronado Beach Company made him an offer that is hard to improve on: the use of North Island, at no charge, for three years.
Curtiss came and looked. "I visited the city in January, 1911," he wrote, "and after a thorough inspection of the grounds offered as an aviation field, decided to make that city the headquarters for the winter."
What he was given was a flat sandy island about four miles long and two miles wide, with the Spanish Bight on one side of it, and, in the words of the account, uninhabited except by hundreds of jackrabbits, cottontails, snipe and quail.
On January 26, 1911, Curtiss put two pontoons on a biplane in place of wheels and flew the first American seaplane off the water there.
The next month he landed one alongside the USS Pennsylvania, which was the argument. A machine that can land on water can work from a ship.
The students that first season were the beginning of two air forces.
For the Navy, Lieutenant Theodore G. Ellyson, who became Navy Pilot Number One. For the Army, First Lieutenant Paul W. Beck and Second Lieutenants G. E. M. Kelly and John C. Walker Junior. Two civilians, Charles Witmer and Robert St. Henry. A balloonist named Lincoln Beechey came later.
The first Naval Aviation Unit was established in 1911.
The Army and the Navy both built on North Island and both wanted the whole thing. They signed an agreement in 1918 giving the Navy the northern portion.
That did not settle it. The dispute ran another seventeen years and ended only when Franklin Roosevelt signed an executive order. The place was designated Naval Air Station North Island on October 26, 1935.
The core buildings were designed by Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, the architect of the 1915 exposition buildings in Balboa Park, and his plan is still legible on the base.
Through the 1930s a major dredging operation in San Diego Bay put sixteen million cubic yards of material onto North Island and added six hundred and twenty acres to it.
The Navy's own engineering record lays out where and when. The fill on the northern and western bayfronts went in during 1936. The fill along the seaward side went in during 1940. Additional small fills went in along the west side of the bay entrance in 1935, 1940 and 1961.
Every bit of that land is dredge spoil. The bayfront of the air station, from the Coronado city limits to the mouth of the bay, is built on fill.
Then the war, and carriers.
A carrier needs a turning basin and a quay to tie up to, and both of those mean taking an enormous volume of material off the bottom of the bay. The Navy's record states what was done with it.
"The estuary that once existed between Coronado and North Island was filled in 1944 when the aircraft carrier turning basin was dredged and the carrier berthing quay was built."
The Spanish Bight was filled with the bay. What came out of the carrier basin went into the channel, and the island and the peninsula became one piece of ground.
Buildings went up on top of it during the war: storage, medical facilities, administration, recreation.
Nothing. That is the point. There is no channel, no bridge over it and no trace of it at street level, and the only way to see where it was is to look at a photograph taken before 1944.
A significant share of the ground in Coronado and on North Island is engineered fill, placed in specific decades for specific reasons, with the dates on record. The 1930s bayfront fill, the 1940 seaward fill and the 1944 channel fill are all documented in the Navy's own engineering history.
That matters in ways that outlast any market cycle. Fill behaves differently from native ground, it is mapped, and anyone doing serious diligence on a property near the bayfront will find it. It is not a reason to avoid anything. It is a reason to know what you are standing on, and to ask the question early rather than during escrow.
Current numbers are in the Coronado market report, and the wider area is in Coast and Peninsula.
The year the channel was filled. The Navy's own engineering record, quoted inside the federal architectural survey, says 1944. Other published accounts put it in 1945. This piece uses 1944 because that is the figure in the engineering record and it is tied there to a specific job, the dredging of the carrier turning basin. Anyone who finds 1945 elsewhere is not wrong to, and the work plainly ran across more than one year.
Where the fill came from. The record states that the estuary was filled in 1944 when the turning basin was dredged and the quay built. It states the two things together. It does not say in so many words that the spoil from the basin is the material that went into the channel, and this piece should not be read as quoting it for that.
Two spellings. The federal record gives the 1886 buyers as Hampton L. Storey and Elisha Babcock, and gives the balloonist as Lincoln Beechey. Both names appear elsewhere with different spellings. The sources' own spellings are used here.
Fill and buildability are separate questions. This piece reports where fill was placed and when, because that is documented. It makes no claim about the condition, the suitability or the seismic behavior of any particular parcel, which is a question for a soils report and not for a history page.
More San Diego history: stories from around the county, one place at a time.