A man flew a glider off Otay Mesa twenty years before the Wright brothers. The city paid another man ten thousand dollars to make it rain, and the month after he took the money a dam came apart and sent a wall of water to the ocean. The streets in Talmadge are named after three silent film actresses a developer used as a sales gimmick. Pioneer Park in Mission Hills is a cemetery, and most of the headstones were hauled off when the city made it a park.
Mission Bay is not a bay. Rancho Santa Fe started as a tree farm that failed. There was a utopian commune on Point Loma, and the Spirit of St. Louis was built here in sixty days.
Every one of these is anchored to a neighborhood people actually live in, and every one links to what that market looks like now. Where a story has been written up in full, the entry links to it.
The glider off Otay Mesa
Twenty years before the Wright brothers, a guy named John Montgomery flew a glider off Otay Mesa. The American Society of Mechanical Engineers put a landmark plaque on it and calls it the first heavier than air craft to achieve controlled, piloted flight.
The city hired a rainmaker and a dam broke
In December 1915 the San Diego City Council agreed to pay a man named Charles Hatfield ten thousand dollars to make it rain. In January the Lower Otay Dam came apart and sent a forty foot wall of water twelve miles to the ocean. The city never paid him.
Chula Vista was a lemon grid
Chula Vista was laid out in 1888 as five acre lots with eighty foot wide streets, three hundred dollars an acre. They planted lemons, and for a while it was the largest lemon growing area in the world.
Every oddly deep lot and oversized street in old Chula Vista is a leftover from that grid.
National City got the railroad first
National City, not downtown, was the west coast end of the Santa Fe transcontinental railroad. The first trains came in in 1885, and the 1882 depot is the only one of the five original terminus stations left standing anywhere.
The first stone on the border
The marble obelisk where the border meets the ocean was the first marker ever placed on the United States Mexico line. It sits behind two fences now and you can only see it from a distance.
The mastodon argument
A freeway job on State Route 54 turned up mastodon bones that a San Diego museum says were broken by humans a hundred and thirty thousand years ago. Most archaeologists do not buy it. That fight is still going.
Lemon Grove beat Brown v. Board by 23 years
In 1931 the parents of Lemon Grove's Mexican American schoolkids sued the school board for putting their children in a separate wooden schoolhouse. They won. A San Diego judge ordered the kids back into the main school, twenty three years before Brown versus Board of Education.
The Army's horse cavalry ended in Campo
There was a cavalry post out in Campo where Black soldiers, the Buffalo Soldiers, trained on horseback to patrol the border. It was the last place in California to house mounted Black troops. When they shipped out in 1944 the horse cavalry era was done.
The Julian hotel
The hotel in the middle of Julian was built in 1897 by Albert Robinson, who was born into slavery in Missouri, and his wife Margaret. They ran it together and it is still taking guests.
The road built for one piece of glass
The mirror for the Palomar telescope weighed fourteen and a half tons, and the county built a road up the mountain just to get it there. It crawled up in November 1947 with two trucks pushing from behind. That telescope was the biggest in the world until 1993.
Sweetwater Dam
Sweetwater Dam above Bonita was finished in 1888 and was once the tallest masonry arch dam in the country. It has been overtopped three times and it is still there.
The racetrack around Lindo Lake
There used to be a two mile dirt racing oval built right around Lindo Lake in Lakeside, and Barney Oldfield raced on it. There is a monument on Maine Avenue marking the spot.
The parachute towers in El Cajon
Gillespie Field was the Marine Corps parachute school in World War Two. Two towers, two hundred fifty six feet tall, stood over the valley there until the mid fifties. The museum says about three thousand Marines graduated in sixteen months without a single fatality, and the Marine paratroopers never made a combat jump in the war.
The bridge that taught America how to build bridges
The Interstate 8 bridge over Pine Valley Creek was an engineering experiment. Finished in 1974 across a canyon about four hundred fifty feet wide and four hundred forty feet deep, it was built out from its piers in segments with nothing holding it up from below.
The observatory on Mount Laguna
San Diego State runs a real research observatory on Mount Laguna at six thousand one hundred feet, with reflecting telescopes up to fifty inches. The university calls it one of the best observatory sites in the continental United States.
The boat houses in Encinitas
Two houses in Encinitas are shaped like ships. A carpenter built them in the late 1920s out of lumber he pulled from a torn down 1888 beach dance hall. They are still on Third Street and people still live in them.
Fletcher Cove was cut with a fire hose
Fletcher Cove in Solana Beach is not a natural gap in the bluff. They blasted it out with high pressure water piped from the Lake Hodges spillway. One man worked the hose for about three months and the beach opened on the Fourth of July, 1924.
The Del Mar skull lost 37,000 years
A human skull dug up in Del Mar was once dated at forty eight thousand years old. Federal geologists redated the same bone and got about eleven thousand. It lost thirty seven thousand years in one lab result.
The pepper trees came from one sailor
The first pepper trees in Alta California were planted at Mission San Luis Rey in 1830, from seeds a sailor carried up from Peru. Every pepper tree you see in Southern California traces back to those. The mission says the one still standing in its garden is the oldest living pepper tree in California.
Vista owns a ranch an hour inland
The city of Vista's water district owns a forty three thousand acre former Spanish land grant cattle ranch, a dam, and a lake, deep in the backcountry near Warner Springs. They bought it in 1946 and they still have it, including a ranch house that is a National Historic Landmark.
Rancho Santa Fe is a failed railroad experiment
Rancho Santa Fe exists because a railroad planted three and a half million eucalyptus trees there to make railroad ties, and the wood turned out to be useless for it. The trees stayed, the railroad went into farming instead, and the town got built around the failure.
The most expensive zip code in the county is landscaped by a mistake.
There was a real battle in San Pasqual Valley
The bloodiest battle of the Mexican American War fought in California happened in the San Pasqual Valley on December 6, 1846. General Kearny's men got cut up by Californio lancers and ended up besieged on a hill with nothing to eat but their mules.
Fallbrook is named off a honey jar
Fallbrook got its name from Fallbrook, Pennsylvania. A settler named Vital Reche brought it out in the 1860s, put it on his honey, and put it on the first schoolhouse he donated the land for.
The top of the county is not where you think
The highest point in San Diego County is not Cuyamaca and it is not Palomar. It is Hot Springs Mountain above Warner Springs, about six thousand five hundred thirty feet, and it beats Cuyamaca by about twenty feet. It sits on the Los Coyotes reservation, so the county's own summit is on tribal land.
Borrego Springs was second in the world
Borrego Springs was the second place on earth certified as an International Dark Sky Community, back in 2009. The state park wrapped around it got the same protection in 2018, so the town and the park are protected as a pair.
The turkey war
Two San Diego County towns both claimed to be the Turkey Capital of the World and it was never settled. Valley Center had a ranch shipping two hundred thousand birds a year in the thirties and forties. Ramona claimed the same title. Nobody ever won.
Talmadge is named after silent movie stars
The streets in Talmadge are named Norma, Constance and Natalie after three silent film actresses. The developer used the Talmadge sisters as a sales gimmick in 1926. Those big black gates on Monroe Avenue were part of the pitch and they are still standing.
Normal Heights is named after a college
Normal Heights is named after a teacher's college. The San Diego Normal School opened in 1899 and became San Diego State. One building from it is still standing on Park Boulevard and it is on the National Register.
Mission Bay is not a bay
Mission Bay is not a bay. It was a tidal marsh called False Bay. Starting in the late 1940s the city dredged twenty five million cubic yards of sand and silt out of it. Almost every island and beach out there is man made.
Every waterfront view out there is sitting on dirt somebody moved.
They built space rockets in Kearny Mesa
The rockets that put the first American astronauts in orbit were built in Kearny Mesa. General Dynamics started the Atlas missile plant there in 1956, and that same missile became the launch vehicle for manned spaceflight.
One man moved the San Diego River
The San Diego River used to empty straight into the bay and it was silting up the harbor. In 1853 an Army lieutenant named George Derby built a dike to swing it west into what is now Mission Bay. That is the only reason the river comes out at Ocean Beach today.
Pioneer Park is a cemetery
Pioneer Park in Mission Hills is a cemetery. About sixteen hundred people were buried there starting in the 1870s. When the city made it a park most of the headstones were hauled off and dumped in a ravine at Mount Hope, where they still are. A fire had already destroyed nearly all the burial records.
Linda Vista was three thousand houses in three hundred days
Linda Vista was built as emergency federal housing for aircraft workers. Three thousand houses in three hundred days starting in 1941. The shopping center they threw up for it in 1943 won an architecture award. Those same little houses now trade over a million dollars.
Sherman Heights cost eighty dollars
In June 1867 Matthew Sherman bought the hundred and sixty acres that became Sherman Heights for fifty cents an acre. Eighty dollars for the whole thing. He subdivided it two years later, made his money back, became mayor, and donated the land the Sherman school still sits on.
San Diego had cable cars
San Diego had cable cars, like San Francisco. They opened in June 1890 and ran up Fourth Avenue, pulled by fifty one thousand feet of cable off two coal fired steam engines at Fourth and Spruce. The bank behind it collapsed and the whole system was dead inside a couple of years.
San Diego's first subdivision was never built
Middletown was laid out in 1850 across six hundred eighty seven acres between Old Town and the new waterfront, platted with five public squares and an open community lot. Almost none of it got built, because there was nobody to buy it yet.
The trolley bridge from OB to Mission Beach
From 1915 to 1950 there was a wooden bridge fifty feet wide crossing from Ocean Beach to Mission Beach. It carried a trolley line, two lanes of cars and a sidewalk. They closed it in 1950 and tore it down the next year.
The Spirit of St. Louis was built here in sixty days
The Spirit of St. Louis was designed and built in San Diego in sixty days for a little over ten thousand dollars. After Paris, Lindbergh flew it back to the same dirt field it left from, and sixty thousand people turned out at Balboa Stadium to meet him.
The Children's Pool was a gift, and the seals came later
The Children's Pool wall in La Jolla was paid for by Ellen Browning Scripps and finished in 1931, built so kids would have somewhere safe to swim. The seals did not show up until the mid 1990s.
The utopian commune on Point Loma
There was a utopian society on Point Loma that built an open air Greek theater in 1901. It is one of the first in America, two years before Berkeley's. It is still standing on the Point Loma Nazarene campus and they still put on shows in it.
North Island used to be an island
North Island was actually an island. A tidal channel called the Spanish Bight separated it from Coronado, and the Navy filled it in during the war for more buildable land. That is the only reason you can drive onto North Island today.
The houses over the water
Before 1942 the Japanese families who crewed San Diego's tuna fleet lived in houses built out over the water of the bay, behind the cannery. On April 8, 1942 every one of them was removed, the temple was locked, and that neighborhood is gone without a trace.