I’m on vacation and I decided to be a tourist in my own city today. I started off in Balboa Park and actually discovered things I had never noticed before.
Did you ever notice that the California Tower has a ship spire (?) at the top?
 
Or that there is a colorful dome at the House of […]

Continue reading San Diego Architecture

Many San Diegans celebrate Memorial Day, aka the unofficial start of summer, with beach barbeques, day drinking, and camping trips. The sand in Pacific Beach and Del Mar is always packed with partiers, picnicking families, and carefree children. Ok, so San Diego knows how to have fun. But what about San Diego’s sense of history? […]

Continue reading Meaningful Memorial Day Celebrations in San Diego

People think I’m weird because I read obituaries…  but you discover the most interesting things.  First off, although I’m a little young to have been a Frankie Laine fan, I’d certainly heard of him…  and apparently I’d heard him over the years, singing songs that have become classics.  I didn’t know he sang the theme song for Rawhide, […]

Continue reading Frankie Laine– Gone, but not forgotten

Jack Macpherson, 69 of La Jolla
From the LA Times:
[Macpherson]… earned a permanent niche in the history of Southern California beach culture, thanks to the loosely organized group of surfers and other beach-area denizens that he co-founded in the early 1960s — a crew whose logo was an abstract rendering of a mushroom cloud and whose […]

Continue reading Local Legend Lost…

Happy Halloween everyone!  In the “spirit” of the holiday I thought I’d pass along this interesting article in the UT about an Old Town Ghost:
….  To be sure, McConaughy Hosue, a two-story Victorian style structure looks like the kind of place that could be haunted…

I know about an alleged haint in Room 309 at the Horton […]

Continue reading Restless Spirits….

Some homeowners inside downtown’s El Cortez created a web site to explain their battle to stop construction on a building 40 feet away. From Save the Historic El Cortez:
There is no right to build anything on the El Cortez block because of a covenant that protects it until 2025.
That isn’t stopping Peter Janopaul and […]

Continue reading The El Cortez Battle

While planning another trip, I stumbled onto Roadside America. It’s tagline reads Guide to Uniquely Odd Tourist Attractions. Of course San Diego has a few entries. Some of the highlights include:

World’s Largest Lemon (Lemon Grove)
Shoe Tree on Frisbee Course (Balboa Park)
Gravity Hill (La Jolla)
Muffler Man (Escondido)

Can you think […]

Continue reading Roadside America on San Diego

INC Magazine wrote a great piece on Buck Knives, which is now available on their web site.  The Buck Stopped Here tells the story of a successful San Diego company that was driven from California due to the high cost of doing business here.  Buck Knives relocated from El Cajon to Idaho Falls, Idaho at […]

Continue reading Buck Knives Story in INC Magazine

When it comes to San Diego’s Old Town, and the carpetbagger New York based Delaware North’s big old ideas to turn the state park into a semi-historic recreation of the mid-1800s they neglected to mention when they bid for the contract that the revenues would be reminiscent of mid-1800s San Diego as well.  Revenues are […]

Continue reading Living in the Past

Headline news today over at the UT, “We’re now No. 8″ referring to the fact that San Antonio, Texas has knocked San Diego off the number 7 spot according to the latest Census Bureau estimates.
In 2004 and 2005, the city actually lost population–  8,276 people, to be exact– for the first time this decade.  San […]

Continue reading Bigger isn’t always better…

This looks like a fabulous event…. “cutting edge contemporary art” music and dancing at the Red Ball, a fundraiser for Sushi Performance and Visual ARt. Come dressed in red, or dressed as your favorite revolutionary.
June 10, 2006. 9 pm…. If you’re a member already, tickets are only $35 if you’re not a […]

Continue reading sushi and stuff

Old man river, that old man river,
He don’t say nothin’, but he must know  somethin’
That old man river, he just keeps rolling along.
~lyrics: Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern
If we want to make sure our old river keep rolling along, we need to take care of it.  Join the fun, and do a good deed […]

Continue reading Old Man River…

Here is a link to a video I shot of the Hotel San Diego implosion this morning. I could say the video was shaky due to the explosions, but the truth is I had 4 shots of espresso prior to the event.

Continue reading Downtown Implosion

The Hotel San Diego will be demolished on Saturday morning.
Dynamite will reduce the 92-year-old Hotel San Diego to dust and rubble Saturday, making way for a new federal courthouse.

Continue reading Here Today, Gone Tommorow

When you’re alone and life is making you lonely you can always go…
Downtown
When you’ve got worries, all the noise and the hurry Seems to help, I know…
Downtown
Just listen to the music of the traffic in the city
Linger on the sidewalk where the neon signs are pretty
How can you lose?
*  *  *
This is the song that […]

Continue reading Petula Clark

Grab your grannie and gather ’round for:
Our Stories From the Great Depression
6:30 p.m. Thursday March 16
Oceanside Museum of Art
In conjuction with the ongoing show ART OF THE WPA ERA :: COLLECTIONS OF THE SAN DIEGO REGION **
through March 19, 2006
Museum executive director Skip Pahl is asking those who remember to share their stories with the […]

Continue reading Stories of the Depression Era

San Diego Serenade: Tom Waits High School Yearbook Sells for $288.24
Tom Waits High School Yearbook Sells for $288.24
Got any of this Idyll High School Class of 1966 yearbooks lying around the house? Well now’s the time to dust them off and turn them in to straight cash homie! One of of the above pictured yearbooks […]

Continue reading San Diego Serenade: Tom Waits High School Yearbook Sells for $288.24

JeSais noted the end of the telegraph a few posts back, which made me interested in when San Diego got a line to be able to send those telegrams. According to the San Diego Historical Society website, it was 1870.
The year 1870 opened with business brisk and real estate act­ive. In March, four weeks’ sales […]

Continue reading Telegraph no more, Western Union arrived in 1870

End of an era?? Don’t all those people living in condos need a hardware store???
From San Diego Union Tribune:
By Frank Green
Downtown San Diego’s oldest retail business, no longer a snug fit in a hub of condominiums, tourist businesses and gentrification, is about to turn its storefront key one last time before moving on. … […]

Continue reading San Diego Hardware packing up its old-time toolbox to leave downtown

Straight from the Hip by Matthew Alice | www.sdreader.com
So by the excruciatingly exacting standards of the Matthew Alice Center for More or Less Correct Information, we declare Dr. Paul Jacobs, CEO, Qualcomm, to be the former lead Trekkie of the Star Fleet Club of La Jolla. We don’t have first-hand confirmation of this, mind you. […]

Continue reading Dr. Paul Jacobs, Qualcomm CEO, Former Prez of Starfleet Club of La Jolla