Photo by Craig Carlson

Architect Jon Jerde: “A city is the mark of civility. It reflects the extent to which a civilization has evolved."

Horton Plaza floats in the downtown landscape: disconcerting, surreal, a dream painted some forty-nine colors. Open almost two years, the $140 million, six-and-a-half-block shopping center-entertainment complex houses four major department stores, 150 specialty shops, eateries, a seven-screen cinema, and two stages.

The New York Times described Horton Plaza as a “Southern California fantasy of a European street.”

Photo by Craig Carlson

“People are beginning to believe it’s really there,” says Bob Dobson, who until last month was Horton Plaza's general manager and who is now the leasing manager, special projects, for Ernest W. Hahn, Inc., the plaza’s developer. Some 30,000 people visit Horton Plaza each day, and a third of them are tourists.

Swift silver escalators, pitched at a steep angle climb to Level 3 for movies and food.

Photo by Craig Carlson

“I can’t think of another center that has a similar draw,” says Dobson, adding that Horton Plaza attracts a greater variety of visitors than do most centers — “the affluent, trolley riders, sailors, Mexican nationals, Japanese tourists.”

“Stores are checked every morning at ten. If so and so’s store wasn’t open, the officer notes that."

Photo by Craig Carlson

7:00 A.M. ALONG BROADWAY. In the original Horton Plaza, a palm tree-ringed pocket park laid out in 1867 by San Diego founder Alonzo Horton, the cupola-topped fountain gurgles as it has for eight decades. The park is now a forecourt to the arched facade of Robinson’s department store, an updating in bright pink of the sixteenth-century basilica in Vicenza.

"People came in, they walked all around the model, and they were very polite. Then they all walked out. Our team was devastated."

Photo by Craig Carlson

His long legs crossed, Darryl sits near the fountain, his gaze on Broadway’s early morning traffic. Darryl had risen at six in his nearby hotel, fed his parakeet, bought coffee from Carl’s Jr., and then came to the park. He drawls like a cowboy and looks like a cowboy: tanned and lean in plaid shirt and jeans. Green-eyed, sad-eyed, Darryl’s face doesn’t show the forty-seven years he’s been alive. He retired early. “I lost a daughter to cancer, when I was driving a bus in Orlando, Florida. She died at age two. Her name was Darla Jo. My mother died, half-brother died, my aunt died. I took those pretty well in stride. My daughter died, my whole body folded inward.”

Darryl casts his glance across benches. Some men he knows; most he doesn’t. “People come and go to this park like seasons come and go, like leaves pop out, and leaves drop off. But more are cornin’ in than goin’ out.”

Snores rise from a grizzled man on the bench opposite. His belly heaves between shirt and jeans. A woman in overalls — with, apparently, nothing on under — twirls around and around on bare toes. Headphones sparkle above her hair, and wires run from her ears to a cassette player tucked in the bib of her overalls.

“They got people down here who ought to be under supervision,” says Darryl. “They eat out of them garbage cans. You say, ‘Hey, man, why don’t you go down to I and Sixteenth at Catholic Worker? And they’re too lazy to walk down there to get a free meal. Some people, you know, can’t be helped.”

Its radio hissing, a police car noses up along Fourth Avenue. “Last summer it seemed like police were always around. Now you don’t see them so often. If you try layin’ down, they’ll leave you alone — unless you lay on the ground. But you can’t sleep on the grass, they keep sprinklers going.” In Horton Plaza, says Darryl, “no way a body could sleep at night. Not that it hasn’t been tried. But they got tight security.” Horton Plaza, Darryl says, hadn’t done people like him, people who live on fixed incomes, any good or harm. “Nothin’ over there,” he shrugs, “we can afford.”

7:45 A M., LEVEL 2, Horton Plaza. At the base of the eighty-year-old Jessop’s clock below, a grey cat licks its paws clean. Startled by footfalls, it leaps up, tail bristling, and scurries across Level i of what the New York Times described as a “Southern California fantasy of a European street” and what Architectural Record called “spirited architecture, an elaborate compendium of historicist forms.” The cat zig-zags back and forth between the triangular zebra-striped palazzo that houses Jessop’s Jewelers and the red galleria that at one end deconstructs into a trompe l’oeil ruin. Up three levels, beneath UA’s art moderne marquee, pigeons search out popcorn hulls. Hearing footsteps, the plump-breasted birds flap their wings and take off — past awnings, terraces, colonnades, turrets, and towers — into clear sky.

Brown-uniformed officers gather in Horton Plaza’s security office, which is lit by flickering closed-circuit television monitors. These monitors track the streets immediately outside the mall, the mall walkways, and parking areas. They do not reach into store interiors, which are outside security’s jurisdiction. The thirty-four officers (both uniformed and plain-clothed) divide three shifts. Their beat encompasses 900,000 square feet on three commercial levels and seven floors of parking. Larger than police forces of some neighboring communities, Horton Plaza’s security force is two to three times larger than most shopping centers, too. (In addition to this force, each anchor store has its own security.) Officers carry flashlights and handcuffs, but no guns.

Assistant director of security Chuck Wrangler, a shave away from six feet tall, twenty years of his forty-four in the navy and another four in a Midwestern military academy, says, “I’m still trying to catch up with the civilian population and figure out how they operate.” Some people come every day. “We know them by name,” says Wrangler, “and where they sit. If they see somebody a little off the ordinary pass, they’ll stop one of us and say, ‘So and so, over there, you oughta watch him.’ “People realize now that you can come here, even at night, and not be afraid. Women who work in stores, when we opened, they’d ask us, ‘Will you walk us to our cars?’ We hear this request less and less. New people ask older employees, ’How is it in Horton Plaza?’ Old employees say, ‘You don't have to worry about anything here.’

“When we first set up here, we put out our perimeters, what belonged to us. Street people, if they panhandle, we say, ‘This is not allowed here. People come here to enjoy themselves.’ If they only walk through, we don’t bother them. Prostitutes, they got the word. When we saw that activity, we’d say. This is private property. If you continue that behavior here, you'll come under a 602, for trespassing. If you want to come back here and not engage in that behavior, fine.’ It worked. They go now to the park or across the street.”

Several attempts were made to use Horton Plaza as a dropoff for illegal aliens. “A driver would pull into the parking area, let off aliens, and have them stay here three or four hours. Then the aliens would be picked up by the Lyceum.” At first, says Wrangler, security spoke to the “players” in this game, saying, “This is not the place for this.” Later security began to take license numbers. “When INS came by to make their runs, we would inform them .”

Gangs have tried to claim territory at Horton Plaza. “When kids come in, flyin' their colors, we say, ‘Excuse me, but flying your colors is not appropriate here.’ We ask them to take them off. We make a point of being very firm, very polite, and trying to win their cooperation. Polite,” says Wrangler, “works quite a bit for us here.”

Plaza management wants stores open on time. “Stores are checked every morning at ten,” says Wrangler. “If so and so’s store wasn’t open, the officer notes that. At five minutes after ten, another officer checks the stores that didn’t open at ten. By that time, most are open.” If not, a report is filed. At night security checks to make sure that no store has closed early.

But most of a security officer’s watch is spent giving directions and helping shoppers find lost cars. Some calls come from call boxes in the parking garages. “Then an officer will come to you on the golf cart, ask you where you came in, ask. Are you a fruit or a vegetable?' You should see some guys’ faces when you ask ’em that!”

8:00 A.M. TO 10:00 A.M., Horton Plaza Park. Darryl introduces the neatly barbered, bearded man next to him on the bench. His name is David. “What I like about David,” says Darryl, “is he has a good healthy laugh.” A thirty-nine-year-old lifetime San Diego resident, David lives downtown. Every morning, early, like Darryl, he brings coffee from Carl’s, Jr., to the park. In his strangled, breathless voice, David recalls the two theaters where Robinson’s is and further on. a Western Union office. “Believe me,” says David. “I’m a native. There were buildings there, believe me.”

David explains his halting speech: “I can't even talk to a woman without my throat seizing up. My doctor says to me, ‘David, when you get to talking, keep on.’ I am disturbed in a way. I am a little bit schizy. For a time, I was very, very sick. But there’s nothing wrong with me now.”

Looking toward Darryl, David says, “Darryl is my friend. I don’t know what I'd do without him. I need a friend real bad. These benches are a friendship center to me.” Long ago, at Third and Washington, says David, County Mental Health ran a friendship center. “They closed it up fifteen years ago for lack of donations. I don’t understand why they don’t make another one. There’s people that need a place to go and have coffee and friends, and there isn't one to go to. That’s why I come here.”

As a child, David made rapid progress on trumpet. “I was fifteen when I played ‘Sugar Blues’ by heart, with the hiccup and everything, the way Clyde McCoy played it, exactly like him. When I was a teen-ager, Stan Kenton took me aside. He told me, ‘David, you have a lot of talent.’ ” David heaves a huge sigh and says: “I can’t figure out why I don't get into music again. I don't understand it. I don’t know why.” “Maybe you’ve outgrown it,” offers Darryl.

“No, no,” David says. “No.”

“If it’s like me, David, I know I have this thing in my heart about young women, but I’m forty-seven, and I've outgrown it.” Darryl laughs.

Back in Horton Plaza, workers and early visitors are beginning to arrive. The silver escalator ascends from Broadway Circle carrying a khaki Bermuda shorts-garbed couple up onto Level 1. “Wow! Eye candy!” exclaims the woman as her gaze travels across multileveled walkways, ramps, and bridges; across pastel-slathered walls; fluttering orange banners; striped awnings; neon signs.

“I wonder,” says her companion, “who thought this up?”

BY 1976, LOS ANGELES architect Jon Jerde, who was then thirty-six years old, had tired of designing standard, “cookie-cutter” suburban malls. “Dinosaurs,” he called them. Suburban tracts around these malls seemed to him “utterly lacking in communality.” As the Seventies segued into the Eighties, Jerde’s observations led him to believe that Americans longed to venture out of suburbia, wanted more than “the murmur of the stereo and the gurgle of the Jacuzzi to break the lonely peace.” They wanted urban, communal experience. They wanted each other.

But most of the cities’ downtown cores, like San Diego’s, had “de-evolved” during suburban population booms. New cities, and modifications of older cities in the U.S. and in Europe, with brutal high-rises that dwarf human scale and lack communal spaces, only further demonstrated to Jerde how far off-track twentieth-century man had strayed.

City making had become a lost art — although Jerde is not sure that city making was ever a known art. Great cities, like Topsy, simply grew. “All great cities that we look to as models took many, many hundreds, if not thousands of years of trial and error to be what they are today,” says Jerde.

In 1977 Jerde left his job as director of design for a firm that Architectural Record described as “best known for its competent, but unmemorable commercial ventures, including several Hahn shopping centers.” He joined with several friends to develop urban mixed-use districts in Los Angeles and Seattle.

Jon Jerde and friends hoped to revive city making and restore communality to desolate urban and suburban spaces. But what would that “revival” look like? What would it be? What made Boston “get better every year” and Los Angeles “get crazier”? “Here we sat,” says Jerde, “in the mid-Twentieth Century, without so much as a clue as to what to do next.”

8:15 A M., HORTON PLAZA. The pace has quickened. Marie Callender’s breakfast cooks don chef caps, stir Belgian waffles. At Irvine Ranch, red raspberries. olallaberries, blueberries, melons, and plums stand on carts in produce aisles. A sleepy man sets out clams and prawns on crushed ice beds; deli chefs chop vegetables. On every level, storekeepers move through still-darkened shops, arranging, then rearranging T-shirts, greeting cards, truffles, books, cans of tennis balls, stuffed toys, candle holders, records, and shoes.

At Nordstrom, opening time is fifteen minutes off, and final preparations are under way for day one of a half-yearly sale. After closing the night before, employees had brought out the advertised sale items — summer dresses, skirts, blouses, slacks, and shorts. Direction signs were posted, and extra dressing rooms were set up, and tables for charge-only customers. Early this morning, employees — all wearing red so as to be easily identified — are back, poised to take on the crowds.

HORTON PLAZA PARK. “I tell you somethin' that happened in my hotel room that will make your heart stop,” says Darryl. “One month I went down to the rescue mission and rededicated my life to the Lord. About two months after that, I was sitting on my bed in my hotel room, and I had this poster on the door of Johann Sebastian Bach. Right on the cheek of Bach’s face on the poster, Christ hung there on the cross, and then he died.

“My heart was about going out of my chest. I kept sitting on the bed, and all at once this light appeared, hovering in the air, this glaring light. It come from nowhere. Back to my left, the light was grey, it was like wind was blowing a smoky dusky grey. After five seconds, that grey light disappeared. Then to my right, a white light appeared, and I stood straight up because I didn’t know what was coming down. I thought I’d done freaked out, I thought, ‘Darryl, you’ve lost it.’ ”

David says: ‘‘Swing. Maynard Ferguson. Benny Carter’s big band, I wouldn’t have been in bands like that, but I would have gone to Vegas. I could have been a studio man.”

8:30 A.M., LEVEL 2, NORDSTROM. Tall blonde Ruthanne strides through the heavy glass doors. Her rust-colored linen jacket hangs fashionably long, her skirt cinched with wide self-belt. Her blouse is beige linen, and from around her neck, on wooden beads, dangle wooden zebras, elephants, and camels. She wears Adidas.

Ruthanne leans slightly, with one hip. into the rack. Grave concentration stamps her face as she runs a hand through one after another of size eights. She sighs. Her eyebrows lift, she cocks her head. She touches the lace collar on a black-and-white print with full skirt, pulls the skirt forward, and looks at it as a Sunday painter might survey landscape. She frowns and shakes her head. Ruthanne appears unaware of shoppers around her. She smiles and strokes another, studies its pleats. She pulls forward a puce linen, examines the dropped belt buttoned at back. Three dresses drape her arm — two black-and-white prints and the puce. A clerk takes the dresses and leads Ruthanne to a dressing room.

8:45 A.M., LEVEL 3, HORTON PLAZA. Claudia’s employees began at 7:00 a.m. to roll out dough for the 500 or so cinnamon rolls that customers will buy today. It takes two and a half hours to bring a batch of rolls out of the ovens. As would-be customers wait for 9:00 a.m. opening time, a yeasty, cinnamon-and-raisin, sugared aroma floats across pastel stucco. “They pipe the smell out here,” one woman tells another.

Claudia, thirty-six, had been a grant writer for social service agencies. When she moved to California from Salt Lake City and began to look for a job, she had little success. ‘‘So I decided to do something on my own. Every time I baked cinnamon rolls — from my mother’s recipe — people would knock on my door and ask, ‘Do you have an extra?’ I decided, ‘If you can sell cookies, you can sell cinnamon rolls.’

“We sell a lot for breakfast. At noon people buy rolls to take back to work. At night they buy a cinnamon roll and sneak it into the movies. On weekends it’s hard to get near the store. One Saturday last Christmas, we sold 3500 rolls.”

9:15 A.M. HORTON PLAZA Park. His paunch hangs over his jeans, and a mustache droops past the corners of his mouth. He greets Darryl with “Buenos dIas.” “Say, where you been?” asks Darryl. They talk, then shake hands good-bye, and the man walks on. To David, Darryl says, “That Mexican guy, his friend the Puerto Rican is gone. He left town.” David, frowning, nods and re-enters the conversation. “Back when Woody Herman formed his own group, the Herd.... Ol’ Woody’s still going strong. Benny Goodman, he died a few months ago.”

“Think big bands will ever come back, David?” asks Darryl.

“Oh, yeah, they’ll be back.”

Sun has burned off the coastal fog, and a bit of wind comes up. David grins. “Breeze cornin’ off the ocean makes it really beautiful right here. It’s perfect. It’s gonna be ninety-two inland today. It’s gonna be seventy here.”

9:30 A.M., LEVEL 3, HORTON Plaza. Ruthanne sits at a table across from Boudin’s, coffee and croissant before her. Ruthanne is twenty-seven, a legal secretary, native Californian, married and divorced at eighteen. She has taken off the morning to “get into the dresses before anyone picks them over.” During lunch she often walks the five blocks from her office to Horton Plaza. Before the mall opened, “this was a zoo down here. You could smell urine. You couldn’t get a block without getting panhandled or some creep says something nasty. I love my job. I love my boss. But I used to think of changing, to get out of downtown.” Ruthanne opens her Nordstrom shopping bag. Six pairs of pantyhose. Four leotards “for Jazzercise.” She has bought one dress, a Liz Claiborne black-and-white print, scoop-necked and front buttoned with round jet buttons. “Not on sale,” she says, caricaturing a frown.

Pushing streaked blonde bangs off her forehead, Ruthanne looks down at her slim hands. No, she did not need another dress. She counts through her closet’s contents and laughs. “You really want me to tell you? Why I shop? I can tell you how I shop. Why it would take a shrink.

“Before I even take a dress off the rack, I imagine myself wearing it. I get a picture, you know? — of me in it.” If she’s in love (now she isn’t — “Thank God!”), she pictures herself first in one garment, then another, as she goes through dresses on a rack. “I try them on first, mentally.” She sees herself in a hotel bar or seated at her desk or at the edge of a chair in the ocean-view apartment in Pacific Beach that she shares with her half-sister. She watches him — “my guy” she calls him — arrive at her front door or office desk. She tries to imagine what he sees when he looks at her. She may mentally flip through half a dozen dresses on a rack, adding to each dress proper shoes, stockings, purse, and even perfume, until she strikes upon the one to which, again in her imagination, her guy says, “Wow.”

Ruthanne blushes. “I guess this sounds pretty silly.”

10:00 A.M., HORTON PLAZA Park. Pushing a battered bicycle, a black man stops in front of Darryl. “What you doin’, fella?” asks Darryl.

“Not much, man,” the bicyclist answers. “How d’ya like my new bike?” “Nice rig,” says Darryl, touching the rusty fender.

The man smiles, says, “I figure, it’ll be all right goin’ down, but it’ll be hell comin’ back up.”

“For sure,” says Darryl.

The bicyclist waves, pushes on down Broadway.

Darryl turns back to David, “The fella bought that bicycle yesterday at a pawn shop up at Fifth, by the dirty movie house.” David nods.

Helen, in her fifties, “bottle-blonde” and clad in a pink T-shirt, walks toward David and Darryl. David, seeing her, stands and, hands in pockets, strides away toward First Avenue.

“Helen and David usually talk a lot,” says Darryl. “I don’t know why he walked off. He’s like that. One day you’re his best friend, he’s all over you. Next day he’ll walk by you and not know you.”

ARCHITECT JON JERDE: “A city is the mark of civility. It reflects the extent to which a civilization has evolved. If we look at the United States today and try to apply that measure to our own cities and communities, we fall radically short.” The city-making game, Jerde decided, would have to be re-invented. This “game” would involve myriad pieces. “You’re not only dealing with artistic issues, with physical senses, and the object-making world. You’re dealing with a simultaneous equation of politics, dollars, marketplace realities, entrenchment of corporate points of view, egos. All that has to be adjusted and tuned to get even a tiny little movement toward progress.”

One solution showed itself to Jerde when, as a college student, he traveled through southern European hill towns. There he saw towns whose builders had focused less on individual buildings than on creation of mixed-use districts. Jerde characterizes these districts as “a missing scale in the culture that has been left unattended for almost a hundred years ... a missing scale that is somewhere between the size of a city and the size of a building.”

By 1977 developer Ernest Hahn had in hand rough plans for the proposed Horton Plaza. These plans showed a two-story, covered mall modeled on Hahn's University Towne Centre in La Jolla. In October of that same year, Hahn telephoned Jerde. ‘‘You are always wanting to do fantastic things downtown, why don't you come help me with this?”

Jerde accepted Hahn’s challenge, and “to do fantastic things,” he drew together a collective of like-minded architects. Thus, the Jerde Partnership (which now includes twenty-three architects) was formed.

The Jerde Partnership discovered in San Diego an inner city no one had come to in years and an area beyond that was “literally paradise.’' Jerde: “So to get anybody downtown was thought of as an unbelievable, almost impossible chore. Whatever this beast was we were going to create, it had to have extraordinary attractiveness to do this job of pulling people out of the suburbs and back downtown.”-

11:10 A.M., LEVEL 2, OUTSIDE Banana Republic, what passersby say they like about Horton Plaza:

“Stupendous colors, the banners, and —” she pointed toward a hanging basket planted with pink petunias and deep blue lobelia, “flowers. I’m inspired to go home and work on my patio.”

“Great place to walk. Like negotiating a river, with new twists and turns, surprises, at every bend.”

“The many different storefronts. It's like a village.”

“You can have fun and not buy anything.”

11:15 A.M., SEATED AT A table near Horton Plaza offices, she puffs a Camel Light while knitting the last few brown inches onto a muffler for her great-grandson in Cleveland. Her hair has been dyed with reference to its girlhood auburn. Her dress is navy blue. A white handkerchief pokes out of a pocket. Stockings droop on her skinny, veined legs. She has loosed the laces on her navy Keds. Her diamond solitaire flashes. Her number-five knitting needles click. She lives in a studio apartment with kitchenette, on Fifth Avenue. Before she retired, she was “in retail, in New York. Little place, second floor on East 59th. Six days a week, three of us. Ladies' foundation and undergarments. All of it fitted. Brassieres, each cup made-to-order, every seam sewn for you. We did Broadway stars, Rockettes. Beautiful things, we sold. We could take a 200-pound woman and give a dignified shape to her. Now busts droops, fat rolls up and out, jiggles. You sit here and see pantylines, even on somebody who thinks to herself she’s a great lady, and she doesn’t think nothing of it.”

Her ball of yarn drops out of her lap to her feet, and she asks a boy in shorts, walking with his mother, “Could you pick that up for me, young man?” He does, and she thanks him and asks his mother, “Can I offer him a stick of gum?” His mother nods a mute yes, and a package of Spearmint is produced from behind the white V of hanky that stands out of the navy blue dress pocket.

“I like to watch little children. I like to get away from old people.” The reason for Horton Plaza’s success, she says, is that nothing was here to start with. “Anything’s bound to be better. Isn’t it?”

11:30A.M.,TOPMOST LEVEL, restaurant row. Deborah Sussman of Sussman-Prejza (whose Santa Monica-based company is responsible for Horton Plaza’s colors and graphic design): “I asked my assistant to match a color to the sky at a certain time of day between 11:30 and noon. She did. And in that half hour, that blue actually disappears. It is the same color as the sky.”

11:45 A.M., OUTSIDE BRENTANO'S, level 1, passersby say what they don’t like about Horton Plaza:

“No place to buy cigarettes except way upstairs under that striped umbrella.”

“No shop like Pretty and Plump [a store exclusively for heavyset women]. God didn't break the mold, you know, at size twelves!”

“Parking entrance too hard to find.”

“I don’t like bums in the park and on city bus benches. Wasn’t the city going to move them on?”

Noon, Horton Plaza, every eatery pumps out orders. A long line threads from Boardwalk Fries. “Yup.” says a fry cook, handing over a paper funnel of French-fried potatoes, “lunch crowds are always awesome.” From Great Gyros, another line forms. At La Salsa, orders for blue corn tortillas are placed. Downstairs, where banjos twang, both Chelsea Court’s and First Avenue’s dining area tables fill.

12:30 P.M., LEVEL 1, SHOPPERS exiting the Broadway, tell what, if anything, they’ve bought:

A family of five: “We’re Zonies,” says the father, a tanned insurance salesman in Madras shorts. “We’re from Phoenix. We come to Southern California every other year. Disneyland. Sea World. Wild Animal Park. Tijuana. There was never anything like this here before,” he says, adding that he understood that shopping mall developers from all over came here to “see how Horton Plaza works.” He thought downtown centers might become a trend and that “gutted-out cities” could be “recycled” into something “viable and beautiful.” He and the family are going upstairs to Marie Callender’s for lunch. He thinks he might make a meal out of a piece of lemon meringue pie.

A fashionable woman in her late fifties, from Mission Hills, comes to Horton Plaza two to three times a month. “A wedding gift. Until Horton Plaza? No, I came downtown for the opera or symphony.... Oh, no, never by myself.” Two sisters, one visiting from the Twin Cities. They had looked for a Father’s Day gift and hadn’t found it. The Minnesotan was here four years ago. Downtown was a dump then, “sailors and lowlife. Depressing. I don't even remember what we did here.” She looks to her sister, who shrugs and says, “Driving through to somewhere else.” A pregnant woman from Clairemont pushes a stroller, packages wedged in behind her two-year-old son. “Underwear. A bathrobe. I looked at dresses. I won’t buy anything,” she rubs her belly, “until this is done.”

A seventeen-year-old girl, will be a senior next year at San Diego High: “I only went in to get an application for a summer job. I’m applying in almost every store.”

A retired couple from Connecticut, “visiting grandchildren. Mother here bought walking shoes,” the husband says. “A pretty mall, real pretty. Not boring. Frankly, I usually get bored in these places.”

THE HORTON PLAZA PROJECT demanded that Jerde’s group “create placeness out of no-placeness” Specifically, the group wanted to give San Diego a “colony of cohesion,” a neighborhood or district within downtown that would be “not foreign to the city but at the same time be foreign to the city,” something like Washington, D.C.’s Georgetown or London’s Mayfair. In such instances, says Jerde, “we’ve found that by eccentrically dealing with the grid [in San Diego, the six-block area into which their project was to stand], touching it in a certain way, magical things begin to happen with regard to the notion of creating a district or neighborhood or special kind of place.” Jerde “tweaked” the grid, introducing a gentle S-curve to induce leisurely, even aimless ambling. From this curve — “Jerde’s curve” it has come to be called — a multilevel, diagonal street system devolved, and from that street system, various levels, Horton Plaza’s “subsets,” sprang up.

Jerde: “We never thought of Horton Plaza as a project or as a building, but rather as a poly-place. Many, many, many parts would make it up. And it should have its own uniqueness by virtue of an eccentric posture. On the other hand, it should be familiar.”

For the familiar, the group drew upon “the wacky eccentricity, the many, many kinds of architecture that all sort of blend together” in Southern California. The Jerde Partnership and Deborah Sussman of Sussman-Pnejza dipped into colors predominant in San Diego’s old and new buildings.

Given San Diego’s mild climate and extraordinary quality of light — Jerde says, “It’s the thing that L.A. used to have, this unbelievable glowing light quality” — he lifted the roof off Hahn's original two-level design. Then, taking note of San Diego’s domes and towers, Jerde’s team replicated, then “tweaked” these forms, using them as “punctuation” and “identity” devices for key elements in the center. The Santa Fe depot’s dome, for example, now striped with zig-zags, was popped onto the building that would house Mervyn’s.

1:30 P.M., LEVEL 2. THE BARRELS inside the House of Almonds are heaped with almonds and walnuts (salted, unsalted, yogurt-dipped, cocoa-powdered, chocolate-dipped), honeyed apricots, jumbles of dried fruit, and gummi bears. Strollers’ eyes widen as they pass. Store manager Gary offers a taste to those who come in. Plump, with a deep cleft in his chin — “Both my father and mother have deep-clefted chins!” — Gary has been at the House of Almonds for four months. His previous job as a housewares salesman at Robinson’s left him cold. “I enjoy selling this better than pots and pans. Housewares are something people need to buy. This,” he ran his hand above a heaped display of almonds, “they buy because they want it ”

“People ask us if we know how many calories are in something. We laugh, say, ‘Oh. none.’ Women’s magazines,” he adds, “are saying that men find that women with some meat on their bones are more attractive. If you’re fifteen-twenty pounds overweight, your life is more comfortable. Right?”

A man in chinos and short-sleeve shirt walks in. Casting his eyes over heaped barrels and glass-front display cases behind which hand-dipped chocolates rest in paper frills, he looks puzzled.

“Something for your sweet tooth?” asks Gary.

“Well....” He frowns.

“How about a chocolate gummi bear? Ever had a gummi bear?"

“No.” The man shakes his head.

“Well,” says Gary, pointing to red, green, yellow, and orange jellied bear shapes, "That’s a gummi bear, there, and these,” Gary catches up a chocolate-covered bear in a metal scoop, “are chocolate-covered gummi bears.”

The man takes the candy between thumb and forefinger, examines it. and pops it in his mouth. His forehead wrinkles while he chews cautiously, using his incisors. Then, after a moment, with wry dismay, he looks toward Gary, says, “Thank you. It’s pretty good.”

2:00 P.M., HORTON PLAZA PARK. Darryl leans across his own crossed knees and says, “I told an artist down at Seaport Village about what I told you about what happened in my hotel room. Nobody as long as I live, to the last breath I take out of my body, nobody will not be able to tell me there’s no God over us.

“You know, I am one of these type of guys, I don’t figure everything out to be true. I was study in’ that vision. I figured it was one of two things — it was the Holy Spirit, or I was losin’ my mind. I went out to the VA Hospital, and the doctor there told me there was nothin’ wrong. That night I missed the last bus back and had to walk the eighteen miles back into town, to here.”

BY 1980 THE JERDE PARTNERSHIP was ready to show its model. “When we presented the first model for Horton Plaza, we had an experience with this missing scale.” The group had built a model twenty-five feet square, “hyped in every way. It had lights and sound, and spotlights..,. It was unbelievably beautiful.

“We had a great unveiling with the mayor [Mayor Pete Wilson], the city council, department store executives, hotel people, the developer, and his financial partners. We were all half dead from having built the model for the last ten days for twenty-four hours a day. And people came in, they walked all around the model, and they were very polite. Then they all walked out. Our team was devastated. We couldn't figure out what had happened. And that didn’t make sense, because we knew the model was something that you either terribly hated or wildly loved.”

Four days passed. Then calls began coming in. “People were saying, ‘Wow, that model was fantastic, incredible!’ It began to dawn on us that they had not known how to judge the model. People judge things in relation to other things they know. A fountain pen is relative to all other fountain pens, or a cup is relative to all other cups. Most people do not have an opinion about six blocks of a city.”

2:00 P.M., LEVEL 1. ALL along Horton Plaza’s curving street, high-wheeled carts, reminiscent of peddlers’ carts, offer goods and services. Individuals and businesses lease carts from plaza management on a week-to-week basis. “We’re not the first in the country to do this,” says Marla Koosed, director of the cart program since Horton Plaza's opening. “But to the extent that we do it, we are unusual. Certainly, the program is novel for Southern California.

“Every week, lessees of carts have an option, do they want to stay, or do they want to go. If it’s not working, they can take their tent and shake hands with us, no hard feelings, and go. You have to really want badly to do this. You're retail camping for an entire week. It’s not simply opening a little pushcart for one week. You have to have a good presentation. Your cart has to be visually terrific. You have to be ambitious, creative. With a cart, you’re more visible than any store, you have the best traffic anyone could ask for. But you have only two seconds to make it or break it.”

2:10 P.M., HORTON PLAZA PARK. Two shirtless men, riding skateboards and toting green plastic garbage bags, sort through newspapers and lunch sacks for aluminum pop cans. Dust shimmers over the mysterious graffiti of tattoo along their naked arms. Their ponytails are loose. The taller has a blood-spotted rag bound around his hand. “Broken bottle,” he says. “Occupational hazard.”

2:20 P.M.. LEVEL THREE. Marylou, who with her husband has moved into a downtown condominium, sips iced tea. She opens The Clan of the Cave Bear. “I’ve been bringing the same book here since Easter. I never get around to reading. I watch people.”

Marylou, who grew up in the Bay Area, likes living downtown. She hadn’t thought she would. She likes Horton Plaza. She wishes there were a drug store. For most grocery purchases, Irvine Ranch serves her well, and when she doesn't feel like cooking, she picks up something there for dinner and takes it back to the microwave.

“Sitting here, it's like watching a fireplace, hypnotizing. There's such a great variety of people.”

2:45 P.M., LEVEL 1, OUTSIDE Pappagallo's. A “new' energy” is growing downtown, and that energy emanates from Horton Plaza, says Elizabeth, whose highwheeled cart offers for sale healing crystals, floral and herbal potpourri, incense, candles, and fifteen-dollar psychic readings.

Greying hair done up in a bun wound on top her head, her dress a mille-fleur print on a purple ground, soft-spoken Elizabeth has the appearance of a “good witch.” She describes herself as “clairaudient” and says, “I’m a messenger. I relay.”

Until March, when Elizabeth moved to Horton Plaza, she gave her readings from a shop in La Jolla. Now, from morning until evening. Elizabeth sits on the high stool by her cart. Her wide brown eyes watch passersby. Noting that Horton Plaza visitors are more dressed up than at other malls, Elizabeth says, “People dress up to come here. You won’t see women in hair curlers or shorts, like you will at other shopping centers.”

Elizabeth intuits Horton Plaza’s spirit or mood from day to day. Basically, she finds the mood festive, a mood that has grown out of a “special kind of energy.” That mood, however, changes. It may be a bit more up one day, a little down another.

3:00 PM., HORTON PLAZA Park. “I forgot to tell you part of it,” says Darryl. “When Christ appeared on the cross and he died and then disappeared, there were two rays of light that came out of the eyes of Johann Sebastian Bach, and it joined the light and went up and up and up and then zig-zagged and then there was one solid spot there like a phoenix." He doesn’t have the poster anymore. His hotel burned up. “I pulled on my pants, grabbed my parakeet, and run out. That parakeet, he owes me his life."

The barefoot woman with a cassette player tucked into her overalls, who earlier that day twirled in slow circles near the park’s fountain, walks back through the park. Her red hair tousled, face blotched, eyes swollen, she carries a brown sack, its top wound round a bottle. She winces with each step of her feet against concrete.

Darryl, newspapers rolled under his arm, stands to leave. He says to a man who has shared a bench with him since midafternoon, “She’s all flipped out.”

3:30 P.M. LEVEL 2, INSIDE Banana Republic, purveyors of “safari” garb. Muted blues, roses, greys, and khaki predominate its racks. Red-haired, freckle-faced, a giggler, Tara (“I’m afraid so," she admits when asked if she was named after Scarlett’s plantation) turns in front of a wood-framed mirror. Tara’s twig of a body had eclipsed into a size Large three-button cotton knit. “Please, I want it for a sleep shirt," Tara begs a woman from whose features her own have obviously been acquired. “My sister gets Banana Republic’s catalogue,” says Tara, “so I've always wanted to go to a real one.”

BETWEEN 5:00 AND 6:00 P.M. Outside Irvine Ranch Market, tables begin to fill. Joe, a bank officer, opens the Wall Street Journal. In front of him on a paper plate sit fried chicken, mashed potatoes, green beans, and a roll, ”$3.95 from hot foods in the deli case inside,” he says, adding, “I can't cook.” His wife left him, for somebody else, took the kids, house. “Well, didn't exactly take it, I caved in.” He’s been alone since Thanksgiving, shares an apartment with a younger guy who’s never been married. Joe comes here three or four nights a week, eats chicken or ribs or meatloaf. Some nights, once he’s finished up that, he buys a yogurt at Heidi’s, maybe goes upstairs to a movie. “I'm at loose ends, no doubt,” he says. “I think, ‘Get your life back together, Joe.’ That’s what I’d tell any buddy of mine this happened to. Hell, that is what I’ve told buddies this same thing happened to. I keep saying, ‘Next month I’ll invite out some woman.’ My heart isn't in it. You know?”

Martin, sixty-four, buys dinner two and three nights a week from Irvine Ranch’s delicatessen. After dinner, some nights, he goes upstairs to see a movie. “But most movies, they’re perverted. Or maybe I’m old.” Last year Martin’s wife died. Yesterday morning he had put a glass jar of her own gladiolus on her grave. “After the wife died, I was going to this same bar, every night. I did that all last summer. I’d pay five dollars to have a cab drive me there, five dollars to have a cab drive me home. One night I looked around. There wasn’t nobody I’d want for a friend. Next morning I gave up the bottle, I gave up cigarettes. I kept a pack in my pocket for a month, I never lit up again.

“I was never somebody to come home and look at television. I had my woodwork projects, chores. We had our garden. We didn’t have children. The wife couldn’t. I was afraid I was one of those men you read about that die a year after the wife dies. But, here I am."

7:15 P.M., HORTON PLAZA Park. A tall woman, bare arms graced to the elbow with lace gloves, argues with a pock-marked man in a skinny-brimmed hat. He is so short and stands so close that his hat brim shades her naked decolletage. “Motherfucker,” she hisses and strides off.

Laughter rises from the benches, and someone calls out, “Guess he be holdin’ hisself.”

7:30 PM , CHELSEA COURT. Tall, lean, chic short haircut, big eyes, big glasses, twenty-seven-year-old Karen smokes Winstons and reads while waiting for friends. She sits at a table next to Irvine Ranch Market's windows to get out of the breeze that has come up and to use store light. “Actually,” she says, “I'm early.” A year ago Karen moved from Boston to take a job. “The first few days, the openness of land, this mass expanse of ocean and weather overwhelmed me. I felt alien, your prototypical stranger in a strange land. It's not easy to make friends. When I first moved here, sometimes when I'd be eating by myself in some restaurant. I'd want to stand up from my table and scream. ‘I'm really smart and witty and a good friend. One of you should talk to me.'

“This,” Karen waves toward the tables outside, most emptied by then, “has been a boon. One day, at the office, I was kvetching about my terrible disillusionment at having a terribly strong coffee topped with whipped cream passed off as cappuccino. Now I'm ashamed. Anyway, I got sent here.

“You know, the hardest thing about making a big move is a feeling that part of you is still in transit and hasn't landed yet. Here, all of me has finally touched ground. Maybe I haven't made a home yet. But I've pitched my tent.”

7:45 PM. NORDSTROM'S sale continues to draw customers. Robinson's Level 3 floor, displaying linens, is virtually deserted. Two saleswomen stand by the cash register, chatting. Broadway's Level 1, on which clothing and shoes are sold, is also empty. Mervyn's, too, had few customers.

The lights strung between the zebra-striped triangular palazzo and the red galleria twinkle above architect Jon Jerde’s curving street. Lamps are lit. Neon shimmers. The swift silver escalators, pitched at a steep angle, have filled again with passengers climbing to Level 3 for movies and food. Moving upward, riders catch sight of the bay, over which the sun has fallen, reddening the water. "Like Valhalla," a woman says, over her shoulder, to the woman behind her.

8:30 PM., RESTAURANT Row. Twilight casts a purple glow over Deborah Sussman’s blue walls. Four couples walk from the Panda Inn. One woman breaks loose from the group, turns, and faces them: "Three-flavors sizzling rice soup, moo-shu pork, fried dumplings, spiced shrimp with peanuts, baby bok choy with Chinese mushrooms, plum tree beef, scallops with garlic, we ate it all.” Lines move up under UA Horton Plaza’s marquee. As Claudia had said earlier that day. cinnamon rolls are tucked into purses and newspapers, to be sneaked in and eaten while watching the film.

8:45 P.M., LEVEL THREE, Pogo's Pizza, open until 9:00 p.m. on weeknights, throbs with activity. Pogo’s owner, native San Diegan Scott Franklin. Franklin looks like someone you used to know but can’t quite place. He failed twice in business before he opened Pogo’s. “With ice cream,” he says, adding, “The locations were wrong." Here. Pogo’s Pizza has done so well that Franklin has hired a manager and is planning additional outlets, one of which he hopes to put in at Fashion Valley.

The pizzeria’s name? “It came from a friend of mine who cuts my hair. She’s Italian. I originally started out specializing in eight-inch pizzas, little ones. Poco, my friend told me, means ‘little’ in both Spanish and Italian. But the way she pronounced poco, it sounded like ‘pogo.’ She thought of the name, and I spelled it. Not until after I’d registered the name did I look the word up in an Italian dictionary. There’s no ‘pogo’ there.”

Franklin had never been a chef, hardly even a cook, before he took up pizza: he took his thin-crust recipe from a New York pizza maker. His sauce comes from a Point Loma cook's recipe.

At night, Claudia had said, Pogo’s “feeds the whole U.S. Navy.” Franklin agrees. “They spend their last dime in here or down the way buying tapes in Sam Goody's Musicland. By the time some of the guys get here, they often have to borrow from somebody.”

From Ernest Hahn's initial phone call to Horton Plaza’s 1985 opening, says architect Jon Jerde, “was eight years of real anxiety. The rules we were breaking in the project were extraordinary. I don’t even know that what was done was right, except that it was righteous as an experiment. We’re getting feedback that it’s working in spades.

“The communal experience, I think, is the key to the thing. It’s not us architects, or thing-makers, that dream this up. It’s the culture itself that decides it wants it to happen. We've sensed a tremendous swing in the culture, from privacy back to communal existence. Jim Rouse opened what is, in fact, a glorified fruit stand in Baltimore [Harbor Place), and it brought 19 million people out the first year. Clearly it was not to eat apples. It was to be with other people.”