San Diego Historical Society photo

Horton Plaza, c. 1885. The fountain was replaced again in 1887, a more imposing model that was equipped with a nickel-plated cup.

When Alonzo Erastus Horton built the Horton House in 1870, he included a dusty, one-third-block, 228-by-108-foot plaza in front as part of the hotel area. He built an ovoid driveway around the plaza, planted hedges to define its borders, and set out watering troughs for horses. The edges of the plaza and the driveway were soon crowded with carriages, horses, people, flies, and fleas. Flowers grew in the planted sections of the plaza.

“Doc” P.P. Martin’s Brass Band (organized in 1867), the Harmonia Brass Band (organized in 1874), the Silver Comet Band (organized in 1875), and the City Guard Band (organized in 1881) played concerts on the plaza on special occasions or as part of a regular series.

When residents received word that the U.S. Congress had selected the Texas and Pacific Railway to bring a transcontinental railroad into San Diego, they held a jubilee celebration on the plaza on March 10, 1871. It was an especially heady time for a town of 2300 people.

1873

Horton installed the first of many drinking fountains in 1873. On a sleepy June day of that year, a bull appeared on the plaza, where he was beset by barking dogs. In the manner of San Diego’s early politicians, the bull responded by catching the dogs in his horns and tossing them into nearby establishments.

In addition to its services as a hitching post and carriage stop, the plaza was a gathering place for civic happenings, such as a centennial commemoration of the “Glorious Fourth,” July 4, 1876, at which a gun made by local tinsmith William Augustus Begole fired a salute.

A picket fence and a new drinking fountain were added to the plaza in 1882. To accommodate the City Guard musicians, a new bandstand was put up in 1886. The fountain was replaced again in 1887, this time with a more impos- ing multi-tiered model that was equipped with a nickel-plated cup. The plaza was locked at night “to keep vandals from destroying and carrying away property.”

The park committee of the Board of City Trustees deplored the dilapidated condition of the plaza in August 1887 and urged the appointment of a permanent gardener who would also act as a policeman. Horton kept the plaza open as a service to the Horton House and to businessmen who bought property adjoining the plaza to take advantage of its prominent location. When in 1887 the city trustees started talking about putting a city hall on the site, Horton’s resolution was sorely tested. (On May 12, 1889, the San Diego Union deemed the plaza “a capital place” for a city hall.)

The Salvation Army gave its first concert at the southeast corner of the plaza on March 31, 1888. Spectators vented their displeasure by jeering and tossing rocks.

1889

Bemoaning the plaza’s “graveyard” aspect, a writer in the San Diego Union in March 1889 called the plaza “unquestionably the dreariest-looking park I have ever seen” and “an abortion of landscape gardening.” He suggested doubling the space and surrounding it with a low wall.

As the city hall idea did not work out, in 1890 Horton advocated removing the fountain, bandstand, and hedges; elevating the plaza above the street; laying cement on the plaza surface; planting trees along the plaza’s borders; and placing circular iron seats at the base of the trees.

Horton’s bare-bones proposal received little attention. As an answer to the exigencies of wear and tear, the hedges and fountain were removed in 1891, and the bandstand was relocated in the center of the plaza.

On August 30, 1890, in the most positive of his many contradictory declarations about the plaza, Horton stated his object in giving the plaza to the city was

...to provide a central, commodious, and attractive place for public meetings, public announcements, public recreation, and for any other proper public purposes; a place where all public questions might be discussed with comfort, where public open-air concerts might be given, where the people might rest, and where children might play in safety.

A proposal to plant grass and trees was opposed by people who disliked the plaza’s untidy landscaping and who wanted the plaza to be used exclusively for public meetings.

The uprooting of plants and the leveling of the plaza surface facilitated the April 23, 1891, use of the plaza as an open-air theater for the estimated 5000 people who cheered President Benjamin Harrison during his visit to San Diego.

In 1892, the decrepit bandstand was removed. As the city did not have money to spend on its improvement, the plaza was left dry, dreary, and desolate. Talk of building a city hall on the site began again.

The first Cabrillo celebration on September 28, 29, and 30 of 1892 brought new life to the plaza. A pavilion made of white cloth and decorated with pep- per branches, streamers, and bunting occupied a ground space of 200 by 124 feet. Planned for 5000 people, the pavilion somehow managed to accommodate at least 6000. F.F. Del Valle of Los Angeles held everyone spellbound with a rhapsodic description of Cabrillo’s adventures. In the evening, the First Cavalry Band entertained an audience of nearly 10,000 on the plaza and surrounding streets. The following day, the San Diego Union came out in favor of a permanent pavilion on the plaza.

Unable to make up his mind, on December 6, 1892, the editor of the San Diego Union swung around to the idea of a landscaped plaza of palms and semitropical plants with diagonal walks across it.

In July 1893, Francis H. Mead, a world-traveled visitor, was astonished to find San Diego’s plaza so devoid of plants and furnishings.

Aside from a lack of funds, another reason for leaving the plaza as wasteland was that Alonzo Ho ton held title to it and could take possession whenever the city decided to use it for anything but a public highway.

Proponents of paving the plaza appeared to be gaining the upper hand when Horton, who approved of the idea, offered to sell the plaza to the city for $5000 and the city’s half lot on Fifth Street.

1894

In October 1894, at the age of 82, Horton finally agreed to deed the plaza to the city, provided he would be paid $100 a month, up to $10,000 for the remainder of his life. The payments continued till April 1903, when the full amount plus an additional $6000 had been paid.

At that time, Horton was 89 years old. With the deed to the plaza cleared, city officials were now in a position to resolve the grass-versus-cement dispute. Those who followed band concerts and attended political rallies offered to raise funds for a bandstand and a pavilion to cover the plaza. The San Diego Union, with no sense of irony, stated the project would be “an improvement and adornment of the plaza.”

Professor Earlson delighted spectators on the afternoon of January 1, 1896, by making a balloon ascension from the plaza.

Window glass on the Sun building and the Schmitt building was broken by a concussion from the firing of a 46-gun salute on the plaza on the morning of July 4, 1896.

A tent put up for a political rally in August provided cover for a masked Admission Day ball in September.

1897

Sailors and Marines drilled on the plaza in February 1897 as part of San Diego’s Midwinter Water Carnival.

In September, steps were taken to resolve the problem of plaza usage. The idea of the plaza as an assembly space for massive group events was dealt a stunning blow. The Leach Opera House (begun in 1885), the Louis Opera House (begun in 1887), the Fisher Opera House (begun in 1892), and the Garrick Theater (begun in 1897) were beginning to meet the city’s need for meeting places.

The destruction by fire of the Children’s Home in City (Balboa) Park on May 9, 1897, made a large sum of money available from insurance payments. This allowed work on the plaza to proceed.

Joseph Falkenham of the Board of Public Works drew up plans that called for paving the entire surface with asphalt, installing 12 gas lights and a bandstand on wheels, erecting iron posts connected by iron chains, and planting 28 Cocos Plumosa palms, which were to be decorated with electric lights.

The plan drew immediate fire from devotees of grass and shrubbery. Moses A. Luce wanted an ornamental fountain in the center of the plaza. A new stationary bandstand for the west end of the plaza with a shell-shaped enclosure was completed in May 1898, and instead of asphalt, a layer of red composite earth was put down in August.

Historian Elizabeth MacPhail gave the date Kate Sessions planted the 28 palms in the plaza as January 19, 1897; however, the more likely date is January 19, 1898, for shortly before that date, holes were blasted in the hardpan. (Kate Sessions received $75 for the palms, which came from funds raised by Major Henry Sweeney at a “Society Circus” put on by local talent in December 1895.)

A celebration of the capture of Manila by Admiral Dewey on the evening of May 2, 1899, brought citizens to the plaza for a carnival, band concert, and fireworks.

1900

In March 1900, the San Diego Union began a campaign to put benches in the plaza. These benches could have accommodated some, but certainly not all, of the 10,000 people who jammed the plaza on the evening of April 9 to hear William Jennings Bryan denounce imperialism and trusts.

Advocates of an ordinance forbidding the sale of liquor on Sunday described to large audiences on the plaza in October how the drinking of alcohol led to lewdness, lawlessness, madness, and murder.

In June 1902, the Board of Public Works invited the Protestant pastors of the city to hold Sunday afternoon evangelistic meetings on the plaza.

William W. Bowers, state senator, prominent Republican, and brother-in-law of Alonzo Horton, criticized the “miserable, unsightly clamshell” on the bandstand in September. Far from directing sound outward, the shell was actually soaking it up.

The San Diego Union, June 14, 1903, noted that the palms had reached a height of 15 feet and that they “gave a picture of beauty seldom rivaled in the world of trees.”

After 35 years in existence, the Horton House was torn down in July 1905, and work commenced on the U.S. Grant Hotel on the site it had occupied.

The first indication that street speakers were becoming a nuisance appeared in the San Diego Union in August 1905. The area where disturbances were taking place was at Fifth Avenue and E Street. The site had become a popular spot for impromptu events because, unlike the plaza, orators did not need the permission of the Board of Park Com- missioners. Owners of businesses in the section were incensed that people with causes were taking over the street and obstructing access to their establishments. The content of the speeches was not an issue.

1907

New buildings went up around the plaza in 1907, including a six-story Union building on the west side.

Trying to find a way out of the imbroglio of grass versus cement, the San Diego Union , March 1907, suggested a border of grass be planted within the line of palms, and shrubbery at the edges of the grass. The Union

also favored putting a statue of General Ulysses S. Grant in the center of the plaza as a way of acknowledging the namesake of the hotel going up across the street.

George W. Marston, echoing the advice of architect William S. Hebbard, proposed grouping civic buildings around an enlarged plaza. City planner John Nolen endorsed this idea the following year; however, he rejected the existing plaza as too small for the purpose.

City hall promoters claimed the plaza was a relic of frontier times that had no place in a progressive city. Instead of putting the city hall at its edge, they wanted the building to extend over the entire plaza. The San Diego Union, July 9, 1907, began noticing the people in the plaza rather than the plaza itself. The cacophony of babbling tongues was too much for the editor. He concluded a series of sarcastic remarks about the intelligence and morality of the speakers with the ambivalent question:

But speech is free. One will hope and trust that it always will be. Nevertheless, would not San Diego be better off if there were less of it on the Plaza? Is the Plaza being put to its best possible use?

1908

Sensing he had been too kind, February 20, 1908, the editor put more acid into his views:

[The plaza] should not be permitted, as at present, to be the chosen resort of vagabonds, crooks, and noisy agitators. The scenes that occur daily upon that little square, which should be a beauty spot, are a disgrace to San Diego and would not be tolerated in most cities.

Some 200 citizens signed a petition asking that the plaza benches and band- stand be removed. While the petition did not state a reason, one can surmise that genteel people were not enthusiastic about the ungenteel people who sat on the benches. The San Diego Sun responded:

Why don’t de park commisheners fix up dis place an leave de benches here like they did in Los? Trees an flours an green t’ings like that would sorter hide up fellers. We don’t care ter be on exibishen, but we likes to have a plase to rest ‘thout goin’ to a booze joint.

A San Diego Union editorial, March 8, 1908, hinted that harsh measures were in order “to disperse the crowds and keep the agitators on the move.” (Those measures were taken in 1912, when prominent San Diegans — with the connivance of the police and city officials — acted out the role of vigilantes.)

After the benches and bandstand had been removed, fictitious commentator Nebraska told his colleague Ohio, with whom he kept up a running conversation in the San Diego Sun, “I have a notion to sit down on the ground here. Suppose they will take the ground away, too, if they see us making some use of it?”

The Women’s Christian Temperance Union put a lemonade and fruit booth in the center of the plaza on April 16, 1908, to serve the sailors from the Great White Fleet a beverage that would not dilute their minds and morals. Faint snatches of music drifted down into the plaza from a band on the roof garden of the U.S. Grant Hotel, playing for the delectation of all standing people.

So the park commissioners got rid of the benches; in September, they banned public speaking; and in December, they hired architect Irving J. Gill to draw up plans for a genteel plaza.

Since a free-speaking element from European countries (other than Great Britain), reputed to be socialists, anarchists, and atheists, had made the plaza — like the Greek agora — a place for relaxation, entertainment, and intellectual stimulation, Gill was expected to draw up a plan that would displease these people and would please sedate, well-bred, church-going, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants.

Almost alone in his conviction, merchant and park commissioner George W. Marston demurred from this attempt by supercilious people to banish those who spoke broken English and used occasional profanity:

While it is true that some of the men who congregate there may be ‘plot- ting against the government,’ as the term goes, I notice that a large number of them are pensioners; a percentage of them tourists, perhaps, who gather on the plaza for sun baths, which are to be had for the effort of going there. If we shut these people out of the plaza, where will they go?

When Gill undertook the redesign of the plaza in 1908, the prospect before him was bleak. The plaza looked like a desert surrounded by a horse corral. The Cocos Plumosa palms were turning yellow due to soil devoid of nutrients. The commissioners favored a plaza of grass and flowers with a fountain in its center.

Gill’s job was to make the plaza respectable, find places for a fountain and a kiosk containing weather-reporting instruments, and lay out walkways. He used the walkways to divide the plaza into quadrants. The walkways converged on a circle where the fountain was to be located.

The kiosk, in the shape of a miniature Greek temple, was located at the center of the east walkway, which had been widened to allow for foot traffic and for the placement of circular seats. On the west walkway, another balancing space was set aside for a drinking fountain, which was supposed to echo the appearance of the kiosk.

The plan called for no more than 50 seats on benches and for seating on cement ledges. Because horses, hacks, and express wagons were so conspicuous outside the plaza, no benches were planned for the abutting sidewalks. (The commissioners relented in February 1910 and allowed benches along the west and south sides of the plaza but none directly across from the U.S. Grant Hotel.)

Gill retained small sections of lawn to serve as enclosures for shrubs and plants and for urns that were to be deposited in the middle of the quadrants. In the final stages of the plan, the location of the urns was shifted to bases on the sides of the red-tiled walkways. Grass remained the dominant ground cover, as the cost of bedding and replacing flowers and shrubs was found to be exorbitant. Chicken-wire fencing around each of the grass plots was supposed to discourage intruders.

After reading in the San Diego Union of the need for money to build a fountain, Louis J. Wilde, banker and part owner of the U.S. Grant Hotel, donated $10,000. Wilde was a bantam rooster of a man whose aggressive stance and powers of vituperation won him the allegiance of working-class people.

1909

Irving Gill’s design for the fountain was accepted by the park commissioners and Louis Wilde in November 1909 after a competition that had elicited 13 designs. The principal requirement was that the fountain be equipped with an electrical apparatus that would project blended colors on spraying water. Gill modeled his fountain after the monument of Lysicrates in Athens, circa 334 B.C., itself a tribute to gaiety and song. This was not an original idea, as the Lysicrates monument had been copied many times in other cities, though this might have been the first time the monument was destined to be a fountain.

The fountain was the center of plaza activity. It was equipped with special machinery to pump and illuminate cascades of water. The elongated lines of the fountain and the round dome that surmounted it harmonized well with the tall open arches of the U.S. Grant Hotel (now, alas, obscured by a modern addition). As the foreground of the first plaza matched the Horton House, so the 1909 plaza matched the nine- story, French-empire-style Grant hotel.

Gill’s original fountain plan called for a liberal use of Mexican onyx and gold leaf. Above the fountain’s pedestal, six Corinthian-style columns supported a frieze, on top of which rose a bulbous-shaped dome of amber glass cut in small sections and secured in copper frames. A large eagle with outspread wings perched on the dome. From base to eagle, the height was 25 feet.

Four streams of water were thrown toward the columns from the edge of a large circular basin, 20 feet in diameter. More water came out at the feet of the eagle and descended over the dome, frieze, and columns. Water also spurted from the mouths of lion heads on the sides of the pedestal.

If Gill’s design had been accepted, the fountain would have been more colorful than the sedate fountain we have now, which in its simplicity and purity of design comes closer to Gill’s later, stripped-down architecture. In Gill’s second design, white Vermont marble was substituted for the onyx, the lion heads on the pedestal were eliminated, the shape of the central monument was changed from circular to octagonal, the number of columns was increased to eight, and sheets of water were redirected to flow between the columns and over the pedestal into the basin.

The final design abandoned the use of gold leaf and shifted the eagle from the top of the outside dome to the top of an inside dome, located within the space enclosed by the columns. Eight streams of water were thrown toward the columns from the basin, and eight sheets of water flowed over the pedestal into the basin.

Sculptor Felix Peano designed the bronze eagle and bronze panels on the pedestal representing “Father” Alonzo E. Horton, Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, and Father Junipero Serra. A fourth panel, facing the U.S. Grant Hotel, reads “Presented to the City of San Diego by Louis J. Wilde 1909 A.D.” On the frieze above the columns appears the notation “Broadway Fountain For The People.” Since the fountain has been called the Horton Plaza Fountain, the Wilde Fountain, the Gill Fountain, and the Electric Fountain, it should be noted that its official name, as chosen by Wilde himself, is the Broadway Fountain. By choosing this name, Wilde, who was unusually prescient, named Broadway (then D Street) three years before the city council did the same thing.

As the fountain neared completion, a squabble erupted between Harry Brown, electrical inspector, and Irving Gill. Brown claimed the electrical connections underneath the fountain were unsafe, that water would run into them, and that people would be electrocuted. Such controversies had a way of becoming knockout dramas, and this was no exception. Police were called in to protect disputants and the fountain. Police Com- missioner John L. Sehon and Park Commissioner Thomas O’Hallaran rushed to the fray. Officials of the Consolidated Gas and Electric Company refused to turn on power for the lights on the fountain until they were guaranteed payment. The disputes were eventually worked out. The foun- tain was tested October 14, and no one was killed. Some- one reassured the electric company that bills would be paid.

“Father” Alonzo E. Hor- ton passed away in his sleep on January 1, 1909.

1910

At last, on October 15, 1910, the great day arrived. Two hours after the formal opening of the U.S. Grant Hotel, at 8:15 in the evening, Mrs. Louis J. Wilde pulled a cord dropping the canvas over the fountain. Cheers arose from thousands of people who thronged the streets from curb to curb on all sides of the plaza (but, presumably, not on the grass). Gill, who had taken more than enough raps while the fountain was under construction, was “cheered to the echo.” The fountain, resplendent as a peacock with tail feathers outspread, showed off its colors as hundreds of incandescent lights flashed on and off at 30-second intervals.

For the third time since they were planted, the Cocos Plumosa palms were in full bloom.

According to Nebraska in the San Diego Sun, the plaza of 1910 (which is substantially the plaza of 1990) was designed for fashion- able functions, to be enjoyed by window-renters in the Union block and the U.S. Grant Hotel. To this end, band concerts and political meetings were to be excluded from the grounds, and not more than 50 people were to be assembled there at one time.

There is a saying popular among cracker-barrel philosophers that “the more things change, the more they remain the same.” The tussle over the uses of the plaza is not over and never will be. Current managers of the U.S. Grant Hotel and Robinson’s Department Store — abutting the plaza on the south side as an appendage of a shopping mall misnamed “Horton Plaza” — are in the fore- front of a business coalition in opposition to the plaza because it provides a place of solace for the down and out. Unlike the contumelious people who in 1910 could not stand the free expression of ideas by unemployed and ambitious people, merchants today blame their failure to make money on destitute and unwashed people, who are known to sell contraband cigarettes from Tijuana or to evacuate themselves on the plaza because there are few places in downtown San Diego where they can do so in private.

The merchants want homeless and harmless people removed so their prof- its can go up and so San Diego can become a city friendly to those who can pay for the friendliness. In the 19th Century, a wag suggested putting roller skates on the Indians so white people could move them wherever they wanted. When the frontier finally disappeared, the only place left for the Indians was the Pacific Ocean. So it is today with the homeless, a class that shows every indication of expanding in exponential numbers.

In 1974, Kevin Lynch and Donald Appleyard (urban planners from MIT who wrote a comprehensive study of San Diego’s regional problems) predicted that in its renewal program, San Diego could banish the brash and tawdry liveliness of Horton Plaza, but the result would be an empty space. The Centre City Association has proposed a puritanical landscape for the plaza that would remove most of its amenities, the theory being that if the plaza is uncomfortable for every- one, it will also be uncomfortable for undesirables.

1984

The City of San Diego has had enough of proposed redesigns of the plaza. The 1984 Lawrence Halprin scheme was a fiasco. After his tower, pergolas, funnels, and fountain were rejected by San Diego, Halprin took essentially the same design to Los Angeles, where it was accepted for a park at Ninth and Hope Streets. So much for Halprin’s talk about how his plan conformed to the buildings around the plaza and continued the architectural heritage of Irving Gill — the very architect whose plaza design Halprin wanted to demolish.

1989

In opposition to the democratic and humanitarian ideas of William H. Whyte, Bernard J. Frieden and Lynne B. Sagalyn wrote Downtown, Inc. (Cambridge, 1989) to justify the privatization of public spaces. They used the new Ernest Hahn-Jon Jerde shopping mall in downtown San Diego as an example of a successful private-public partnership. They admit their definition of success does not include success for low-income people. Bryant Park in New York City presented a stumbling block to the two apologists for free enterprise. There, an aroused citizenry (including members of the affluent middle class) kept the park from passing into the hands of a private concessionaire in an attempt to get rid of “undesirables.”

In their usual obtuse fashion, San Diego politicians are making Horton Plaza worse instead of better. Their decision to locate the Times Arts TIX building at the southwest edge of the plaza was a mistake because this awkward, tacky, ersatz structure does not contribute to the plaza experience. It was thrust on a public space to take advantage of foot traffic and because a benefactor offered it to the city free. A precedent having been established, the city has now entered into another agreement for a concessionaire to erect a companion, permanent food building on the southeast side of the plaza next to a bus stop.

Robinson’s, incidentally, was planned in total disregard of the existing plaza, which the Centre City Development Corporation hoped would disappear. The department store’s main entrance is not on axis with the fountain, its stairs are not intended for seating, and its ground level provides neither transition to the plaza nor hospitality to passersby. Its walls are blank and its colors are bland. Except for a minimal post-modern play of arches and curves at roof level, it is a mechanical and lifeless building.

By encouraging greater use of the plaza, by providing portable food, book, and flower stands and places for bands and orators on the south border of the plaza, we can attract high life as well as low life into the plaza without drastically altering the formal design bequeathed to us by Louis J. Wilde and Irving Gill.

By following the example of San Francisco and putting special miniparks for the homeless and the mentally ill in prime locations downtown, we can adjust and assuage some of the savage conditions that make the plight of rejected people so dehumanizing.