Photo by Howie Rosen

Ray Ashley, head of the Maritime Museum

Photo by Howie Rosen

I started thinking about the waterfront one morning maybe ten years ago, when I went down to the bayside beach on Coronado with my friend Joe Ditler. He was carrying his lightweight dinghy on his head, intending to row across to “the other side.” Not even half a mile, but from the island it always looks like another city, another land.

He jumped in. I helped push him off. He started sculling away, facing backward, toward me. “Let me know if anything’s coming,” he said.

The waters were slick, metallic blue, and looked peaceful enough that I felt I could swim after him. But as he grew smaller, I looked to the west, and there was this ginormous Navy assault ship, inward-bound, heading for the bridge — and Joe.

I waved and pointed. Joe waved back and kept rowing. It was the classic “drowning not waving” situation. I yelled. I jumped up and down. Joe waved back.

Then, BAARRPP! The ship blared its horn. Joe leapt three feet in the air. He turned around, saw, and started rowing like Wile E. Coyote, trying to return to the cliff’s edge. He missed the water with his flailing oars, fell back, disappeared. But, thank goodness, the ship missed him. I next saw him bailing furiously in its chop, in between waving his fist at me.

He’s never let me forget that day. “It could have killed me!” he says, as if I had been in charge of the ship.

What I thought, though, after calming down, was how little any of us know about this waterfront. How little this fantastic, sheltered body of water in our back yard is a part of our lives. And how empty it feels, apart from those Navy ships.

Yet if you read down the Port of San Diego’s “Fast Facts” sheet, it’s clear that this could be one vital, active bay. For instance:

The bay is 22 square miles in size, with 34 miles of waterfront and five cities sharing it: San Diego, Coronado, Chula Vista, National City, and Imperial Beach.

It has three “islands” (all actually joined to the mainland): Coronado, Shelter, and Harbor.

It has ten miles of pathways, good for walking and riding.

It has 16 parks with 10 playgrounds.

It has 250 acres of visitable open space.

It has 16 marinas with 6000 boat slips.

It has three museums: the Maritime, the Midway and the National City Railcar Museum.

It has 15 hotels with 512 rooms.

Cruise ships come into the port 200 times a year; 275 cargo ships visit; and 75 Navy ships homeport in the bay.

There are 69 restaurants on the waterfront.

Then why does so much of this land seem so desolate?

I decide to investigate.

I head south from Coronado on my bike, ride five, six miles, to the Coronado Cays. The guard at the gate lets me through, and I continue on till I find the Calypso Café. It’s a little deli with a beautiful patio that looks down on one of the yacht-filled channels.

Beautiful, but all, all alone.

Turns out, Calypso is the last waterside café, the last human presence on the bayfront for about seven miles. Not till you scoop down and past Imperial Beach and back up to Chula Vista on the mainland side do you find signs of human waterside life — and that’s another isolated café, mainly for boaters.

What all this tells me is: the most beautiful part of San Diego — its bay — is way underdeveloped.

What should we do with it?

Architect Richard Moren (seated) wants to see San Diego become “a place where people can live on our waterfront and enjoy it, instead of it being designated for tourism.”

Let’s start with the main port area, where Broadway meets the water downtown. It isn’t the climax of this Pacific port city; it’s the raggedy edge. Yes, there’s the Star of India, the Midway, and Seaport Village. But the place is for daylight tourism. These sites apart, there is no “there” there.

Imagine being a cruise passenger, coming off the ship. You land in a semi-wasteland, rather than the pumping heart of a city. Instead of the city reaching out to you, you have to head across parking lots to find the city, somewhere inland.

Cries to “do something” — to bring downtown’s waterfront more into our lives, to integrate it with the city — have been heard for a long time, but they came into real focus earlier this year when, under the U-T’s new owner, developer Doug Manchester, the paper published a front-page editorial titled “Think Big.” The editorial outlined a Manchester-style plan for downtown’s waterfront: put in a football stadium, sports arena, and park where the Tenth Avenue Marine Terminal now sits.

“After weeks of interviews and other reporting,” read the January 22 editorial, “U-T San Diego has come to believe in a new vision. It is a vision that would not just integrate a new stadium with an expanded convention center, but, in phases, would include a sports/entertainment district with a new sports arena, new public parkland, public beach and promenades — all in an area that today is unsightly industrial property inaccessible to the public.”

That’s in addition to the Navy property Manchester wants to turn into a hotel-retail complex at the bottom of Broadway, and another piece of land across Broadway that developer Rob Langford plans to develop, where Lane Field (the Padres’ first home) used to be.

This is what’s likely so far: for the North Embarcadero, prettier walkways, some trees; at the bottom of Broadway, Manchester and Langford hotels and retail. But there won’t be any East Village–type development where people come to live by the water. Or over it; the only waterfront beds on offer will be hotel beds, reserved for affluent out-of-towners.

South of the wall of convention centers and hotels, and just north of the Coronado bridge, Manchester and the U-T want to bulldoze the Tenth Avenue Marine Terminal (where Dole banana boats come to unload 185 million bananas each month), and build a new football stadium for the Chargers, plus another sports center, and parks and beaches.

But do we really want a giant football stadium to block more of the waterfront?

Of course, my first hope is for the total opposite. I’d like to see us build little things: houses, condos, right on the waterfront, maybe even out over the bay’s sheltered waters, so that everybody who wants to can live right here, crowding these 34 miles of coast with small ports and cute villages, like Saint-Tropez or Porto Venere or some upgraded version of Popotla, south of Rosarito.

It seems there’s a state law against that, too, at least in terms of private citizens occupying such lands: we cannot live on waterfront areas that the Port — meaning, the State — owns. This is the result of laudable democratic impulses by California officials back in the 1960s, to make sure that everybody had access to the waterfront, not just the rich. In a very real sense, this restriction has backfired: because these lands belong to everybody, they belong to nobody. People stay away, except to jog or launch their boats. Parks are about the only thing that the authorities ruling the bay can think of doing with the single most beautiful and potentially valuable part of their cities.

So, what could we do with our waterfront, if we put our thinking caps on?

Here are some people with ideas for what planners call San Diego’s “land-sea interface.”

East Village by the Sea

Architect Richard Moren (seated) wants to see San Diego become “a place where people can live on our waterfront and enjoy it, instead of it being designated for tourism.”

It’s a sparkling-waterfront morning when I meet up with Richard Moren, a compact, intense man with a shaved head and a gold earring in his left ear. Moren is a renowned potter, but also an architect who’s created everything from plans for the great staircase in the Bellagio in Las Vegas to schemas for Fantasy Island resorts in Singapore.

We’re standing beside the Coronado ferry landing as a bunch of people traipse up the low-tide gangway from the Cabrillo. Pedicab drivers twitch, ready to pounce as their marks step onto dry land. Families call to each other (“Over here!”), and the pedicab drivers bark out invitations. “Seaport Village? Midway? Gaslamp?” Sun sparkles on the waters. Gulls hold steady in the breeze, at about ten feet, scanning the Embarcadero for scraps. There’s a lot of life here.

I’m waiting to pounce on Moren because we’ve talked before, and he’s an original thinker. Hasn’t been turned into one of those careful professionals who retreat into mindless “solutions”-oriented architect-speak.

“Okay,” I start right in, “so, if you had your druthers, what would you do with this waterfront?”

“My thoughts are simply that we should be looking at creating an active space,” Moren says. “Not just activated by tourism, but actually a part of our world. Let’s make San Diego a place where people can live on our waterfront and enjoy it, instead of it being designated for tourism. There’s no reason people shouldn’t live where the water meets the land. In fact, I’d suggest we carve water channels that can come into the land. In fingers. More water to live beside. It may seem radical, but if you look at other areas that share our climate, like the Mediterranean, in big towns and small villages, that’s exactly what they do, and it doesn’t detract from public spaces and tourism. It enhances it. We could easily create our own Saint-Tropez, or Venice, in a sense, but something that would be well beyond that. Take the city to the water! And take the water into the city. Center the city’s energy and life down here. Let the waterfront be the city.”

He points to the distant business towers of downtown.

“Right now, the city as you see it is high-rise. Nine to five. Purely business. Then there’s this big gap — there’s no connection whatsoever to this area. All we have down here is a small amount of retail and restaurant features — again, basically, for tourism. If tourism goes to hell, what do we have left on the waterfront? We’ve got a wasteland, and nobody comes after…what? Five o’clock? Seven o’clock? It’s all shut down. I want people to be here 24 hours a day. They don’t have to be all locals. It can be a mix. Mixed use. Hotel units, rentals. Bring life to the waterfront.”

But surely land here is too valuable?

“That’s right. And this brings us to the point where we have to start looking at this as a project. Why not let people live here in dense neighborhoods that don’t block the views, that link up, for instance, East Village with downtown? I don’t know what the rules are for extending [into the bay], but all I can say is there’s plenty of land right here that we can cut back into.”

Where only the rich could afford to live, right?

“No. Mixed use. Hotel rooms, condos — expensive places, yes, but also a percentage of low-income housing, perhaps rent-controlled apartments, as in San Francisco, all as part of the mixed-use conditions. Perhaps lotteries to choose lucky buyers or renters.”

People living here, Moren says, would have to be prepared to have semi-public lives. No gated communities. It has to be welcoming to the wandering public. Plenty of small businesses, cafés.

“But here’s the thing: Waterfront housing would provide a grand income for the city. And the state, obviously. Because this is their land, too, their project. And, certainly, there are a million developers who would love to take a crack at it.”

Sounds like Pacific Beach’s Crystal Pier cottages writ large. And why not? says Moren.

“I can’t believe it’s the only place you get this experience. Going to sleep with the waves crashing below you, waking up to the seagulls, with that incredible feeling of looking back at the land. Yet the only reason [the cottages] are there is that they’re grandfathered in.”

He says that the city — and the state — need to take ownership of their waterfront. “Look around right now. Of all the people I’m seeing down here, I bet there’s not more than 10 percent who are locals.”

We’re walking and talking as we head for Seaport Village. We pass by Bonnie Eisner — she’s sitting at her craft table under a Hawaiian Flame Tree just south of the Midway, making bangles of wire and faux precious stones to sell.

“I’ve been coming here since November,” she says. “I enjoy it. I make everything right here. And I give directions a lot.”

She says that just about everybody is a tourist. Not too many locals.

If there’s a problem, it’s that most waterfront places close early. “Summer nights, people come by, asking where they can eat, and I have to tell them that even the Fish Market sometimes closes early. The Upstart Crow at Seaport Village stays open later. Sometimes, they have readings or music there. But who can find them? They’re kind of tucked away.”

“I rest my case,” Moren says. “Why can’t people live, or at least stay here, where the beautiful interface is?”

One problem: those state laws prohibiting private dwellings on Port land.

Moren believes it’s time to change those laws.

“It’s been a difficult situation to handle,” he says. “We’ve got a bunch of archaic laws on the books. But I’m thinking that there’s no reason that the state or the City of San Diego couldn’t build down here and become involved in property management, with actual ownership of these units. It might help the city become financially feasible again, through the ownership and renting of these properties. If California [officials] were to open their eyes, they might realize that they have a gold mine here. It would work because real people will be living here, while the tourists would still be staying here because, instead of having separate hotel towers, hotel rooms would be built right into rental structures. So, that’s the fun part of it: this becomes like East Village by the Bay, part of the lived-in city.”

A Waterfront Mosque?

One thing about the waterfront: there’s no shortage of enthusiasts with great ideas about what to do with it.

At the NewSchool of Architecture and Design in East Village, at least eight graduates this year did their theses on waterfront-related projects.

“We’re one of the rare cities that has a clean plate, right in front of the waterfront,” said one of the graduates, Brandon Linsday, on the night their projects were presented. His thesis “created” a new headquarters for SANDAG (the San Diego Association of Governments, the planning arm of all cities in the county) down at the waterfront. Inherent in the idea: a walkway connecting his new building to the Embarcadero. “We have every opportunity to make this one of the best waterfronts in the United States. How many cities get that much free space to create it?

“I’ve been to community meetings about the waterfront. My exact thought is: let’s make something happen. Our third-largest source of revenue is tourism. Yet all the tourists go to a waterfront that isn’t developed. That wall of hotels and convention centers? We [San Diegans] know that’s like a ‘tourist-only’ zone. We don’t often go there.”

Shawn Lynch’s thesis project was a redevelopment of the B Street Pier, to which the Maritime Museum could transfer its headquarters and its main ship, the Star of India. In the model, the proposed museum headquarters looks like a big ol’ Wyoming barn. Or a dockside warehouse.

“There is disconnection between the city and the bay,” he told people admiring his model at the graduation party. “B Street Pier is poorly maintained and under-utilized. But this pier could become a place of community gathering.”

Lynch wants to create a park on the pier, run a kind of canal through the middle, and also to make a space for the San Diego Symphony’s Summer Pops concerts.

The idea for the project “started in the summer of 2011,” he says. “I went on a trip to Scandinavia. Oslo, Stockholm, waterfront places like that. What I brought back was how Europe is revitalizing their waterfronts. Their industrial ports are pedestrian paradises. I returned to San Diego and realized that we barely use our waterfront. We need something to bring the public down to the water. We need a focal point.”

He thought about the Broadway Pier, but the cruise-ship terminal was already going up (blocking, incidentally, the view corridor down Broadway to the bay in a way that should horrify feng shui aficionados).

“Then I started looking at the B Street Pier,” Lynch says, even though the Port needs half of it for cruise ships when the Broadway Pier is being used. “I want it to become a community space, with parks and water and music and events going on. I put space for the symphony to play at the end of the pier, in a public park, with a lot of green, and I put the Maritime Museum there, with space for the Star of India.”

Partly to help security when the northern side was being used for cruise ships, Lynch sliced his canal diagonally through the middle of the pier, with drawbridges that could be raised to unjoin the cruise terminal side, but also to frame the Star of India and other museum ships moored in the “canal.” He included a pitched roof on the museum to accommodate tall masts and to give it a “maritime shed” look. He also included walkable ramps so people could walk or jog over the water.

“I want to seduce people down there,” he says, “locals, make it part of their lives.”

Loay Alkhifi wants to build a mosque and Muslim interpretive center in front of the convention center. “This will help bring life to San Diego’s waterfront,” he said. “The purpose is to increase awareness about Islam, about my country Saudi Arabia as a Muslim country.”

He shows me a model of the long, low building with a minaret at one end.

“It’s an interpretive, cultural center for non-Muslims — it’s not primarily for Muslims. And the way I thought about it, as a project being on the waterfront, is to find what is good on the site and make more of it. The good things are the promenade, the Embarcadero park, the public spaces.”

Alkhifi knows a little about fighting for waterfront-access rights.

“I grew up in the [Red Sea port of] Jeddah, which is the closest city to Mecca. On Jeddah’s waterfront, public access is an issue. People just try to have private buildings over there.”

Grad student Andrew Sisson has the same feelings about San Diego. “The waterfront currently is very disconnected to the pedestrians of San Diego,” he says. He’s enjoying a flurry of fame with a twisting skyscraper he created in his graduate class, which was featured last February in a U-T spread.

“You have Pacific Highway, which is really a barrier. And I think we have to somehow try to break that barrier, because you have 720,000 visitors coming in on cruise ships [every year], you have 1.2 million people visiting the Midway every year. And if they build the [500-foot-high Wings of Freedom] on Navy Pier, this becomes a very iconic location for San Diego. Obviously, everyone wants to be connected to the water. They want to see the water, they want to feel the ocean.”

How far out do waterfront architectural theses get? Peter Jones’s project is on smart phones that can talk to buildings and vice-versa: click your phone and the entire color of a building might change to improve your mood. He thinks this would suit the fun atmosphere of the waterfront. He believes that the waterfront could be developed more than it has been, but “because of the value of the land, you’re definitely going to have a tough time. But anything’s possible, right? You’d have to find a creative way to fund it. Maybe having companies such as Apple [and] Facebook funding advertising on the [interactive] walls of buildings [down there] would do it.”

The Blue Economy

According to another Jones — Michael Jones — you can forget about dreamy ideas of orchestras on piers and waterfront-living clusters.

And don’t even talk to him about Doug Manchester’s idea of turning the Tenth Avenue Marine Terminal into a football stadium.

He wants the waterfront to stay a working waterfront.

“If we lose the waterfront to housing and tourism, we’ll be sorry,” he says.

Jones is president of the Maritime Alliance, a trade group representing maritime-related industries in San Diego. “If we take away the working waterfront, we’ll never get it back.”

That would be a shame, he says, because the “blue economy” — ocean-related industries — is about to open up for San Diego.

“People don’t realize that San Diego has more maritime-related jobs than any other industry cluster in the county. We have 1400 companies responsible for nearly 46,000 jobs and $14 billion in direct spending into the local economy. We believe that, indirectly, they are responsible for 120,000 jobs.”

These numbers come from a recently released San Diego Maritime Industry Report.

“This is no small potatoes,” Jones says. “Everything from robotic undersea vehicles to desalination plants are designed and made here. San Diego is the largest desalination center in the world. And all sectors in San Diego’s maritime-industry cluster are growing an average 7 to 20 percent per annum. We are going to need a working port more and more. Not less. A Chargers stadium and a beach to replace the Tenth Avenue Marine Terminal? If any of that land goes, it never comes back.”

It’s not just that the Dole banana boats won’t have a place to unload. Soon enough, Jones says, instead of rail and road, much local transportation of goods will be by sea, and we’ll need more, not fewer, facilities to handle them.

“Container ships now carry about 10,000 containers each. But, coming soon, they could be carrying as many as 24,000 containers per ship. Too big for most ports. This will mean creating deep-water ports offshore in the ocean, maybe 20 miles out. And then smaller ships will distribute those containers to ports up and down the coast. That ‘marine highway’ will reduce road-highway and rail-transportation dependence and bring a new lease on life to the last port with a surviving shipbuilding industry — San Diego.”

Jones says there is so much potential for San Diego’s status as the nation’s premier blue-tech center, and the port’s potential for expansion, that selling our waterfront to private and public leisure development is folly.

“The blue economy is San Diego’s future,” he says. “Besides, with climate change, we’re going to see rising waters. Building private residences on the waterfront is just asking for trouble.”

Damned Near Perfect

Boom!

There’s a gun battle going on outside the porthole. The cracks of shots ricochet against wooden hulls. Blue smoke forms donuts in the air between ships.

I check through the porthole: two rake-masted revenue cutters pivot and swoop in the breeze to get the position advantage.

Bam-bam!

Now I wish I hadn’t stuck my head out quite so far. These mock explosions could burst my eardrums.

Dr. Ray Ashley doesn’t take much notice. As director of San Diego’s Maritime Museum, he’s more concerned with the logistics of this event, the Festival of Sail, which he’s spent the past two years organizing.

But it’s a thrill for me. Looking out at these sailing vessels, you can imagine the harbor back in the days of the Dons, of Juan Cabrillo, even. It makes you realize that in 1542 — nearly 45 years ahead of Jamestown’s beginnings in 1587 — this place was a cradle of European civilization in North America.

We’re aboard the Berkeley, next to the Star of India, in Ashley’s cramped stateroom. The cannon fire between two privateers booms and blats through the porthole. It makes the timbers of the old Berkeley shudder.

Ashley, historian that he is, loves the mix of old and new San Diego playing out on the waters right now. I’ve come to ask him if he agrees with Michael Jones, that San Diego should remain a working port and not allow people to live on the waterfront.

“What you have here is the mixture of different kinds of uses,” he says. “It’s more typical of a 19th-century seaport. San Diego is actually a bit more of an authentic experience than you’d find in most places. Whether by accident or design, I think the way our bay has evolved, with all this multitude of uses — Navy, trade, scientific, historic — is a rarity amongst seaports of the world. In consequence, it’s a precious resource and commodity for the people who live in San Diego. You have to be careful: because if you’re destroying those uses that can only take place on the waterfront, in favor of something that could take place anywhere, then you really are undermining the basis for the economy. It’ll just be gone.”

But why is the waterfront not part of most San Diegans’ lives?

“I worked on a book with some other historians years ago, and we researched that question fairly deeply. One of the things we found out is that, like most industries that grow ever more efficient, [waterfront industries] are ever more efficient in their deployment of manpower. At one point, in the middle of the 19th Century, one out of every four jobs in the United States was related to maritime activity.

“Everybody knew somebody who worked on or around the water. Ships that could go places were the first large-scale technological system devised by humanity. If you take a look at the Star of India, built in 1863, it can move about 1000 tons of cargo, at a bit better than 100 miles a day, with the efforts of 30 [crew]. However, if you boost that up to an oil tanker today, where you have a 100,000-ton ship with 16 [crew] on it, one sailor on that tanker has the same throughput as a thousand sailors on the Star of India.”

Which tells you why this waterfront seems dead, I guess. Scale, automation. Less going on, more space — so why shouldn’t citizens move in and create a different waterfront?

“This is still a working port,” says Ashley. “Gentrification of the waterfront is a huge worry for the shipyards and all the maritime industries because there is a concern that if you start building expensive high-rises down in East Village or to the south of it, and they overlook those shipyards and they overlook gritty neighborhoods like Barrio Logan, those [property owners] aren’t going to want that. They’ll pretty soon demand to have all those gritty things removed, and then the shipyards are gone. The shipyards are gone, the local economy unravels. It’s a real concern.”

He says that over the years the bay’s industrial center of gravity has moved from North Bay to the South Bay.

“At one point, the area around Shelter Island — even before Shelter Island was there — till about right here on the bay, was concentrated with boatyards and shipyards. It was real life. It was also rather gritty. Over time, people bought houses nearby. A lot of houses. They bought because they wanted to live in the picturesque place near the pretty boats and the boatyards. But those pretty boatyards also smelled pretty bad. And there were tools, it was noisy, and pretty soon, they didn’t like that. Something’s got to give, so the boatyards end up losing out. Now you’ve got a lot of pretty houses and you’ve got a sterile waterfront, in many respects.

“It’s happened in waterfronts all over the country. They become gentrified, and ultimately they become sterile, dead places.”

Would he mind a “village” growing up around the Star of India and the Maritime Museum?

His face says it all. “Cutesy little houses? An artificial construct? I think what you describe would be ghastly. It would involve the appropriation of a public access for the few people who would enjoy it at the expense of all the other people who would like to be able to go there. There’s just not enough real estate to have individuals sequester it that way.”

Yet he doesn’t mind the “cutesy little houses” of that totally artificial construct, Seaport Village.

“I kind of like it, even though a lot of people detest it. I don’t know why they do. It’s supposed to be a collage of architecture of different seaports as they existed around the turn of the century. Did it succeed in conveying that impression? I don’t think most people realize that’s what the idea was. But the ambiance it generates, I think does that. So, when you go there and you just hang out, there are thousands of people enjoying Seaport Village. It’s packed with people all the time. I think it’s a great success.

“But do I want to have our museum right next to a Seaport Village? No. Because when those things have happened before, where maritime museums have been next to big retail developments, they basically gutted the maritime museum. It happened with the Hawaii Maritime Museum. It happened at Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. It happened at South Street [in New York’s lower Manhattan], ground zero for maritime activity in the United States. The whole ‘street of ships’ phenomenon. And [now] you have all these buildings surrounding South Street, pizza parlors and restaurants and retail shopping. All these people going back and forth, it’s sucked the life right out of the ships. In effect, the ships of South Street now are pathetic derelicts. So, do I want Seaport Village right next to me? No. What we have right now is damned near perfect.”

Time to Touch the Water?

Rob Wellington Quigley may be the only person with a chance of bringing San Diegans to live within reach of their downtown waterfront. Quigley’s currently completing his most iconic project, the domed Central Library in East Village. He lives just a block away, in a new, vertical wood-and-metal office-home.

Rob Quigley, the architect behind the downtown library, says of San Diego Bay, “There’s no place that you can actually stick your toe in the water, or literally touch it. Also, the city doesn’t figuratively touch the water, either.”

Photo by Howie Rosen

We’re on the third floor in these just-completed digs, looking out at the library’s Florence-like dome and down at a computer-assisted image, an aerial view of a “bay within the bay.”

“This was a project [for a] competition the Port funded in 2005,” he says. “It was an international competition to take the Seaport Village property and do something wonderful with it. The brief from the Port said they wanted something iconic that would work for tourists as well as for the people of San Diego.”

At first glance, Quigley’s model looks like a giant tadpole with a long tail curled all the way round to where Harbor Drive turns east, just south of the USS Midway.

“So this is our project,” he says, looking down to where a circled baylet springs out in front of the Manchester Grand Hyatt. A giant circular walking path — the “arc walk” — protects the bay-within-the-bay.

It looks like a bust-out of downtown breaking through to the water, between the pre-set North Embarcadero and the wall of hotels and convention centers to the south.

“In essence, it’s about touching the water,” Quigley says. “My critique of our bayfront, our collective bayfront, is that people never actually get to touch the water. Can you think of one place? No! There’s no place that you can actually stick your toe in the water. The city doesn’t figuratively touch the water, either.”

Initially, the word “iconic” stuck in Quigley’s craw.

“When the Port said, ‘We want something iconic,’ they were thinking Sydney Opera House. Remember the Opera House? Twenty-one times overbudget. It didn’t just almost break Sydney, it almost broke Australia. So we said ‘no.’ We agreed it should be iconic, but it shouldn’t be a physical monument. We asked ourselves: what can we do to make the bayfront valuable to San Diegans?

“Our theory is, if it’s valuable to San Diegans, tourists will also appreciate it. Right now, everything is for the tourists. We wanted to reverse that. So, this is, first of all, for locals. But because it is meaningful, hopefully, and emotional, tourists will also enjoy it.”

Quigley had a couple of ideas. “One was that we would continue the city grid, 200-by-300-foot blocks, and wipe out Seaport Village, which is an aberration. We would continue the grid, like it used to be years ago, back to the water, and allow the fabric of the city to touch the water. Instead of having this band of industrial uses separating the city from the water, we’re trying to connect it, trying to bind it back.”

He created this “bay within a bay” by digging out landfill and letting the waters back to their original shoreline. The giant “arc walk” is “a pier that goes all the way to the shipping lane. From this point, you could sit on a bench and literally look up and down the bay.”

And, “We’ve added beach. I live downtown, and we don’t have a beach.”

In the baylet, there would be barges. “They could have restaurants on them,” Quigley says, “or retail. Who knows? We also floated one barge here that would be a theater.”

Perhaps most importantly, Quigley created waterside and near-water housing. “The fabric [of the housing] could be three and four stories high. No more high-rises out here because that blocks the view from the city.”

But would this development be only for the wealthy?

“Our recommendation was that there would be all kinds of housing. Boutique hotels for college kids, say, or boutique hotels at the high end for the rich, but small-scale. There would also be affordable housing — which is possible because of the multiple stories — and when it was all completed, when CCDC [the recently dismantled Centre City Development Corporation] was operating, I think [affordable housing] would be a 20 percent segment.”

Bottom line?

“We entered,” he says. “And this prestigious jury of people from all over the country selected our scheme. We won.”

Which should have meant their project would be built, right? So what happened?

“We haven’t heard a thing from the Port since. It’s been six years.”

Say the Port does eventually build his project...what of the state law forbidding private residences on the Port-owned land-sea interface?

“We were hoping that, over the years, we could leverage more varied housing in there. Because we want people living there, where they can touch the water.”

Does he envision waterfront villages all around the bay?

“Yes, if we could move the state on that no-live law. Probably, the original idea for the law was noble, but it has been inverted, and now only the rich or high-end tourists [benefit from it.]”

Any hopes the Port will honor their contest promise?

“If the Port reneges on the commitment to go forward with our [winning design],” Quigley says, “the city will never touch the water.”