Downtown San Diego Stories
Napa Valley Grille 502 Horton Plaza, Downtown (619) 238-5440 Napa Valley Grille has its own wine bar, two outdoor patios, a private dining room, and a large central dining room. Restaurants come and go in …
Pantoja Park Between Kettner and State on G Street Lunch Hour, Monday through Thursday This game has been going on for over nine years. The players come and go, but the game goes on. The …
For years, Mel Shapiro, a retired accountant who spends much of his time as a watchdog of the goings-on at San Diego's city hall, suspected that the city council was not being straight about what …
A client once remarked to Margarita Alvarez that all of San Diego's fruit and vegetable vendors would eventually move to the edge of downtown. That prediction, made in the 1970s, surprised Alvarez, the assistant board …
Here’s the idea: You get a bunch of writers together and you take them someplace cool, someplace evocative — the Santa Fe Depot, say — and you tell them, “Go ahead, write something.” This could …
“House of Blues is not coming to the building bounded by Fifth and Sixth and Broadway,” says a well-connected source. “I understand they have walked away from the Woolworth’s building.” It was announced in the …
Frank Klaiger, owner of a bar on Sixth Avenue, accused Ada Maxwell of stealing $65. Klaiger went to Ada’s home at Fourth and island, and fired through a window. J. “Bull" Conrad, raced outside and punched Klaiger.
When a new cast of characters auditions next week for the Centre City Development Corp., it aims to revive San Diego's longest-running empty stage. The Balboa Theatre, a national historic landmark in downtown San Diego, …
Perhaps San Diego’s two screwdrivers, the Hyatt and One America — harbingers of shapes to come — are tools for its future. With luck, Emerald Plaza may serve as a New Age talisman against overbuilding and outrageous flash.
When Charles Harrington Elster contemplates the task of building a new library in downtown San Diego, the Greek myth of Sisyphus comes to mind. For his crimes of murder, gossip, and greed, Sisyphus was condemned …
This is exactly the room I’ve been afraid of all my life. A place where I have landed in middle age. Somehow I have failed, this time thoroughly. I find myself on a hard mattress …
As a biology student at the University of Colorado, Ken Rowland imagined becoming the next Jacques Cousteau, but a bout of seasickness on the way to Santa Catalina Island moored his career to land. Rowland …
During the 1930s, the black community began to have clearly defined borders. Blacks mostly resided in the area from 30th Street to 32nd Street, between Woolman (now Oceanview) Avenue and Logan Avenue.
Matt: Would you do a favor for all us bike riders and make a list of the steepest streets in San Diego? -- A. Rider, San Diego Dear Matthew Alice: What are the steepest street …
On one side are two multi-millionaires; five national cable and broadcast conglomerates; a well-entrenched, monopoly daily newspaper and its army of compliant reporters; the mayor and city council and their taxpayer-paid staff; an ex-mayor tainted …
Hillcrest dentist David Kennedy recently posed the following question to several friends with whom he was dining: What would you do if you knew that a toxic substance was going to be added to San …
“If you have an office building, 1 story, 30 stories, or 80 stories, the owner wants to look forward to a profit. One way, if the economy is good in that market area — you can raise the rents.”
On the second floor is a character I recognize. I’ve seen this individual bicycling around town, along Pacific Coast Highway, and in Ocean Beach. Today this person is reading an instructional book on Mandarin Chinese.
"The universe is a bar," Buck says between swigs of beer, in one of those lines that led the late poet William Stafford to observe, "Everyone wanders into poetry sometimes." If Buck hadn’t just told …
When UCSD first opened, US 101 had not yet been replaced by the long-promised Interstate 5. Although 101 sliced the campus in two, in its early days, UCSD was mostly confined to the Revelle College area,
Welton Jones: “Let me finish. If you say one more goddamn word to me, I’m going to hang up! You just keep your mouth shut and your ears open and you might learn something.”
As I’m preparing to get out of the car, a woman in a blue Isuzu pulls up. I try to ignore her. “Are you leaving?” she asks plaintively. “No,” I reply, smugly. “Just got here.”
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, …
The Coast is for the “working class,” as a co-owner of the hotel, Lee Howard Jr., likes to say. Others compare it to fly paper. Still others say it merely provides a stopping off for misfits.
Once a week Cathy Elkin has the unlikely task of educating 500 new sailors about the dangers of their first liberty. The Navy calls it “Liberty Lecture,” and Elkin, who is director of public affairs …
Suppose, for a moment, that you had a lot of money — oh, not exactly cash, but valuable property. More money, that is, than you would ever need. Suppose, too, that for most of your …
“We love the view. Particularly over fogbanks, you get subtle violets, rose, and gray tinged with blue. Concentrated on the water as this city is, it’s one of the great sunset cities of the world.”
Six years ago I could visit Pat at Cathedral Plaza simply by walking into the building, taking the elevator to her floor. Now I call ahead and arrange for Pat to meet me at the lobby entrance.
The Santee condominium in which Michelle Wyatt lived for the last nine months of her life is typical of the hundreds of others that were constructed during the late Seventies in similar newly developed East …
“You 'll never fit all this in. There’s just too much, isn’t there? It’s really a book •that would be timely, for women. And it’s going to be done. You know its title? A Town …
I saw Richard and Jeffrey standing some distance off. I deliberately ignored them. For weeks now Richard had been prodding me to stake Jeffrey so that he could leave town.
A commotion at the entrance of the Can-Can Club. Heads turn as the vibrations spread. Two men are ejected from said topless go-go bar. One of them is on crutches, his right leg in a full-length cast.
Herschel and Silverado, La Jolla: The buildings on this corner in La Jolla don't reek of money: a print shop, a Travelodge, It could be a corner in another part of San Diego. But the …
"One warning. Make sure you wear shoes."