What is San Diego, Revisited

from Cameron Crowe’s memoir:

With San Diego Comic-Con approaching, it’s time to revisit our 2024 question, What Is San Diego?

Perhaps the suffocating banality of official San Diego’s pious “America’s Finest City” mantra has led even those who know better to think that nothing is possible here other than the affectless pleasure that comes from drifting back and forth between the beach and the shops. Or maybe we are too preoccupied by daydreams of tech bros taking over the now-defunct Horton Plaza mall downtown, buying up luxury condos and ushering out the unpleasant hordes of the dispossessed, to think beyond our own marketing. Nonetheless, underneath San Diego’s superficial postcard sunshine, writers have found both grit and genuine transcendence.

Perhaps the city is best captured by the incongruous juxtaposition of the evanescent beauty of the gleaming coast with the muted gray façade of America’s multi-billion dollar killing machine. San Diego is also the sex oozing from the teeming Pacific Beach boardwalk in mid-summer and the lonely deaths of migrants in the unforgiving winter desert. It is a city of lurid scandal and right-wing vigilantism as well as a home for increasingly creative, diverse and progressive communities. San Diego is neither beyond alienation, nor devoid of ecstasy.

San Diego is the Anglo Mission fantasy that evolved from the days of Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona and the place where Henry James wrote, “the sense of the shining social and human inane is utter.” San Diego is where Henry Miller was converted to free love and radicalism by famous anarchist Emma Goldman on the way to a Tijuana brothel, and the place where right-wing vigilantes tortured and murdered Wobblies for speaking on soapboxes at the corner of 5^th and E. America’s eighth largest city has produced a minor noir tradition and a sizable canon of gay sailor pulp novels.

So says Doug Porter in an excellent roundup, “The Perpetual Limbo of Literary San Diego.”

In 1942, the narrator of Jim Thompson’s seminal noir account of San Diego, Now and On Earth observed that:

San Diego, prior to the establishment of the aircraft factories, was not inappropriately dubbed the “City of the Living Dead.” There were no industries, there was no construction; the town’s one asset was its climate. If you were young and wanted excitement and had a living to make, why, the town wouldn’t want you and you wouldn’t want it. If you were old and had a small income or pension, you couldn’t have found a more attractive place to live (or die) in.

I was looking for more answers to what’s the deal with San Diego – not the tourist portal, but the city that’s home to 1.4 million. What’s the San Diego that I, a tourist, never see? Luckily there’s a book just for me:

The historian Kevin Starr was asked by Neil Morgan, a Union-Tribune columnist, why San Diego got so little space in Starr’s celebrated Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915. Starr replied serenely, “From a historian’s point of view, nothing much happened in San Diego before the Second World War.”

Very funny thing for a historian to say. The pre-WW2 San Diego topic Starr does talk about in the book is the 1917 Panama- California Exhibition, the buildings and pavilions designed by Bertram Goodhue.

Many of these remain or were rebuilt in San Diego’s Balboa Park. (Goodhue also designed the LA Central Public Library and the Nebraska State Capital).

And what happened at the Second World War that made San Diego pop, historywise? Well, San Diego was converted into a giant military base and aircraft factory, and the city boomed in population.

Under tremendous pressure from Washington, San Diego had reluctantly yielded more than a quarter of its incorporated land area and 70 percent of the undeveloped county to defense plants, training camps, airfields, and bombing ranges. “The city’s landscape had been scraped, leveled and built to meet the demands of the army, the navy and the aircraft industry. Two thousand acres of new land had been added to airports and parade grounds by moving the waterfront a mile out…

But, whatever the price, there was simply not enough housing to meet the soaring levels of demand. In 1941 the population increased by a staggering 50 percent, a decade’s projected growth in a single year.

The result—as investigating congressional committees confirmed in 1941 and again in 1943—was the nation’s worst defense housing crisis.

“Aviation Okies,” as they were called, were often forced to sleep in their autos, abandoned rail cars, all-night movie theaters, or share beds in shifts. Mission Valley, whose Nisei truck farmers were now interned in Arizona, was a vast trailer camp for Consair workers and navy wives…

the county was experiencing a severe drought. In any event, the bewildered city administration of Mayor Benbough, who dropped dead of stress in 1942, was totally overwhelmed by the housing and infrastructural crises. With the city’s business leadership almost paralyzed, Fleet took matters into his own hands To gain Washington’s immediate attention, he telegraphed Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox that a deadly epidemic was imminent because of the sewage in the harbor. Then he spoke directly to FDR, warning the president that further expansion of B-24 production was being jeopardized by the city’s inability to overcome the various bottlenecks. “The situation is now impossible without federal aid,” Fleet said. The White House punctually ordered the navy and other agencies to undertake a crash program of housing and public works.

San Diego became the first of the so-called congested districts, crucial to war production, whose urban development was temporarily taken in hand by the federal government.

San Diego intersects with my own family history here: my grandmother took a train from New Jersey to Camp Pendleton, where she married my grandfather who was waiting to ship out.

This train connection from the east is a key to San Diego’s history. It was slow to arrive. San Diego has great geography for an ocean harbor and bad geography for an eastbound rail connection.

“Physically, as Davis notes (and the canny Kipling realized), San Diego—with its hem of forbidding eastern mountains—is a “cul-de-sac.” Its “intractable geography” frustrated generations of promoters who longed for the direct railroad connection to the east that might have made it a great entrepôt. Rather than becoming the hub of a railroad empire, however, San Diego was doomed to be a sideshow for remote capitalist deities like E. H. Harriman, master of “The Octopus” and Kipling’s model for Cheyne. Rapacious even by the standards of his fellow robber barons, Harriman, who controlled the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific railroads, was the first to envision and almost to accomplish a global transportation network.

According to Davis, the development of North County in San Diego was “retarded” for a generation as a remote consequence of Harriman’s duel with the overmastered Henry Huntington.

By contrast:

Thanks to the San Andreas Fault, which shifts entire mountain ranges, the Los Angeles basin has two great natural gateways to the east—the San Gorgonio and Cajon passes—that were used by Indian raiders in the 183os and 184os before they became the routes of the Southern Pacific (1879) and Santa Fe (1885) railroads. The natural deficiencies of San Pedro Bay were compensated by these generous portals to the east.

You can see the problem on this 1890 railway map:

Says Wikipedia’s history of San Diego:

In 1878, San Diego was predicted to become a rival of San Francisco’s trading ports. To prevent that, the manager of Central Pacific Railroad Charles Crocker, decided not to build an extension to San Diego, fearing that it would take too much trade from San Francisco.

LA and San Francisco got railway connections that San Diego didn’t.

The Civil War years brought literally biblical disaster to California south of the Tehachapis. The worst drought of the nineteenth century scorched the grasslands of Los Angeles and San Diego counties into ochre deserts and destroyed the livestock wealth of the region’s mixed Anglo-Californio pioneers. In San Francisco, by contrast, the fabulous fortunes of the city’s Nevada silver colony, the Comstock, as well as the profits from the construction of the Central Pacific Railroad, had created a boom of Medician splendor. After the end of the Civil War, the excess capital of the North soon flowed south to take ownership of the ruined anchos. There was an almost complete turnover of elites as silver barons (like Baldwin and Irvine) and Central Pacific Railroad speculators (like Lankershim and Van Nuys) acquired an empire of former Spanish land grants at rock-bottom prices.

In this environment, Alonzo Horton saw promise.

Alznzo came from the east:

when he was 21, he began transporting grain by boat from the Lake Ontario port of Oswego, New York, to Canada… But having developed a cough, and with his family and friends fearing tuberculosis, he was advised to move to the West. At that time, the Western frontier was Wisconsin, and in 1836 he moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

He bought land warrants from veterans of the Mexican-American War, and set out to establish a town in the wilderness:

In 1848 Horton filed his first Warrant in Green Bay, the County seat for Brown County which the area was a part of at that time, for 160 acres of land which is now “Downtown Hortonville”. The price per acre at that time was only $.70. But before he could file he had to take an oath that he had seen and inspected the land and that no other settler resided on the land. To do so meant travelling by foot to inspect the land which was almost all dense woods with no trails. Then he had to go back to Green Bay by foot to file and return again. No easy task as the trip was around 40 miles and the area has many streams and rivers that he needed to cross along the way. After this he became a success at trading land, establishing businesses and cattle.

Hortonville, Wisconsin is still there, it looks pleasant. Alonzo moved on to California. He sold ice in gold field towns, and opened a furniture store in San Francisco. Then he heard about San Diego:

After a lecture about the ports of California, he later recalled his excitement, “I could not sleep at night for thinking about San Diego, and at 2 in the morning, I got up and looked on a map to see where San Diego was, and then went back to bed satisfied. In the morning, I said to my wife, I am going to sell my goods and go to San Diego and build a city.”

He was successful for awhile. He mapped out Horton’s Addition to the Old Town that was once the center of San Diego:

But the dream of the Texas Pacific Railroad reaching San Diego dissolved:

The bursting of the railroad bubble ruined Horton, who for a glorious few months had been selling his twenty-six-cents-an-acre lots for as much as $6,000 each. He was now forced to auction off his wharf and mortgage his hotel (the creditors finally foreclosed on it in 188l).

Simultaneously, New Town’s swollen population of speculators and land investors, who were waiting for the Texas and Pacific to make them instant millionaires, melted away to the far corners. San Diego altogether lost nearly 70 percent of its residents and for the remainder of the 187os was forced to earn a modest living from beekeeping, whaling, and vineyards, with an occasional mining boomlet in the mountains. Once again, in Hubert Bancroft’s acid phrase, the forlorn town “crawled along… like a starved dwarf, wandering among trees laden with fruit beyond his reach.”

There’s a statue of him in Horton Plaza:

Into this vacuum came John D. Spreckels, son of the sugar king:

Why did I come to San Diego? Why did any of you come? We came because we thought we saw an unusual opportunity here. We believed that everything pointed to this as the logical site for a great city and seaport. In short, we had faith in San Diego’s future. We gave of our time and our strength and our means…to help develop our city, and naturally, our own fortunes. … What is the matter with San Diego? Why is it not the metropolis and seaport that its geographical and other unique advantages entitle it to be? Why does San Diego always just miss the train, somehow?

Spreckels controlled the street cars which he used to sell real estate:

Mike Davis describes him:

John D., who served an apprenticeship managing his father’s Hawaiian empire, inherited this love of conquest as well as a business philosophy based more on the dictums of von Clausewitz than those of Adam Smith. – Indeed, in hindsight, his enemies would later recognize that John D. had conquered San Diego like a Prussian general, systematically overrunning one stronghold after another. His first step, not long after docking the Lurline, was to construct a modern coal wharf at the foot of Broadway. Controlling the city’s supply of imported energy, he was in a superior position to leisurely cherry-pick the best properties.

By 1900, according to one of his principal adversaries, Colonel Ed Fletcher, “Spreckels owned nearly everything of value in San Diego,” and paid fully 1o percent of the county’s property tax assessment. It was a degree of absentee control John D. did not move his residence to San Diego until after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake) unequaled anywhere in California, and editors and publicists had begun to routinely refer to San Diego as a “one-man town” or ” principality.”‘

But even the Promethean energies of Spreckels in consolidating and rationalizing the city’s key infrastructures were of little avail against the depression that gripped San Diego for nearly a generation after 1888. (Even in 1910, its population would still be smaller than it was in 1887). In 1893 John D. had to provide coal on credit to the bankrupt Santa Fe Corporation to prevent it from discontinuing rail service to what Los Angeles papers gleefully referred to as the “ghost town to the south.” Indeed, the 18gos ruthlessly clarified the differential growth potentials of the two southland cities. Although Los Angeles was also knocked flat in 1888, it was back on its feet and growing vigorously by the mid-189os, largely due to its exploitation of hitherto unsuspected mineral wealth.

Why did LA prosper while San Diego struggled?

The most important discovery was that the Los Angeles basin and its inland valleys literally floated on millions of acre-feet of underground water, which, thanks to newfangled electric pumps powered by dams in the foothills, could be used to irrigate thousands of orchards and farms. Los Angeles, as a consequence, quickly became the richest agricultural county in the nation. Its other bonanza was oil, first discovered on the flanks of downtown in the 18gos, then in fantastically rich fields near Long Beach after World War I. Los Angeles, which had always relied on expensive coal imported from Australia and British Columbia, became the Saudi Arabia of the 1920s, with prodigious reserves of cheap fuel for its cars, suburbs, and new branch plants.

San Diego, by contrast, had no oil and precious little ground-water. Nor did it have a large constituency of wealthy citrus growers aggressively pushing for the comprehensive development of the water and power resources of its local mountains. Indeed, by the time that imperial Los Angeles made its famed grab for the water of the Owens Valley, thirsty little San Diego was still embroiled in petty water wars between the Spreckels’s Oray interests and the competing holders of water rights on the San Diego River. Unlike Los Angeles, which could afford to build vast infrastructures in anticipation of future growth, San Diego habitually failed to keep up with current demand.

(Indeed, as we shall see, this historical shortfall in water provision, as well as in sewage treatment, would assume crisis proportions in the 1940s.) Whereas turn-of-the-century Los Angeles seemed to enjoy a virtuous circle of cheaper resources, more abundant capital, and high growth, San Diego stagnated without the capital to develop the necessary resources, or the resources to attract the necessary capital.

San Diego had to build a wooden flume to bring in water from 35 miles away:

A positive buried in that misfortune?:

Unlike Los Angeles, which had recklessly alienated its public lands, San Diego still possessed forty thousand acres of developable “pueblo land,” fourteen hundred acres of which had been providentially set aside for a great municipal park. With proper planning and good advertising, San Diego might yet become a bigger version of Pasadena, the celebrated town in the Los Angeles foothills that was a winter home for dozens of Midwestern millionaires.

In this boom and bust era was the rise of the Stingeree:

Just when the name Stingaree was first used to describe San Diego’s tenderloin district is unknown. From early newspaper accounts, it is learned there were some buildings on lower Fifth known as Stingaree Row or Stingaree Block. By 1881, however, they had fallen in disrepair and were causing considerable comment. In November of that year the Union reported that Stingaree Row was receiving an application of paint, soap and water; but in 1882 a citizen wrote to the editor complaining that the Stingaree Block was an eyesore to the community and a nuisance of flagrant character. Finally, in 1884, the old Stingaree Block was moved to a lot “near the court house.” It is possible that the name of this disreputable old building was later used to describe the entire area. In any event, the flats along San Diego’s waterfront were infested with Stingarees, a venomous fish with a whiplike tail capable of inflicting severe injury. Obviously those who patronized the Stingaree were likely to “get stung.”

In this era came Wyatt Earp:

Among the gamblers who came to town during the Boom was Wyatt Earp, former lawman and refugee from the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Earp, while in San Diego, ran three gambling halls, one on Fourth across from the Plaza, and the others near Sixth and E, all in the “respectable” part of town. As a sideline, he acted as a referee for boxing matches. He was listed in the 1888 City Directory as a “Capitalist.”

The Stingaree, described in 1887 by a reporter from the San Diego Union:

Strolling down Fifth in the evening, the ear is rasped by notes from asthmatic pianos, discordant fiddles and drunken voices boisterously singing ribald songs. Noses are offended by garlic, swill and fried meat coming from some chophouse. The eye is pained to see men lying drunk on every corner . . . . it is fully as bad as the Barbary Coast in San Francisco.

No “decent” woman would be seen in that part of town, even in the daytime. The identifiable ladies of the night seldom went beyond the “deadline,” Market Street, except in carriages hired by the Madam to transport her girls, all gussied up and looking very proper, around town to pass out their calling cards, much to the disgust of housewives who peered curiously through lace curtains at their fallen sisters.

On the west side of Fifth. between Island and J, in the middle of the block, was Pete Cassidy’s place, a two story brick building. Behind Cassidy’s, and running through to Fourth behind the Turf, was another compound of cribs, or stables. In the parlance of the Redlight District. stables or bullpens described rows of cribs facing on a courtyard, rather than having entrance from a street. In this compound were at least fifty rooms. Each girl paid $14 a week, plus a percentage of the take, for the privilege of doing business, and often a fee to the procurer who usually was the bouncer or “protector” of the compound.

Over the door of each crib was the name of the occupant, such as Rosie or Dolly. Often a good luck charm, such as a horseshoe tied with a faded ribbon, hung over the door. Inside the rooms on the walls could be seen plaster of Paris angels and cherubs, and often a copy of the Lord’s Prayer. ..

Some of the better brick structures on Fifth housed the “all purpose” girls, those who were employed uptown during the day in dress shops. restaurants and offices, and then “moonlighted” on Saturday night.

The regular inmates of the Stingaree seldom left the district, and so messengers were used to deliver clothing and other necessities from the stores which were out of bounds for the girls. Messenger boys also were kept busy supplying food and liquor to the girls in the compounds. One of the residents, known as Dutch Annie, was an alcoholic, and every morning without fail a messenger was summoned to bring her a bottle. 

All that from this excellent 1974 piece by Elizabeth MacPhail in the Journal of San Diego History.

In the Stingaree in 1912 the most exciting event in pre-World War 2 San Diego took place, the Free Speech fight. IWW workers, Wobblies, and other outsider political speakers would give soap box speeches and agitate:

The square block at the corner of Fifth and E Streets was home to more than just debauchery, as it also was the central location for a variety of “soapbox orators” including the Salvation Army, Socialists, Holy Rollers, and the Single Taxers.

Davis/Mayhew/Miller find an interview that gives some context for this movement:

Empowering bums was not popular with the vested interested in the city. The San Diego Common Council passed a ban on soapbox speaking. An ongoing fight over the right to speech broke out. It came to climax in May 1912 when the socialists Emma Goldman and Ben Reitman came to town to speak. It didn’t go great:

Reitman was abducted by vigilantes from his hotel room and tortured. He later recalled,

They tore my clothes off. They knocked me down, and when I lay naked on the ground, they kicked and beat me until I was almost insensible. With a lighted cigar they burned the letters I.W.W. on my buttocks; then they poured a can of tar over my head and, in the absence of feathers, rubbed sage-brush on my body. One of them attempted to push a cane into my rectum. Another twisted my testicles. They forced me to kiss the flag and sing The Star-Spangled Banner. When they tired of the fun, they gave me my underwear for fear we should meet any women. They also gave me back my vest, in order that I might carry my money, railroad ticket, and watch. The rest of my clothes they kept. I was ordered to make a speech, and then they commanded me to run the gauntlet. The Vigilantes lined up, and as I ran past them, each one gave me a blow or a kick. Then they let me go.

In the aftermath, the Stingaree was cleaned up. Prostitutes were rounded up and put on trains, many buildings were razed. The neighborhood kinda languished, with some porno shops for sailors and stuff, until the 1970s, when it was reinvented as The Gaslamp District. This is kind of ersatz historic district, though there are some legit old buildings.

In the WW1 period, the Navy put a significant footprint on San Diego:

After the creation of a full-fledged Pacific battle fleet in 1919, San Diego soon won destroyers (based at Thirty-Second Street in National City) and a submarine base (at Ballast Point), transferred from San Pedro. If the biggest plums, the new battleships and heavy cruisers, went to Pearl Harbor, San Francisco, and Bremerton, it was a blessing in disguise. San Diego’s compensation was an unusual concentration of the navy’s infant, cutting-edge technologies: long-distance radio transmission, carrier aviation, and, later, undersea and amphibious warfare. This was San Diego’s future high-tech economy in embryo.

Moreover, as the bay was gradually deepened, San Diego was able to grab some cruisers and, far more important, the first generation of aircraft carriers, led by the Langley in 1922 and the Saratoga in 1932.

(The sediment dredged for the carriers was used, in turn, to create Lindbergh Field in 1929) In part, this was San Diego’s just reward for its political support of Admiral William Moffett and other leading advocates of naval aviation.

This continued through WW2, as we’ve seen, and then after:

in the mid-1950s the holy grail sought by Wilson and other boosters was homeporting the navys new supercarriers. Without costly dredging of the harbor channel and the construction of new wharf facilities, however, San Diego could not accommodate the huge ships, the most deadly weapons platforms ever constructed. Long Beach, on the other hand, had ample port facilities and was eager to see San Diego demoted to a mere destroyer base. To make matters worse, the navy, which considered all of Kearny Mesa’s airspace as the exclusive preserve of its Miramar-based jets, was angry at a city plan to develop nearby Montgomery Field as a replacement for overcrowded and dangerously situated Lindbergh Field downtown. In the end it was left to the Union to panic voters with the apocalyptic headline, “Navy Says San Diego May Lose Carrier Fleet in Airport Dispute.” Duly intimi dated, the city council scrapped its airport scheme, and, with the help of Vice President Richard Nixon, Congress approved funding in 1958 for a new supercarrier wharf on North Island.’Two years later, San Diego repaid Nixon’s favor by providing him with the margin of votes to narrowly carry California in the 1960 presidential election.

The best book I’ve ever found about San Diego is Max Miller’s I Cover The Waterfront, from 1932, reviewed here. The waterfront in Miller’s time was on a different scale from the aircraft carrier and tourist shop waterfront of today. Says Wikipedia:

The San Diego tuna fleet reached a peak of 160 vessels, and in 1962 employed around forty thousand San Diegans

Incredible. It seems the tuna fleet declined due to foreign competition, Mexican restrictions, and the Marine Mammal Protection Act. Claude estimates the number of people working in commercial fishing in San Diego today to be in the low hundreds. Bumblebee is still headquartered in San Diego.

Don’t worry, there’s darkness below the surface there too.

Mike Davis is great on the various power brokers of postwar San Diego: pavement kings who controlled construction, developers and political dealmakers. Your tolerance for local corruption and spiderwebs of dealmaking may vary; any time new developments are happening there are alliances in politics, regulations boxing people out, the people with the connections to lift the delays and move the shovels. Consider Irvin Kahn:

In 1962, Kahn acquired the approximately 14,000 acre Rancho Peñasquitos with financing from Sixty Trust, the employee pension fund of airplane manufacturer Textron, Inc. (Rancho Peñasquitos was one of only a handful of large ranches still operating within the city limits.) Kahn planned to develop the land into a massive $1 billion housing development with a golf course, apartments, single-family tract homes, retirement housing, and shopping centers. Kahn’s broad vision set in motion a series of additional planning processes that created lengthy delays for the project, with the San Diego City Planning Commission voting to delay consideration of Kahn’s subdivision plan for several years until a master plan could be developed for the area. By 1965 the project was in danger of foreclosure and required additional financing. Kahn recruited Louis Lessor’s help in obtaining financing from the Teamsters Pension Fund through Lessor’s relationship with Morris Shenker, who was the gatekeeper for the Pension Fund’s investments. Shenker arrange a $10M mortgage from the Mercantile Trust Company National Association and an additional $3.5M in financing from the Teamsters Pension Fund. In exchange, the Teamsters Pension Fund received a first deed of trust on Rancho Peñasquitos, and a 20% share in the Rancho Peñasquitos development corporation.

Or, to put it more bluntly:

Davis is great on San Diego’s mayor turned California governor, Pete Wilson:

The structural reform, however, that most concerned Wilson was redressing the imbalance of power between the mayor and the city manager. San Diego’s weak mayor-strong council/city manager system did not fit with either Wilson’s personality or his ambitions.

The city charter devoted two full pages to the city manager’s powers but a mere paragraph to the mayor’s. Wilson frequently contrasted the enfeebled status of the mayor with the line authority exercised by county supervisors or, even more tellingly, the sweeping powers of Port Director Don Nay, who was the landlord of Lindbergh Field and all of San Diego’s tideland industries.

When a frontal assault—an unsuccessful 1973 charter reform ini-tiative— failed to provide Wilson with enhanced power, he resorted to stealth He succeeded in forcing the council to accept a new committee system whose proceedings were controlled by a rules committee of which the mayor was chair. No agenda item, as a result, could come before the council without Wilson’s approval. … Finally, he created a fundraising network that allowed him to dominate San Diego’s system (established in 193L) of citywide council runoffs. Council candidates were pared to two finalists by district primaries, but success in the runoff depended upon one’s resources to mount citywide television ad campaigns. Wilson controlled the crucial purse strings.

Source – this San Diego Reader piece by Thomas Larson on Wilson, which mostly focuses on Pete as governor, and Prop 187, the anti-immigrant measure that won big at the ballot box, got tied up in the courts, and probably wiped out the Republican Party in California.

The first time I ever visited San Diego I arrived by plane, and I was struck that the airport seemed to be right in the middle of the city. Indeed, the Guinness Book of World Records declares San Diego to have the “most centrally located urban airport.” On subsequent visits I try to arrive by train, to the Santa Fe depot. The rail line runs right by the beach in north San Diego County. There are plans to move it inland, and into a tunnel, which would be less fun. Someday it will fall into the ocean.

That’s a reasonable roundup on the history of San Diego, at least for the weekend tourist. Max Miller’s waterfront and the former Stingaree will host 100,000 Comic-Con visitors this weekend. Let’s give the last word to Doug Porter:

San Diego is one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the United States. It also has one of the largest gaps between the rich and poor in California, a growing unhoused population, and juxtaposes a carefree postcard reality with a massive military industrial complex and a heavily fortified international border. San Diego County goes from the desert to the sea, contains mountains, wild spaces, and the sprawling suburbs which threaten them. In many ways, it is a region on the cutting edge of the Pacific Rim.

here’s a collection of photos of San Diego diners in 1947:

Bet the coffee here hit.

The Spreckels of California

Alma, in later life

Claus Spreckels was born in Germany in 1828.

After the bad harvests of 1845 and 1846, the resulting inflation and hunger crisis reached its peak in 1847. Spreckels emigrated to the United States in 1848 at the age of 19 to start a new life, with only one German thaler in his pocket, which upon arrival in the US, he exchanged for 75 cents. (Equivalent to about $30 in 2023 dollars.) Spreckels settled in Charleston, South Carolina, working as a grocery clerk, taking over the grocery store after a year and a half by buying it on credit from the retiring shop owner.

Claus’s brother Bernard had moved to San Francisco, and told Claus things were booming there. In 1855 Claus moved there. He opened a grocery store, and then a brewery. From Wikipedia:

Brewing proved a sometimes difficult line of work. Beermaking required constant monitoring for temperature, something that might be ignored when a shift change happened, requiring Spreckels to come in late at night and monitor the process himself. He later stated that he often slept no more than four hours per day for months on end.

A new idea:

Spreckels saloon was located in the same area as George Gordon’s San Francisco and Pacific Sugar Refinery and frequented by some of its workmen. Spreckels had overheard a conversation between these workmen discussing the wastefulness of the sugar refining process at their factory, which allowed large amounts of sugar liquor to overflow and run into the sewers. Spreckels sensed that if the refinery could still turn a profit while wasting so much of its product, then the profit potential in sugar must be enormous. An additional factor was the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, which cut off the North from Southern sugar supplies, causing demand to outstrip supply.

This went great, but it wasn’t easy:

In 1869, overwork and stress had led to severe burnout and a mental breakdown, characterized by memory loss and other physical and mental symptoms. His doctors advised him to withdraw from all business activity. Spreckels left management of the California Sugar Refinery in the hands of his partners and spent the next 18 months over 1869 and 1870 traveling with his family in Europe. This trip included a course of hydrotherapy at the spa town of Karlsbad, Bohemia. He returned to San Francisco in early 1871 with his health and vigor fully restored.

He had sugar plantations in Hawaii, and sugar beet operations in Santa Cruz County. In Maui he built the company town of Spreckelsville. But he found himself on the wrong side of Hawaiian politics after the overthrow of the Kingdom, and left.

Allegations by the Chronicle and other critics included the claim that he practiced slavery on his Hawaiian plantations, that he acted as a pimp for King Kalākaua, and that he had defrauded stockholders in his company

Back in California Spreckels developed more sugar beet operations, and established another Spreckelsville:

(source). Sometime I’d like to visit. from a 2012 Monterey Now article:

Claus Spreckels founded the town in 1899, when the sugar plant became the world’s biggest, binging on 13 million gallons of water from local wells and processing 3,000 tons of beets a day. 


The company may have left in the ’80s, but its imprint never will. Sugar beets still pop up “randomly” in the yard, according to resident and local celebrity chef Todd Fisher. 


“People who live there will forever associate with the sugar plant,” he says. “We’ve all got some form of memento.” 


The impact appears permanent on the wider Salinas Valley as well. Claus Spreckels is credited for the Salad Bowl’s first raised row crops and for pioneering its underground irrigation. 


“He put Salinas on the map agriculturally,” says Tanimura & Antle cofounder and CEO Rick Antle. “It was basically wheat crops for cattle feed before him.”


“The Spreckels Sugar Company built a vast network of wells, pumps, ditches and canals, all to bring water to the beet fields,” authors Gary Breschini, Mona Gudgel and Trudy Haversat write in Images of America: Spreckels. “This irrigation project transformed the dry ranches into fertile farmland. In subsequent years, the irrigation made the switch to row crops possible. In many ways, it was Claus Spreckels who turned the Salinas Valley green.” 

He developed a railroad into the Central Valley that competed with the Southern Pacific.

By the early 1960s a series of mergers and acquisitions swallowed up Spreckels Sugar. Some remnants became part of Amstar and others were shut down.

Some of Spreckels children were Adolph, who shot San Francisco Chronicle publisher Michael DeYoung, failed to kill him, and was acquitted. Aldoph also bred the first California horse to win the Kentucky Derby. He married Alma de Bretteville:

Alma de Bretteville met her future husband thanks to a rumor that she modeled for the Dewey Monument by Robert Aitken, which can be found in Union Square. One version of the story holds that Aitken hired Alma de Bretteville Spreckels, who had modeled for Aitken previously, to model for the statue. However, a 1902 article detailing the monument’s construction states that Aitken’s model was Clara Petzold or Petzoldt, a popular artists’ model in San Francisco at that time. Regardless, this statue was selected from a number of entries and only barely made the cut, thanks to the crucial vote of the chair of the Citizens’ Committee, Adolph B. Spreckels. Although he was 24 years older than she was, he was smitten by Alma, and after a five-year courtship, they married on May 11, 1908.

Alma funded the Palace of the Legion of Honor, famed San Francisco landmark seen in the movie The Rock.

Adolph’s brother John D. was an important figure in San Diego. He built the “Impossible Railroad” that connected the city, through rough terrain, to the east, requiring miles of tunnels and bridges.

At various times he owned all of Coronado Island, the San Diego-Coronado Ferry System, the Union-Tribune Publishing Co., the San Diego Electric Railway, the San Diego & Arizona Railway, and Belmont Park in Mission Beach. He built several downtown buildings, including the Union Building in 1908, Spreckels Theatre in 1912, the Hotel San Diego, and the Golden West Hotel. He employed thousands of people and at one time he paid 10% of all the property taxes in San Diego County.

John D.’s mansion is now the Glorietta Bay Inn.

Adolph’s son, Adolph Jr, was the father of the surfer Bunker Spreckels:

When Kathleen’s marriage collapsed to Adolph Jr, she fell into the arms of one Clark Gable, who took Bunker on as his own, schooling him in the arts of hunting and Hollywood artifice (In one of Bunker’s final interviews, with writer CR Stecyk III, he said of Gable: “I’ll say one thing – he was the same way at home that he was on the screen. He didn’t change very much. He was from that no-crap school of acting and that’s the way he lived, too. He was never one to talk about himself… He taught me how to shoot. He taught me how to use different weapons – knives and bullwhips, that type of thing. He was good with a whip. He was good with a lasso, good in the cowboy arts. Good with horses. He was good with animals. He was into hunting and fishing.”) Gable was, by many accounts, a wonderful stepfather to Bunker, but when he died suddenly in 1960, he left in his wake a boy with a wild streak who had never lived by the de facto rules of society, and an heir to a ridiculously large inheritance. In the years after Gable died, Bunker is said to have used the actor’s Oscar trophy as a doorstop. What could possibly go wrong? Between the ages of 15 and 20, Bunker made ends meet by selling bags of weed here and there while living on Gable’s ranch. His girlfriend at the time was Miss Teen California and they would kill time cruising around in her trophy car. Despite embarking on a promising career as a stockbroker, Bunker returned to his family’s de facto homeland of Hawaii when was 18 (he wouldn’t inherit his fortune until 21) and threw himself into surfing culture (he’d originally envisioned himself flying missions into Vietnam). As a young boy, he had already been taken on by the island’s nobility. Because of his family’s support of the king, David Kalākaua, many of the old kahunas believed Bunker to be a reincarnated Hawaiian prince and taught him from an early age the ways of Pacific island life. Hunting, arching, fishing, and of course surfing, his true passion.

from a profile of Bunker in The Rake magazine by Ryan Thompson.

Let’s get into your background. Has your family always been a powerful family?

Yes.

Do you know much about your ancestors?

Quite a bit actually, about some of them, just maybe the key people in the family. I’ve read books on them. We come from a Viking line of Tetons. My great grandfather Claus Speckels- only then it was Von Spreckelsen, but in America we dropped it to Spreckels – sailed over from Germany in 1846.

He was in the grocery business?

He was in the grocery business in New York and he made his money and he came West. He went up to San Francisco and got into the beet sugar business as well as public utilities. I think he had his finger in parts of the banking business, too. He made a lot of money in those businesses. Then he came to Hawaii in the late 1800s.

Before going to Hawaii, I believe he was involved in running the government of San Francisco some-how. There was a little corruption with him and some other guy. That seemed to be the rule. There was always some sort of corruption going down around him. As I look in my book at my notes here / see the word “corruption.” Corruption. Opium bribes. Gifts to the king.

Who’s that in the picture?

Kalakaua. And then the Oceanic Steamship Company, which is now the Matson Line. The SS “Lurline” is named after a Spreckel. She’s named after Lurline Spreckels.

But your family has been influential in the development of modern Hawaii?

Not modern Hawaii, no.

Well, if it wasn’t for your family we probably wouldn’t know Hawaii more or less as it is today: territorial, statehood, and all that.

They were here when it was a monarchy. After the queen was jailed it became whatever it became, the annexation business. Our family by that time had pretty much pulled out of here.

After my great-grandfather Claus, there was another Spreckels that ran a bit of a game here, but nothing like Claus ran. Plus, there was no more monarchy because when Claus was here he was the king’s best friend.

What was their life like?

I hear it was pretty decadent. The legend is that Claus won the kingdom playing cards, which isn’t true. It was just that Kalakaua had a lot of missionaries on his back and a lot of people breathing down his neck because he liked to party and drink gin and what not, and have his women and his opium and whatever he liked. They call him the “merry monarch” because he liked to party.

He was overspending and he owed money to so many different people. Whenever something was going to happen he’d have to ask people if he could do it, and here is the king having to ask all these people if he could do something. When Claus came to Hawaii he walked right to the front door, had a drink with the king, and said, “How much money do you need to bail yourself out of this and pay everybody off?” The king told him and he paid everybody off. Kalakaua fired his whole cabinet at 2 in the morning one night and they put in the people that Claus and Kalakaua wanted in the cabinet.

Plus the king gave Claus Spreckelsville, land for his sugar plantations.

Claus brought his engineers over from Germany and they redesigned the sugar industry, the refining of the sugar and all that, they redesigned that. They dug the Spreckels ditch for irrigation purposes. They just revolutionized the whole sugar industry to the point that they kind of had a monopoly on the sugar business because they had the most advanced techniques and they could produce the most sugar in the fastest, most effective way. That was Claus’s genius. He knew who to call up and who to bring on and have this design or that design.

How did the missionaries react to them?

They felt that Claus came over here with his money and his power and offered his friendship to the king. Claus is responsible for the king traveling, too, getting him on a boat and going around the world. He really wanted to make Hawaii a power, the king did. They’d go in and they’d present themselves to European royalty and all that kind of stuff and tell them to come to Hawaii, “We’ll take care of you,” and all that kind of stuff. The missionaries came over here with their Bibles and their talk. I think they totally ruined Hawaiian culture with all that. The Hawaiians had their own gods. I feel that some of the missionaries who came were hypocritical. Some of them really hadn’t done their homework.

You mean with what the people were like?

Yeah, they just came over here and started waving Bibles and told everybody to put their clothes on. They taught them to read. They imposed something on the Hawaiian people. They imposed their way of life and their trip.

How did your great grandfather differ?

He was a heathen. He was a realist. He came over and he didn’t use Christianity to get what he wanted.

He used the things he had made with his hands, his power, and the things he had at his disposal.

Did your great grandfather speak Hawaiian?

Not fluently, no.

What kinds of activities was he into?

He drank. He could drink Kalakaua under the table. They could both drink. I just heard that. They could both drink all night and the next day, they would be up working.

Claus went around, he oversaw the fields. He’d check on his bosses and his workers and make sure things were getting done right.

Let’s change gears a bit. What do you feel you’ve gained from your father, Adolph?

I learned how to find out as much about people as fast as I possibly can. I learned that from my father. When you go out with my father you find everything out about the coffee-shop waitress and everything about her whole life in about two minutes. That was one of his better qualities.

How did he do it?

He’d just strike up a conversation with her. He’d probably tell her a joke. He was quite a lady’s man, quite charming if he wasn’t too intoxicated. He would just break the ice with a joke or something like that, or “How’s the family?” and before you knew it he’d get the whole story from her.

What’d you learn from your mother?

I probably couldn’t sum that up in one sentence. I probably learned how to listen to other people rather than shooting my mouth off and letting my feelings and my emotions be known. She would say, “Be as wise as a serpent, as sound as a dove.” That’s just one little trick | picked up from her.

What about your stepfather, Clark Gable?

I learned a lot about grooming. I heard from him what a fuck-tit the acting business is. I learned a lot about words, how to use words. He taught me how to use the dictionary.

A return to the topic of whether sugar ruined us.

Los Angeles

Out the window. Are people’s airplane photos boring? C’mon, this is a pretty decent capture of the whole basin.

Jackson Browne

Kevin Starr on Jack London

London’s socialism always had a streak of elitism in it, and a good deal of pose. He liked to play working class intellectual when it served his purposes. Invited to a prominent Piedmont house, he featured a flannel shirt, but, as someone there remarked, Jack’s badge of solidarity with the working class “looked as if it had been specially laundered for the occasion.” Mark Twain saw straight through to the ambiguity of London’s hopes for revolution. “It would serve this man London right to have the working class get control of things,” said Twain. “He would have to call out the militia to collect his royalties...

His deficient sense of culture-which could see in Paula Forrest such heraldic expression of social value-was the direct result of personal experience. Yet London’s psychological development took place within a specific context, California at the turn of the century. Social and personal experiences were concurrent and reinforcing. In a sense, London’s was a representative quest. His search for identity, for a place in the sun, was also contemporary California’s Like many Californians, he often pathetically misread signals, confusing consumption with culture, display with code, and aspiration with achievement. London bore within himself the burden of an ambiguous history, with its violent hates and tangled drives, and so did California.

…

His foster-father, John London, had been a vague and shadowy presence, embarrassingly aromatic with the smell of failure. He hounded his son for money (so London said in 1898), pursuing Jack to the offices of the school journal at Oakland City High School to borrow fifty cents. If unsuccessful, he would shamelessly wheedle the money from his son’s friends. In his mother-a strange, eccentric creature, harsh, compulsive-London could see only a burden of mutual shame, mother for son, son for mother, and rejection.

“I do not ever remember ever receiving a caress from my mother when I was young,” he recalled. Whether he did or not, he wanted that to be the case. He accused his mother of forcing her husband to beat him, after which London Junior and Senior fell weeping into each other’s arms.

…

Through the pseudo-historical terms of an imagined impoverished child-hood, London gave mythic structure to his inner trauma of repudiation and rejection, a mythic past onto which he later grafted his version of California history. All his life he whined of the poverty of his childhood, which was simply not the case. “I never had a boyhood,” Jack said, “and I seem to be hunting for that lost boyhood.” He meant that he had a boyhood he chose not to remember. He had put together his personal myth as carly as 1908, complaining to his upper bourgeois girl friend Mabel Applegarth (appearing as Ruth Morse in Martin Eden) that as a boy he was so hungry for meat that he would steal from lunchbags at school. “Great God!” moaned London, “when those voungsters threw chunks of meat on the ground because of surfeit, I could have dragged it from the dirt and eaten it”-“This meat incident is an epitome of my whole life”-

“Hungry! Hungry! Hungry! From the time I stole meat and knew no call above my belly, to now when the call is higher, it has been hunger, nothing but hunger. The fact was, Flora London often served steak-but she insisted upon putting newspapers under the plates to prevent meat juice from spashing upon her tablecloth. In the newspapers, London could remember his mother’s eccentricity, with more than faint overtones of hostility and resentment, and the seedy inconsequentiality, not grim poverty, of their social position. Psychological and social expectations fused, and the memory became one of no meat, not no love and no social position, as symbolized in newspaper place-mats. In later life London loved bloody rare steaks and half-cooked duck, which he devoured with juice-spilling abandon.

The first larger myth to be grafted onto this story of a deprived childhood was socialism, London’s youthful systematization of experience. Socialism explained boyhood rejection in socio-economic terms. Laced with strong draughts of Darwin and Nietzsche, socialism offered a route of escape. Around 1905 or so, just after the publication of The Sea Wolf, London had what he called the Long Sickness, a sense of failure and self loathing. His marriage to Charmian was part of his effort to come out of this depression. Although he continued to sign letters “Yours for the revolution,” socialism ceded to Sonoma as London’s most vital myth. Like socialism, Sonoma explained the facts of dispossession and recovery: how old Americans had lost out in the California scramble and how on the land they would reclaim their rightful place. Sonoma’s revolution was agricultural, not industrial, but just as redeeming a myth. If London could not storm the barricades in pressed flannels, then he would lead a counter-march across scientifically terraced fields and orchards, astride a spirited stallion, dressed in boots, riding togs, and Baden-Powell.

Both socialism and Sonoma were more matters of fantasy than hardheaded diagnosis. London could not relate closely enough to any society to coax forward realistic, pragmatic imperatives. Psycho-sexuality had much to do with determining what forms of social expression appealed to him. London grew up dominated by women, first his mother, and then his sister Eliza, who supervised Jack when their parents left them alone on the ranch to scour the countryside for spiritualist meetings. (Eliza later managed the Sonoma ranch in Jack’s absences.) Lonely and shy, young London read a lot, dreamed of becoming a poet or a composer.

Schoolmates taunted him for being a sissy. His aesthetic boyhood tastes later embarrassed him.

… He recreated himself as a Huck Finn of the Oakland water-front, ignoring his withdrawn pre-adolescent years. Ideologically and psychologically he developed a he-man complex, playing the well advertised womanizer, instructing his barber that he wanted his hair “not fancy, you know, but rough,” filling his fiction with vanquishing males…

London’s friendship with George Sterling-to whom in 1909 he sent from the Solomon Islands a dried clitoris-was romantically intense, characterized at one point by an exchange of confiding and confessional letters slipped wordlessly into each other’s pockets. London called Sterling “Greek” and answered to Sterling’s “Wolf.” He had always been searching for “the great Man-Comrade,” London told Charmian in a love-letter, and had first wished that she were a man. He dreamed at night in later life of a man “to whom he would eventually bend a vanquished intelligence.” “Imperial, inexorable with destiny,” this vanquisher would descend a staircase, at the base of which waited a psychically ravished Jack.

…Tormented by toothache, he loved to pull other people’s teeth, having a portablé dental kit for the purpose. Obsessed with meat, he once barbecued a snake, laughing as some of his guests vomited when told what they had just eaten. He loved violent practical jokes, hitting from behind with a rubber mallet, booby-trapping books with explosives.

One contemporary at least felt Jack’s tastes for aggressive pranks “evidence of a serious mental condition.” He loved to write of the cruel matings of wild animals…

As a younger man, he especially relished San Francisco’s Chinese bordellos, with their contrived practices. After bloody rare steak and drinks on the Barbary Coast, Jack would head for one of San Francisco’s many houses, where, as he described it, “my most savage natural instincts are unleashed. I can be cruel or kind, according to my whim and my pocketbook. What more, after being well fed, may a man want? There is mastery in it. A fecling of power, a satisfaction of the instinct that inclines us toward beauty.”..

Aggression, distrust, ambivalent sexuality, hatred of women—such psychological facts conditioned London’s capacity for social existence and for a theory of society. Like his mannish heroines, the ranch represented a male ideal—managed, paradoxically, by Jack’s older sister. As a utopian enterprise, it was conceived in aggression against the California fact. The lineaments and contours of that dream-realm proceeded partially from a subliminal life common to both London and California. Through Sonoma myth London partook in the larger myth of California. There-like California-he sought to find a heroic past. There-like California-he sought to synthesize vigor and intellect. There-like California-out of private but not irrelevant compulsions he sought to manifest a sense of regional identity and to glory in regional possibilities. A confused inner life made fulfillment of this ideal impossible, distorting his relation to the land, alienating him from any form of community, driving him to self-destruction: over-eating, over-drinking, and-on his sleeping porch in the early hours of 22 November 1916—over-dosing himself with morphine and atropine sulphates. It was not suicide in the unambiguous sense of the word. Waking in the night with an attack of renal colic, London took what proved to be an overdose, complicated by the alcohol in his system, in an effort to stop the excruciating pain. But when one considers what had brought about London’s uraemic condition-his drinking, his disregard of doctors’ advice that he exercise his disintegrating body, the compulsive devouring twice a day of near-raw venison and wild duck—a pattern of self-destruction is quite clear.

London’s psychic distress paralleled California’s own internal social tensions. Latent homosexuality, anxieties about manhood, had an analogue in California’s turn-of-the-century determination to identify with the titanic energies that had pulsated through society during the frontier period, energies which both attracted and repelled a genteel generation.

His insecurity, his intimidation by an imagined hostile high culture, characterized California’s ambivalent speculations about style and value. It was the reverse aspect of the determination to retain frontier vigor, an intimidation by the East of the fact and the East of the mind—an Fast so-phisticated, impervious, assured of its history, assured of its caste. Like California, London was certain of none of these things and so he constructed a myth, not by himself, but in concert with fellow Californians.

His flight into narcissism and fantasy, expressed mythically in the remembered story of his own life and in his version of California history, expressed spatially on the ranch, paralleled California’s appropriation of a fabled Hispanic era and a mythically redemptive frontier. London’s death in one-and by no means exclusive-sense came when his myth, his iden-tity, broke down.

Jack London bought a sloop and was an oyster pirate, went as a crewman on a sealing expedition to the coast of Japan, was a hobo and a tramp, arrested for vagrancy in Buffalo, NY, all before he enrolled in high school.

Next time I’m in Oakland I must go to Heinold’s.

Lucius Fairchild

Writing of Gold Rush California in Americans and The California Dream, 1845-1815, Kevin Starr tells us:

“Five years,” wrote Prentice Mulford, “was the longest period any one expected to stay. Five years at most was to be given to rifling California of her treasures, and then that country was to be thrown aside like a used-up newspaper and the rich adventurers would spend the remainder of their days in wealth, peace, and prosperity at their Eastern homes.” Leonard Kip of Albany, New York (brother of the first Protestant Episcopal missionary bishop to California), and John Hale of North Bloomfield, New York, rushed home after a year to write discouraging reports. M. T. McClellan of Jackson County, Missouri, made his opinion known in no uncertain terms: “I do not like this country-I do not like the climate, and more than all I abhor and detest the society; I never expect to sow a seed or plant a grain in this country” Others found themselves and their future in California, although the West was not to be the scene of their fulfillment. Having seen the elephant (as the expression went), they returned to Eastern careers. Lucius Fairchild, a seventeen-year-old clerk in a dry goods store, left Madison, Wisconsin, in 1849 to cross the plains. “I don’t see how I could be satisfied to work for 12 or 15 dollars per Month when I can make that here in two days,” Fairchild wrote home from California. He stayed six years, a miner, a cattleman in Siskiyou, and a businessman. He considered those years a time of emancipation and preparation, a way of making sure that he would never have to step back behind the dry goods counter. When he returned to Madison-in high boots, spurs, a wide-brimmed hat, a money belt strapped around his waist-it was to play a man’s part. Fairchild studied for the bar, won promotion to brigadier in the Civil War, served three terms as governor of Wisconsin, represented the United States at the Court of Saint James’s, and had his portrait painted by John Singer Sargent.

Not sure I love Sargeant’s portrait here, reminds me of The Generals. I prefer just the photographic image of Fairchild:

Note that Lucius Fairchild (along with Levi-Strauss, Leland Stanford, Wells and Fargo, Ghiradelli, and Studebaker) didn’t make his fortune in gold but in “picks and shovels“:

Once in California Fairchild did not pan for gold, but instead tilled soil, butchered cattle, waited tables, and farmed. Fairchild’s hard worked attracted the eye of democrat politician Elijah Steele who eventually became Fairchild’s business partner in trading beef. In 1855 after six years in California Fairchild sold his beef business to Steele for $10,000. After selling his business in California Fairchild moved back to Wisconsin.

(Did anybody make a lasting fortune from California gold? Most of Hearst’s money came from the Comstock Lode, the silver of Virginia City, Nevada, and then of course Deadwood. I guess there were the Murphys. I gotta check out Murphy’s Hotel sometime:

More recently:

That part of California is kind of dispiriting. Takes forever to drive around in the hills, it’s all been dug up and tossed over like an anthill, hot in summer impossible in winter, the forest is suffering, touristy, and the tourists don’t seem sure what they’re looking at. Then again I was there in a fire and drought time. The trees were like dry matchsticks.)

Lucius Fairchild had an exciting and no doubt terrifying July 1, 1863, in Gettysburg, PA:

The 2nd Wisconsin… distinguished themselves at … Seminary Ridge during the first day of fighting , being the first infantry regiment to make close contact with the Confederate Army. During the engagement, at approximately 10:00, the 2nd Wisconsin Infantry delivered a striking blow by capturing very first Confederate general officer of the war, Brig. Gen. James J. Archer. Almost immediately after this success, the regiment was ambushed by an attack on their right flank, losing seventy-seven percent of their ranks, including most officers. Fairchild was shot in the upper arm, captured, tended to, and released.

You can look inside his vest in this video from the Wisconsin Veterans Museum.

Dateline: Hollywood

from this Deadline article about the premiere of HBO’s “The Rooster.” The mood here is on edge. But isn’t it ever thus? One of California’s themes is: on the edge.

Pasadena weather report

It could’ve been an early October day in Massachusetts.

You might find it odd to see a Union Civil War monument in southern California, Pasadena wasn’t even founded until 1874. But it was founded by people from Indiana, the experience was probably quite real to them.

Los Angeles in 1850

Cowboys, gamblers, bandits, and desperados of every description brought to the Los Angeles of the 185os a tone of border-town mayhem. Rough statistics indicate that in 1850 a murder occurred for every day of the year. The Reverend James Woods, a scholarly Massachusetts Presbyterian, arrived in October 1854, hoping to bring the gospel and social order. Despite the beauty of surrounding vineyards and orange trees, he noted, Los Angeles was a hellhole, a valley of dry bones, a city not of angels but of demons. An orgy of murder fills the diary Reverend Woods kept during his desperate ministry of six months. In his first two weeks alone, ten Angelenos met violent ends. Ordinary citizens walked the streets armed with pistols, bowie knives, and shotguns. Cruelty was everywhere. He was horrified to find an Indian servant girl dying in the street, abandoned by a household wishing to avoid burial expenses. A young cowboy, David Brown, sentenced to hang for the shooting of Pinckney Clifford, refused to see Woods, telling the sheriff he would rather have a bear in his cell than a minister. Shortly after, Brown was dragged from the jailhouse and lynched. The mob was led by Stephen Clark Foster, mayor of Los Angeles and a Yale man.

Fairfax and Melrose, 1922

source

looking the other way, 1920:

Relaxin’ at Camarillo

(source)

“Relaxin’ at Camarillo” is a composition by jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker. It is inspired by his six-month stay in Camarillo State Hospital in Ventura County, California, after serving a prison term for arson and resisting arrest. The tune is a blues in C major and has become a jazz standard.

The heroin in Los Angeles was not of the quality or ample supply Charlie Parker needed, he turned to alcohol and things got bad. This was the incident that sent Charlie Parker into the system:

That according to Bird: The Life and Music of Charlie Parker by Chuck Haddix. (No mention of the arson, interesting. Other sources say Parker lit his hotel sheets on fire.) On the website Saving Charlie Parker I find this photo of the Civic Hotel:

It was in Bronzeville, now Little Tokyo.

Reading about Kansas City lead me to Charlie Parker and, inadvertently, back to my own backyard, and to the history of mental health treatment in California and the nation.

From the Wiki page for Camarillo State Hospital:

The end of the institution came due to economic challenges and a changing outlook on mental health treatment. In 1967, Governor Ronald Reagan signed the bi-partisan Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, which greatly affected state hospital populations, forcing many to close immediately.

Another contributing factor was in 1996, when Governor Pete Wilson empowered a special task force to research reasons for and against the closure of the Camarillo State Hospital and Developmental Center.^[2] The task force cited that the facility, which housed as many as 7,266 patients in 1954, had only 871 clients in 1996. The hospitals per capita costs had risen to nearly $114,000, second highest in the state mental health system. These factors prompted the initial closing of one-quarter of the facility’s 64 units and later, on June 30, 1996, the hospital officially and permanently closed.

The intentions and consequences of the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act seem quite complicated. Genuine concern for the well-being of the mentally disturbed may have led to policies that in the end left more people uncared for.

Reporter Dan Morain, writing at the Center for Health Journalism:

As a Capitol reporter for the Los Angeles Times and later a columnist and editorial writer for the Sacramento Bee, I covered some of those legislative battles. But I did not know fundamental details about the law — how the final bill was gutted and amended on the final day of the legislative session in 1967, and how it was a compromise that guaranteed that Reagan’s administration and local governments would have no legal or financial obligation to provide care for people once housed in state hospitals, or those who in an earlier day would have been in asylums.

Internal Reagan administration documents show that soon after the law took effect, the number of prison inmates with psychiatric issues increased, and private nursing homes began caring for larger numbers of people with severe mental illness. 

In the years after its passage, Lanterman and his coauthors, Democratic Sens. Nicholas Petris of Oakland and Alan Short of Stockton, became alarmed at increasing numbers of homeless people struggling with mental illness — an issue that has become a dominant issue in California politics today.

Bold mine. Sometimes you hear cocktail party history that “Reagan closed all the asylums” but the truth as usual seems more complex. What about the Community Mental Health Act of 1963? or the history of Thorazine? This seems like it’s just a messy, messy problem. There’s a history of the feds and the states sending it down to “the community” without any funding, or with funding that later gets taken away, and the community doesn’t handle it.

This feels like a good summary.

JFK signing the CMHA:

An outcome where the patient, instead of facing criminal charges, is taken to a state hospital with beautiful Mission style architecture, heals for six months, comes out happy, and continues a productive artistic career, is that not optimal? Is it possible our reforms, even if well intentioned, were misguided? Every day I walk past an averages of two distressed/ disturbed individuals on our streets. Could we be relaxing them at Camarillo?

Then again Charlie Parker died at 34, not in great shape, so… maybe these are just tough challenges.

Herb Caen’s San Francisco

The ’40-41 San Francisco was a Sam Spade city. The Hall of justice was dirty and reeked of evil. The criminal lawyers were young and hungry and used every shyster trick in the law books they never read. The City Hall, the D.A. and the cops ran the town as though they owned it and they did. Hookers worked upstairs, not on the street; there were hundreds, maybe thousands, most of them named Sally. The two biggest abortion mills-one on Mar-ket, the other in the Fillmore —were so well-known they might as well have had neon signs. You could play roulette in the Marina, roll craps on O’Farrell, play poker on Mason, get rolled at 4 a.m. in a bar on Eddy, and wake up at noon in a Turk St. hotel with a girl whose name you never knew or cared to know. Sam Spade went through all this and his face showed it. You’d see him alone at 1 p.m. at a Taylor St. lunch counter, drinking coffee, chain smoking

You hear often – usually from rich tech people – about San Francisco being a warren of drug addled zombies. There’s truth to this, I’ve observed it myself. Feral zombies wander the Tenderloin.

But wasn’t San Francisco ever thus? Doesn’t Mark Twain report on the bums on the street? And hasn’t the charm always outweighed the derelicts?

If I do go to heaven, I’m going to do what every San Franciscan does who goes to heaven. He looks around and says, ‘It ain’t bad, but it ain’t San Francisco.’

I got this collection after a visit where I walked Herb Caen Way, with the ambition of getting some historical perspective on the city.

Forgive me if I’m about to go over familiar ground, but I get a little sick of hearing people say, as a society woman said the other night: “Who cares about those old drunks? Kick’em out and start building.” I think she would have voted for gas chambers.

(1972)

The tourists. They used to beat a path from the Ferry Building to the Cliff House. Now they roam around the Vaillancourt Foun-tain, making funnies, and stay in Hyatts and Holiday Inns, eat at whatever place is handy and ask plaintively: “Where do the real San Franciscans go?” There is no satisfactory answer, for the San Franciscan is forever a tourist in his own hometown, mingling with the tourists from elsewhere and usually having just as good, or rotten, a time as they… Come let us play and pay together.

Topic A:

Some of us old newspaper hacks were sitting around at the Nam Yuen in Chinatown the other night, eating stuffed chicken legs and discussing Topic A, as usual, which is not what you think. Sex may be Topic A in most places, and food is certainly Topic A in Paris, but in San Francisco Topic A is —San Francisco.

After we’d covered the usual high spots (Things Ain’t What They Used to Be, but were they ever?), a former Front Page Farrell who has been put out to pasture as an editorial writer sighed a wine-laden sigh. “When I was covering a beat,” he said, “I knew the town pretty well-and most of the characters. Now I feel like a stranger in my own city. Out of touch. The old characters are fading out, and I have no idea who’s taking their place.

January 20, 1963

Meeting John and Yoko:

Earlier that evening, the Lennons, and their local close friend, Craig Pyes, the co-editor of SunDance magazine, had dined sumptuously at Mme. Cecilia Chiang’s Mandarin in Ghirardelli Square, looking out over the quiet Bay and the old ships at rest.

“We’re crazy about this city,” said John, peering at the view through his bottle-thick glasses. “First time we came here, we walked the streets all day— all over town-and nobody hassled us.

People smiled, friendly-like, and we knew we could live here. We’d like to keep our place in Greenwich Village and have an apartment here, God and the Immigration Service willing … Los Angeles? That’s just a big parking lot where you buy a hamburger Ifor the trip to San Francisco.”

They raved over Mme. Chiang’s newest delicacy, scallop soup.

“The food in this city is fantastic,” John went on. “Better than Lon-don. You know, more variety. And the beautiful old houses and the strange light. We’ve never been in a city with light like this. We sit in our hotel room for hours, watching the fog come in, the light change.”

Peking duck, mandarin style, came wrapped in paper thin pan-cakes. “We drove here from New York,” John continued. “Yoko and I probably have seen more of the United States than most Americans. United Statesians? When I was a Beatle, I didn’t see anything —whoosh-whoosh-whoosh. In Nevada, we got out of the car and rolled in the sand. We’d never seen a desert before.”

In answer to a question: “Yes, we want to live here perma-nently. There’s violence, sure, and it’s scary, sometimes, but there are so many good people, so many chances for change. Not like England, which is dead. Sure, we’d be happy to become American citizens. We’re not here on a tax dodge, you know.”

The Immigration Service will make a decision in November on whether the Lennons can stay here. “We’re in limbo till then,” lamented Yoko. “It’s hard to settle down, to write, to work, when you don’t know where home will be.” A kind, gentle, soft-spoken couple. I think we’d be lucky to get them.

July 21, 1972

On the anniversary of the World’s Fair:

Tonight, if you’re in the mood, you may listen to Woody Herman, visit Top o’ the Mark and drink a toast to Treasure Island, thereby celebrating three silver anniversaries in one. Like most anniversaries, it will be a little sad.

February 23, 1964

(Previous coverage of San Francisco)

Redondo Beach Submarine Canyon

I noticed this deep canyon on my Raven map of southern California. You can see it on Google maps.

Here’s what to expect when you dive the canyon:

After a short swim you drop down to a 25-30 foot sand bottom and move west. As you reach a depth of about 35 feet, you’ll start down a rather steep slope to about 75-80 feet, which quickly drops to below 100 feet and then to the abyss. This is the Redondo Submarine Canyon.

While the sand leading out to the canyon edge has a lot of marine life, most divers like the deep mud flats. Long before “muck diving” became popular with photographers at some fancy tropical resorts, southern California divers were visiting sand and mud flats at local submarine canyons. Just as with these resort destinations, our muck has much to offer in the critter department.

Look for small creatures like a camouflaged octopus or brightly colored nudibranchs, which can be spotted year-round. In late fall through winter months, lucky night divers can witness market squid mating in massive numbers. It’s been described as a blizzard of frantic activity. After the mating the seafloor will be carpeted in large clusters of white egg cases — and dead or dying adult squid, who kick the bucket shortly after they do the deed.

Whether it is squid season or not, this place is an excellent night dive with a lot of small animals to be seen.

One creature that can be found on nearly every dive, day or night, is the massive sheep crab. Its clumsy motions are comical to observe but watch out for the claws! Their pinch is insanely strong. The sheep crabs here are the biggest you’ll find anywhere along our coast. Some of them measure three feet across!

The city of Redondo Beach has two webcams to soothe in troubled times:

https://www.youtube.com/live/Ni7v-aIa3bw

https://www.youtube.com/live/2kbj3LqB_20

Lays

source

C’mon this is cool

Zane makes The New York Times.

I don’t care for the word “snub.” from Etymology Online:

If you’re a Television Academy member, please consider voting for COMMON SIDE EFFECTS in the category Outstanding Animated Program.

If you’re not a Television Academy member, consider becoming one! The TV Academy is not like the Academy of Motion Picture Arts. You don’t have to be asked to join. You can join if you have a couple TV credits and $225. That’s who votes on the Emmys.

Bless you.