What is San Diego?

From time to time fortune takes me down the coast to the city of San Diego, and I’m always left a little stumped. What is this place? What is distinctly San Diego? If it has a bent it is slightly to the right, somewhat fratty/military. Top Gun, Navy SEALs. Retirees. IPAs (although those are everywhere now). The California burrito. What else? We’re talking about the eighth most populous city in the United States. Pleasant living is on offer for sure, sunshine and surf. The people that like it love it. But what does it have to show for itself?

Here’s the WPA guide to California on the city, as it was circa 1939:

SAN DIEGO (0-822 alt., 147,995 pop.), the oldest Spanish settlement in California, is in the extreme lower left-hand corner of the United States. Although only 16 miles north of the Mexican boundary, it is completely American. Its landlocked natural harbor is headquarters for the Eleventh Naval District, for marine and coast guard bases, and home port for a fleet of tuna clippers and fishing smacks manned by Portuguese and Italian fishermen.

The city has much of the easygoing spirit of Spanish days, and people dress and live for comfort. Life moves at a modulated pace, particularly because of the large number of retired and elderly persons.

The downtown area, dominated by a group of tall buildings, is small for a city of this size; Broadway, the main artery, runs from the waterfront due east and divides the city into distinct sections. Although liners no longer call at the port Max Miller wrote of in I Cover the Waterfront, freighters and tramp steamers dock here regularly. Tuna clippers bring in big hauls of huge fish, and sport fishing parties return with catches of yellowtail, barracuda, and swordfish. Navy shoreboats run between ships at anchor and the piers.

South of Broadway many plain buildings of the 1870’s and gingerbread structures of the 1890’s are still in use. Markets and grocery stores along Twelfth Avenue display fruit and vegetables in pyramids and cascades. Third, Fourth, and Fifth Avenues have taverns with three-piece jazz bands, shooting galleries, inexpensive movies, hamburger stands, pawn shops, and small hotels.

Balboa Park’s giant green square begins just north of the business district. North and northwest of the park are the newer residential districts, and to the west is Middletown, a narrow segment extending from the bay to the low hills, occupied by Italian fishermen and airplane factory employees. Old Town, site of the original Spanish settlement, is northwest of Middletown. It has some fine adobe buildings, fringed with rose bushes and flowers, but most of the land is occupied by small houses and auto courts.

Most of San Diego’s inhabitants, apart from the shifting Navy personnel, are immigrants or descendants of immigrants from the East and Middle West. Many are retired; ten percent of all retired U. S. Navy officers live in San Diego.

In the Logan Heights district, south and east of downtown along the curved southern shore, sprawl San Diego’s Mexican and Negro communities, with Mexican restaurants vending tamales and tacos, and with chicken palaces and big ovens where Negroes barbecue meat.

About 10,000 Mexicans, most of them clinging to their own language and customs, live in this district; they are employed mainly as day laborers and cannery workers. The 4,500 Negroes are mostly manual or domestic workers. The Japanese colony, of about 1,000 persons, is in this area also; some in huts on stilts over the water. About 5,000 Portuguese fisherman, who live on the bay side of Point Loma, form a distinct group preserving its own customs. Italian fishermen mingle more generally with the community.

The site of San Diego was visited in 1539 by Father Marcos and his followers, from the desert side, in their search for the “Seven Cities of Cibola”; in 1542 by Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, a Portuguese explorer in the service of Spain, who spent six days in the harbor; and sixty years later by Sebastian Vizaíno, merchant navigator charting the coast for Spain.

In 1769 Governor Portola, with Franciscan friars and soldiers, established a mission and presidio here. The English sloop Discovery, engaged in scientific research, visited San Diego in 1793, and in 1803 the Yankee-owned Lelia Byrd, caught while smuggling otter skins, fought a cannon duel with the battery of Ballast Point.

…

During the Mexican regime, San Diego took on more color. “The beautiful señoritas danced their picturesque dances at the balls which followed bull-fights and cock-fights.” Many Spanish families, on bad terms with the Mexican governor, assisted the Americans in their conquest. After the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the town came peacefully under American rule.

In 1850 the present Old Town was incorporated as a city. The site of the present city was called New Town, or “Davis’s Folly” for William Heath Davis, who first built there. Alonzo E. Horton, for whom New Town was named “Horton’s Addition,” profited more than he.

From 1867 to 1872 New Town grew steadily; then a fire wiped out Old Town’s business district, and New Town became the city’s center.

In 1885 the Santa Fe Railroad laid tracks into San Diego and made it a transcontinental terminus. Two years later it had 40,000 residents, but the boom collapsed, and by 1890 there were only 17,000. Since 1910 its population has doubled about every decade.

Aircraft is the only large-scale industrial plant. Fishing and canning San Diego’s 335 factories are mostly small enterprises; Consolidated are basic sources of income. A large lumber mill handles timber rafted in from the Northwest.

San Diego was an open-shop city until the strong wave of unionization in the early thirties; during the bitter “Free Speech Fight” of 1912 radical headquarters were raided and radicals ordered out of town.

Depressions have touched lightly on San Diego.

The colorful fishing fleet days are over, although there are still some 150+ commercial fishing vessels.

San Diego is a place that isn’t “certified,” to borrow from Walker Percy—there are fewer templates or cultural expectations for what your life must be like here, compared to LA or New York, for example. As Armantrout went on to say, “In my mature years I have come to appreciate the blankness of this town. When I step on the street in San Diego, I am not stepping onto a set; I am not stepping into a play, my own or anyone else’s.” In her work, the ersatz dailiness of ordinary life in San Diego—bills, television shows, illness, reading, advertisements, children—is maybe the best portrait of the city one could make, and certainly a guide for maintaining a vibrant life of the mind here.

from this piece on literary San Diego by Patrick Coleman.

Maybe (in fact certainly) I’m overthinking it. San Diego is a normie heaven, and that’s it. We need a city to absorb surplus bro energy and mellow it in the Southern California sun, which object San Diego achieves. To ponder what it might mean is very un-San Diego. Just crack a cold one or pop an edible, put on the game and vibe out.

And what are we even talking about here? New Orleans produces culture and also absurd murder rates. LA is LA but did San Diego have anything on the scale of the 1994 riots or the O.J trial? What is character but atrocity, debacle, chaos sanded by time?

In recent years my visits to San Diego have been for Comic-Con. 130,000 people descend on the San Diego Convention Center (2.6 million square feet) and surrounding blocks. This might seem fringe or marginal, it was at one time, but now we’re talking about the most popular movies in the world, billion dollar corporate products.

a fraction of a fraction of the whole, the scale is difficult to grasp. The size of it humbles the aircraft carriers docked across the bay.

Perhaps it is the very blankness of San Diego that allows the city to absorb Comic Con. You can attend Comic Con without being in “San Diego” in any real way. There’s nice weather, you’re near the water, but essentially you’re in one giant hotel without distinction.

Near the Comic Con zone is a massive Dole shipping and processing facility:

In the past I’ve been impressed with the San Diego Museum of Art, that has a possible Bosch or Bosch workshop.

This year I ventured as far as Little Italy to Vino Carta, where Jeff Fischer was pouring wines. You’re on India Street there and under the landing path of planes to San Diego’s airport, it’s kind of fun as they descend just over your head. On the rec of a local I had some very fine tacos from Tacos El Gordo, a line down the block, Bourdain kind of place. The adobada was recommended but I’m off the pork at the moment.

Recall that towards the end of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, the kid ends up in San Diego. Here are some excerpts, which we put down towards the project of assembling a literary anthology of San Diego:

As he was crossing the plaza toward the little mud cabildo he encountered Toadvine and Webster newly released. They were wildlooking and they stank. The three of them went down to the beach and sat looking out at the long gray swells and passing Brown’s bottle among them. They’d none of them seen an ocean before. Brown walked down and held his hand to the sheet of spume that ran up the dark sand. He lifted his hand and tasted the salt on his fingers and he looked downcoast and up and then they went back up the beach toward the town. They spent the afternoon drinking in a lazarous bodega run by a Mexican. Some soldiers came in. An altercation took place. Toadvine was on his feet, swaying. A peacemaker rose from among the soldiers and soon the principals were seated again. But minutes later Brown on his way back from the bar poured a pitcher of aguardiente over a young soldier and set him afire with his cigar. The man ran outside mute save for the whoosh of the flames and the flames were pale blue and then invisible in the sunlight and he fought them in the street like a man beset with bees or madness and then he fell over in the road and burned up. By the time they got to him with a bucket of water he had blackened and shriveled in the mud like an enormous spider. Brown woke in a dark little cell manacled and crazed with thirst.

a bit later:

They reached San Diego in the dead of night and were directed to the alcalde’s house. This man came to the door in nightshirt and stockingcap holding a candle before him. Glanton pushed him back into the parlor and sent his men on to the rear of the house from whence they heard directly a woman’s screams and a few dull slaps and then silence.

…

They left them bound and gagged and rode out to visit the grocer. Three days later the alcalde and the grocer and the alcalde’s wife were found tied and lying in their own excrement in an abandoned hut at the edge of the ocean eight miles south of the settlement. They’d been left a pan of water from which they drank like dogs and they had howled at the booming surf in that wayplace until they were mute as stones. Glanton and his men were two days and nights in the streets crazed with liquor. The sergeant in charge of the small garrison of American troops confronted them in a drinking exchange on the evening of the second day and he and the three men with him were beaten senseless and stripped of their arms. At dawn when the soldiers kicked in the hostel door there was no one in the room.

A return:

It was evening of the following day when they entered San Diego. The expriest turned off to find them a doctor but the kid wandered on through the raw mud streets and out past the houses of hide in their rows and across the gravel strand to the beach. Loose strands of ambercolored kelp lay in a rubbery wrack at the tideline. A dead seal. Beyond the inner bay part of a reef in a thin line like something foundered there on which the sea was teething. He squatted in the sand and watched the sun on the hammered face of the water. Out there island clouds emplaned upon a salmoncolored othersea. Seafowl in silhouette. Down-shore the dull surf boomed. There was a horse standing there staring out upon the darkening waters and a young colt that cavorted and trotted off and came back.

He sat watching while the sun dipped hissing in the swells. The horse stood darkly against the sky. The surf boomed in the dark and the sea’s black hide heaved in the cobbled starlight and the long pale combers loped out of the night and broke along the beach. He rose and turned toward the lights of the town. The tidepools bright as smelterpots among the dark rocks where the phosphorescent seacrabs clambered back. Passing through the salt grass he looked back. The horse had not moved. A ship’s light winked in the swells. The colt stood against the horse with its head down and the horse was watching, out there past men’s knowing, where the stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.