San Diego neighborhoods off the typical tourist’s radar.
Hip, vibrant districts show city offers more than sunny beaches.
Like a lot of people, I first came to San Diego during a family vacation. Back then, the koalas at the San Diego Zoo and orcas at SeaWorld were my must-sees, as well as the chance to bodysurf and score a puka shell necklace at Pacific Beach. It was a while ago.
All grown up by the early 1990s, I started to regularly visit San Diego and discovered the city behind the tourist town. San Diego is, after all, the West Coast’s second-largest city. And I fell for historic neighborhoods of vintage Spanish and California Craftsman bungalows fronted by low cobblestone walls and landscaped with towering columnar cactus.
Somewhere, beyond the beach, this is the San Diego that visitors typically miss. Over the past few years, I’ve been most intrigued by three neighborhoods — Liberty Station, North Park and Barrio Logan — that are currently transitioning into new eras.
Liberty Station
Maybe there’s no such thing as an unseasonably nice day in a city without seasons. But even by San Diego standards, this late autumn afternoon is an absolute stunner.
I arrive at Liberty Station, formerly the Naval Training Center San Diego, which over the past decade has been transformed into the city’s newest neighborhood. Sunlight, softened by a scrim of high clouds, washes over salmon-colored Spanish Colonial Revival buildings built in the 1920s. With their arched colonnades, the onetime barracks line a promenade that stretches for several blocks. Want to shoot a World War II epic? This is the spot.
The training center closed in 1997, and I’ve watched its evolution into a genuine community. At times, progress seemed halting, even as artists set up studios in the Arts District and residents settled into townhouses and freestanding homes along streets named for Naval heroes (Farragut and Truxton) and historic aircraft carriers (Wasp and Hornet).
On this afternoon, Liberty Station is like the most optimistic of planning renderings sprung to life. There’s a salsa band outside Liberty Public Market, the warren of artisan food stalls that opened in 2016 and helped kick Liberty Station into a higher gear. It’s in the training center’s old commissary building, and high up on the walls of the onetime mess hall, unretouched murals painted in the 1950s trace a timeline of Navy history. Along the communal tables, tourists and locals alike devour pork curry bowls and sushi burritos from the popular stand RakiRaki Ramen & Tsukemen, all washed down with beer from the 24 taps at Bottlecraft: sours, stouts and, of course, West Coast-style IPAs.
Nearby on the promenade, a wedding, with several guests wearing Navy service dress blues, begins beneath a giant Norfolk Island pine, while outside a dance school, girls on a break from their rehearsal cartwheel and backflip across a lawn.
I follow a path brightened by blooming birds of paradise toward a graceful, canary-yellow house partly covered by hanging vines. Incongruously, a large rooftop sign reading “Hotel San Diego” rests upside down in the garden.
A fifth-generation San Diegan, Paul Scott Silvera restored the house, originally the base commander’s residence. It was designed in the 1920s by Lincoln Rogers, whose local work also includes the Italian Renaissance YMCA downtown (reopening in 2018 as the boutique Guild Hotel).
“This house was a piece of crap,” laughs Silvera. “When I expressed interest in one of the officers’ houses, I was told that I had to take the one in the worst shape. It’s made out of brick and was literally separating in two. Half of the house was sliding down the hill. It had been boarded up since 1996. Homeless people had broken in and were living there. It was a hot mess. But the architecture was just spectacular.”
Silvera worked on the house for a year before launching Scout @ Quarters D, his interior design and home furnishings retail business. With heavy watering, the dead garden came back to life. As for that sign, which stood atop a hotel built for the 1915 Panama-California Exposition in Balboa Park and greeted generations of servicemen returning to port, Silvera plans to use it as a centerpiece for a garden renovation that will include a new café.
Growing up in Point Loma, Silvera would often see the house and training center from Rosecrans Street. “The base was kind of like the Forbidden City in China. In the middle of everything, but nobody knew what was there because it was closed to the public. Now you can see all of the fantastic architecture and the beautiful promenade. …It’s like another Balboa Park. You just have to get out on foot to discover everything that’s here.”
North Park
I’m staying downtown at the Hotel Republic, a newly opened boutique hotel with a contemporary design that pays tribute to San Diego’s nautical heritage. The hotel is central to the areas I want to explore, including North Park, originally a streetcar suburb that’s now invariably characterized as a hipster haven. “North Park is a stellar example of an organic change,” says Silvera. “When I was growing up, it was nothing special. Now it’s very hip, very expensive. Just a great neighborhood.”
Cutting through Balboa Park, I catch glimpses of the ornate buildings along El Prado, the heart of the 1915 exposition. A system of canyons cuts through San Diego, and I drop into the coastal sage scrub of still-natural Florida Canyon, before climbing back up the mesa and into North Park.
Maybe 10 years ago, North Park’s buzz began to build as galleries opened along Ray Street and the community emerged as a hub for San Diego’s craft beer community. When I stop at Bottlecraft’s shop at University Avenue and 30th Street, beer buyer and store manager Gene Fielden tells me, “Sitting at the main intersection in North Park, it sometimes feels like the whole beer world beats a path to my door. Sales reps, brewers, home brewers, out-andout beer nerds, collectors, tickers — all of the kaleidoscopic elements of the craft beer world can be found here.”
Along the way, North Park has garnered the kinds of accolades that emerging neighborhoods both crave and fear: 30th Street was dubbed the country’s best beer boulevard and North Park popped up regularly on lists of coolest neighborhoods.
Parachuting in as an outsider, I don’t sense that North Park has crossed a line and lost its identity, even as locals grumble about housing prices and the neighborhood could perhaps be approaching Peak Beer.
There are plenty of new spots. I stop into Holy Matcha, then settle into a pink velvet banquette, sipping a cup of the antioxidant-rich and luminous green drink made with powdered tea imported straight outta Kyoto.
To maintain its purity, Holy Matcha accepts no cash. But a few blocks away, things are decidedly less pristine in the dusty aisles of the Bargain Center, an army-navy surplus store in a 1930s Streamline Moderne building that once housed a Piggly Wiggly supermarket.
The East German army pants don’t fit but I find a thermal shirt and wool socks. I wonder how long North Park’s traditional businesses can hold on (there are still a surprising number of barbershops with old-school chairs and blue containers of Barbicide on their counters). So I ask the guy manning the register whether he was worried about more change coming to North Park.
“Nah. We own this property.”
Barrio Logan
Driving from North Park to Barrio Logan, the city’s historic Chicano neighborhood, I realize that, with all due respect to Sarah Palin, you can see Mexico from San Diego. A wildfire near Tecate sends billowing smoke toward the coast, while the Islas Coronados loom off Baja California.
It’s the feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe. After mariachi Mass at the century-old neighborhood parish, a steady procession of older women carrying bags cuts through the alley outside of Bread and Salt, a bread factory converted into an arts complex. On their way, they pass beneath a tower with a large street-art-style mural of an ice cream cone. Painted by Tijuana street artist Panca, it’s a tribute to the neighborhood’s pushcart ice cream vendors known as paleteros.
Down on Logan Avenue, I’m tempted to return to the taqueria ¡Salud! for its al pastor tacos and a décor that features the hood and front panel of a Chevy lowrider, plus the requisite crying/ sweating velvet Elvis. But at Las Cuatro Milpas, a Barrio Logan institution since
1933, I don’t see a line. A rarity.
There’s nothing nuevo about Las Cuatros Milpas. The stripped-down interior is anything but taco rococo, and only a few family photos and a 2002 calendar from City Towing Services decorate the blue walls. You can grab a seat in the back and watch the tortilla makers and tamale wrappers, but I get my order to go — a pork burrito and a bowl of beans and rice — then walk over to a picnic table at Chicano Park.
Art and activism are inseparable in Barrio Logan. Designated a national historic landmark in 2017, the park sits beneath overpasses for the San DiegoCoronado Bridge. The pylons are painted with elaborate murals portraying Chicano political themes, ancient Mesoamerican imagery, and such figures as Frida Kahlo. There are more recent works, including one protesting the proposed border wall, but many murals date to a 1973 painting campaign that followed the 12-day occupation in 1970 that led to the park’s creation.
While touted as the next new thing, because of its historic role and despite the steady roar of traffic from the bridge and Interstate 5, Barrio Logan is a kind of sacred ground. David Favela didn’t grow up here, but when he decided to open Border X Brewing Co. in the neighborhood, he understood the importance of respecting the local culture.
Favela founded Border X, San Diego’s only Latino-owned brewery, with his brother and nephews. “We didn’t want to be a me-too IPA chaser,” he says. “It didn’t feel right. We’re not English. We’re not Irish. So what do we bring to the table? I told my nephews, ‘Let’s bring our roots. Let’s make Latininspired beers.’ ”
They incorporated flavors familiar from childhood: hibiscus and agave into the Blood Saison and Abuelita’s chocolate, a brand beloved in Mexico, into the Abuelita’s Chocolate Stout. “We’re craft beer evangelizers,” says Favela. “I’d say 70 to 80 percent of the people who come in have never had a craft beer. But we’re connecting them to flavors that are nostalgic, not foreign.”
Favela still works his day job and the build out of Border X was very much hands-on. While doing the demolition and grinding concrete, Favela occasionally had trouble finishing his work because so many people stopped to talk, including old-timers who told stories about the neighborhood and the houses they grew up in. Eventually Favela realized that he was being vetted.
“I took time to listen to their stories and developed a rapport. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that was essential. If I had popped in driving a fancy car and started dropping bills and just paid contractors, I don’t think it would have been the same. We’d still be seen as outsiders. You never know. Sometimes your biggest challenges are your biggest blessings.”