3-30-10: The old Horton Plaza fountain itself is out of use and fenced in, while the small gazebo park around it is completely unmaintained and overgrown.
Around a dozen homeless people were inside the chained-off park, hanging out on the unmowed grass, most of them having easily maneuvered shopping carts and other belongings past the simple dangling chains -
The result was like a bizarre zoo cage, set smack dab in the middle of the city, with everyone trying hard to look away from and ignore the cage and its contents.
Oddly, not really all that different than the old pre-Gaslamp dayz of the 1970s, other than the abandoned state of the acreage, which the City only obtained from the late Horton (shortly before he died a pauper) by
promising never to raze the fountain and the park.
Now, it's a strange and depressing monument to the epic mismanagement of San Diego's most iconic pop culture treasures --
April 10, 2010