Hazard Center Drive in Mission Valley East is probably the shortest road incurring the longest completion of any in San Diego. It is approximately three blocks long and runs from the west end of the San Diego River spillway under Highway 163 to Mission Center Road at the east where it first intersects with Frazee Road.
I’m thinking that this parking lot, when it’s submerged under three feet of storm runoff, will make a great place for pick-up truck water skiing, drunken community college guys on boogie boards, and trash can lids spraying up fantails past Macy’s and Target as middle-aged women look on in horror from their stranded minivans.
Sections of the river, from the estuary near Ocean Beach to the headwaters near Julian, are being covered based on the availability and location of volunteers. This week, the team is mapping the River Walk Golf Course, which will complete the data collection for the Mission Valley portion of the river. The San Diego River Park Foundation hopes to complete the project by next summer.
On a hot August afternoon in Mission Valley, 47 men, women, and children stand on newly laid squares of sod at the temporary park inside San Diego’s largest mixed-use, environmentally sustainable communities, Civita. It sits north of Friars Road between Highway 163 and Interstate 805, closer to the latter.The earliest arrivals huddle under the meager canopy of a recently planted sapling.This is San Diego’s new wave of urban dwellers.
Thousands of San Diegans showed up to party, tailgate, and generally show their support for the city's football team before a Monday-evening public forum put on by a new stadium advisory group organized by mayor Kevin Faulconer. The information-gathering session itself, however, failed to capture the enthusiasm of much of the crowd, and concluded a half-hour short of its advertised three-hour run time.
About 30 years ago I heard about some concrete stairs leading from the area around UCSD Medical Center in Hillcrest down to Mission Valley. I went exploring and found them, but I only went part way down because it was overgrown and creepy. I think they were around Bachman Place, so maybe the street has replaced the stairs? If you know anything about their history or construction, I’d love to know.
If you placed all the malls and chain stores in the world end to end…but, hell, they already have, haven’t they? Restaurants, bars, clothing stores, multi-multiplexes, all of them nationally known, with convenient parking, strewn along Friars Road like hookers lined up in front of a Navy base. I spent today running from mall to mall, from Fenton Marketplace to Rio Vista Center to Park in the Valley to Mission Valley Center to Mission Valley West to Fashion Valley.
After a rainstorm last winter, the river's waters blew out a section of Fashion Valley Road that has yet to be repaired. Local weblog The Indepundit titled its January 7 response to that storm "Nature: Still a Bitch." It warned New Yorkers, in town for the weekend's Chargers/Jets playoff at Qualcomm Stadium, to travel to the game early, stick to the freeways, and avoid north/south roads in Mission Valley.
Roberto DePhilippis, the owner of the Butcher Shop Steak House, got very angry one night last spring. In November of 1985, his landlord, the Plaza International Hotel in Mission Valley, sent him an eviction notice. After six months of legal haggling, DePhilippis accepted the fact that the Butcher Shop would have to leave the premises it had occupied since 1971. DePhilippis would leave, but he made sure that not one usable chair, table, booth, appliance, or other Butcher Shop fixture would remain.
Mission Valley is a distinctive place. In the midst of the mesa or plateau that is San Diego lies a canyon six miles long, 500 feet deep, and 2000 feet wide. Arthur Ribbel, in an April 30, 1972, article in the San Diego Union, described an earlier Mission Valley.“Oldtimers, many years ago, looked down upon a vastly different Mission Valley than they do today, a garden-land then of small farms and dairies, rather than a center of commerce pouring rich dollar-blood into San Diego’s economy.
The Sandrocks’ move to the valley did not bring them prosperity. The valley remained a rural place, for no one wanted property where flooding occurred. The family had grown by two, and the four children added to the burdens of an already stretched pocketbook. In 1882, Clemens was arrested and charged with battery against his wife. The charges were later dropped because of the illness of family members.
"You know, when I sold my cows I got more for the shipping rights for the milk than for the cows. That's unconstitutional. See there where the trees are (close to the stadium)? That used to be a beautiful lake. I leased that land for grazing land from the city. But now all that land fill from the construction has filled it up. No, you can’t dairy around here any more.’’