Downtown San Diego Stories
As baseball fans headed toward Petco Park for the August 20th game, at about 6:30 p.m., a car abruptly stopped on the corner of Tenth Avenue and J Street to unload some passengers at the …
Emergency medical and fire crews were called to San Diego’s downtown nightclub On Broadway in the early hours of Saturday, August 15. According to witnesses at the venue, a fight broke out that left at …
At approximately 9:35 p.m. on Friday, August 7, two men were seen walking westbound on the 900 block of J Street when one of them fell unconscious to the sidewalk. Two security personnel from a …
Just before 3:00 p.m. on Sunday August 2, a man was seen sitting on the sidewalk, leaning up against a building on the 400 block of Tenth Avenue. He bled profusely from his left arm. …
Marlon Castle, 22, got in line for the entrance to the San Diego Convention Center after having stood in line for 20 minutes at the will-call window for his ticket. The ticket is worn around …
THE RAID. On September 10, 1909, city prosecutor Edgar Luce, chief of police Keno Wilson, and a detective named Smith crossed the Market Street “dead line” and took a stroll through the Stingaree, San Diego’s …
The Centre City Development Corp. is paying $10,160 to Heritage Architecture to create a “list of potential new uses, creative adaptive reuse design scenarios and provide cost-estimating services for the selected alternatives,” for rehabilitating the …
Last week, San Diego sheriff’s deputies and investigators arrested 38-year-old Ismael Sanchez Carrillo for attempted grand theft in front of the Hall of Justice at 330 West Broadway. During the past six weeks, jurors and …
On Saturday afternoon, July 25, San Diego Police helped quell an unruly crowd on the main floor of the San Diego Convention Center. During an appearance of the cast of FX channel's It’s Always Sunny …
THE MOST HATED MAN IN SAN DIEGO. From 1910 to 1912, Walter Bellon inspected San Diego’s waterfront, Chinatown, and the Stingaree district for the health department. If an owner failed to make basic improvements, the …
A man was arrested at approximately 12:50 p.m. on July 23 in front of the San Diego Convention Center. Witnesses indicated that the man -- in his 20s or early 30s, with black curly hair …
Strolling on the boardwalk through Seaport Village on the afternoon of July 15, I admired the shops along the footpath between the Midway and the convention center. Then, something on the ground in front of …
On February 15, 1898, the Monterey sailed into San Diego Bay. The ship had been at sea for more than a month. The next day around noon, half the crew got liberty and hurtled through …
On Sunday, July 5, at approximately 2:30 p.m., a sidewalk peddler was spotted on the southwest corner of Tenth Avenue and J Street hawking “ice cold water and Gatorade” to baseball fans walking around Petco …
I put sour cream in my coffee because I didn’t have any milk. I searched through my refrigerator for anything that could possibly be utilized as a splash of creamer. Salad dressing, mayonnaise, soy sauce, …
Visitors to downtown hotels are a piddling few. Residents of downtown condos are a piddling few. But that won’t stop the establishment from diddling taxpayers for more downtown development — a travesty because outlying parks, …
The Cribs. In 1887, a reporter for the San Diego Union grew a beard, wore threadbare duds, and stealth’d through San Diego’s red-light district. He was shocked to see drunks on every corner. Some clung …
The idea of building a new downtown library has been teetering on the brink of fiction and non-fiction for over a decade. But during recent months, dwindling fundraising efforts, a ballooning city deficit, increasing project …
Shortly after the Padres-Dodgers game on Friday, July 3, cars and fans filled the streets surrounding Petco Park. So, San Diego traffic controllers began to enforce the ban against San Diego pedicabs operating in the …
On Thursday, July 2, at the top of the ninth inning in a game between the Padres and Houston Astros, bees were seen buzzing around in the outfield. “The left fielder [Kyle Blanks] started waving …
San Diego County is putting the brakes on spur-of-the-moment marriages. Beginning Monday, July 6, marriage licenses and civil ceremonies will be offered by appointment only. “The walk-in marriage services are being discontinued due to budgetary …
San Diego city councilmember Carl DeMaio has some questions for the Port of San Diego before he’s ready to endorse the city’s convention center expansion. In a June 30 memo issued by his office, the …
Let’s take a walk through time. We’re at the southwest corner of Fifth and K, part of the Gaslamp Quarter. At night, lines form under bright lights at popular clubs and restaurants. Between 1875 and …
Just before 1:00 p.m on June 29, an altercation between two people at 746 Broadway (above the Church of Steel tattoo shop) resulted in police officers surrounding the building. Because a gun was involved, police …
At approximately 9.15 a.m. on Saturday, June 27, as an M.T.S. Blue Line trolley en route to Old Town arrived at the Civic Centre stop, commuters onboard were forced to evacuate the train as smoke …
On Wednesday evening, June 24, The San Diego Padres found themselves deadlocked in a 3-3 tie with the Seattle Mariners through the top of the eighth inning. Although it was a close game, there were …
For the past two months, the future site of Thomas Jefferson Law School in the East Village has been the location of an orderly protest regarding labor matters. At the southeast corner of 11th and …
Is Balboa Park part of downtown? Does the city need another leash-free dog park? Can it afford it? Those questions occurred to Mel Shapiro when he read an account in the Union-Tribune about a recently …
The May 30 “Baja by the Sea” food and cultural exhibition held at Embarcadero Marina Park in downtown San Diego ultimately sought to encourage Baja tourism, but considering what I experienced, the mission was somewhat …
At the Wednesday-morning meeting of the San Diego City Council’s rules committee, councilmembers Tony Young, Kevin Faulconer, Donna Frye, and Todd Gloria (council president Ben Hueso was at a Coastal Commission meeting) requested that the …
Though the Padres stretched their Sunday, June 7, game against the Arizona Diamondbacks 18 innings in the longest major league game so far this season, one Padres fan didn’t quite make it to the 8th. …
The sugar daddies that could be expected to bankroll the convention center expansion are on the sidelines. But watch out: the backers of the proposed expansion are likely to twist statistics and distort reality to …
When the Arizona Diamondbacks were in town on May 6, 2009, the Padres and D’backs drew an announced crowd of 13,646 — a record low for Petco Park (capacity is 42,445). The average for this …
It was shortly after 2:00 a.m. when Gerald Jackson finished his closing shift at the Barbary Coast, a downtown gay bar at the corner of Fourth and C, next to the landmark California Theatre. The …
Old-time San Diegans remember when the Gaslamp Quarter was getting over its “Hey, sailor” sleaze-phase and Horton Plaza was new. Italian restaurants serving affordable food suddenly peppered the neighborhood — but once the rising entertainment …
Officials from the Centre City Development Corporation (CCDC) continue on their cross-city public relations tour to promote the construction of a new downtown civic center. Last week, the group showed their stuff to a near-empty …
Soon, the city council will decide on whether to enter into an agreement with Gerding Edlen Development for exclusive negotiations on a new downtown civic center. Jeff Graham, vice president of redevelopment for CCDC, likens …
The stunning 50 percent plunge in Phoenix’s home prices has attracted national attention. By contrast, San Diego’s condominium market, which has seen values fall by 55 percent, has suffered in relative silence. That may be …
A lone transient brought fear and terror to downtown San Diego on Sunday, May 3. The unnamed man, wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt, climbed to the top of a crane on the construction …
A 911 call on Monday, May 4, brought emergency teams and a fleet of San Diego Fire-Rescue Department vehicles (including battalion chief 1's red Chevy Suburban) to the Lyceum Theatre entrance of Horton Plaza. According …
In a scene reminiscent of a late 1960s Vietnam War protest, Horton Plaza Park (on Broadway between Third and Fourth avenues) was packed with noisy demonstrators on Saturday, April 25, between 3:00 and 4:30 p.m. …
During District 2 councilmember Kevin Faulconer’s state of the district speech on April 27, he listed his accomplishments during the past three years. One of his proudest accomplishments so far has been banning alcohol from …
“Be nice or go away,” says the sign above the bar. Hmm...none too welcoming. But, hey, I’ll be nice, ’cause what a bar, and what a backboard! Huge, with baroque carving, big mirrors. Victorian, I …
They say your home is your castle. So it is with Jim’s place, which is shaped like a castle. He’s known as the P.B. Millionaire. The St. Patrick’s Day party he hosted was downtown at …
The 1898 ferry boat Berkeley, moored permanently on San Diego Bay at the Embarcadero, has been in need of maintenance, which it received last weekend. On the morning of Sunday, March 29, workers for the …
On Saturday, March 29, a young man fell from a 12th-floor apartment on Ninth Avenue at 1:15 a.m. The victim, who had been visiting a friend at the Avalon building in Cortez Hill, died on …
The proposal to build a new San Diego city hall at a cost to taxpayers of at least $587 million is slowly making its way through the City-owned Centre City Development Corporation, en route to …
As San Diego’s unemployment rate has climbed steeply (to 8.8 percent), so too has the homeless population. Food lines are extending around blocks, and shelters fill up before the sun sets. Many are turned away …
All across the United States, and around the world, convention centers are vastly overbuilt. Supply exceeds demand. So municipalities that own the centers resort to price-slashing. They often lose money on their centers and have …
Who are the new would-be owners of the Padres, and are they fit to own the team? Recent documents unearthed from city hall under the California Public Records Act suggest that City officials may not …
On a Saturday night a few weeks ago, I went to a Saturday Night Live theme party at the Tivoli Bar in the East Village. I went as one of the gold-chain-and-polyester-wearing Czech brothers played …
A little after 5:00 p.m. on Thursday, March 12, a late-model, black VW Jetta traveling northbound on Seventh Avenue collided with one of MTS’s red-and-white articulated buses that was eastbound on Broadway. Although both vehicles …