The City: A Place to Stay

It had taken four years’ work and $21.5 million, but San Diegans were convinced that the evening had been worth it. For with the opening night of San Diego’s impressive new Civic Theater last week, the community could look back with pride on an urban-renewal program without parallel in the U.S. It could also look forward to growth and progress that of late have eluded what was becoming California’s problem city.

San Diego (pop. 655,000) has every natural asset a city could ask. Set between rolling mountains and the sea, it boasts a magnificent natural harbor, a paradise for yachtsmen and a major port for the U.S. Navy. No smog sullies its air, no wastes pollute its waters. The climate is kindly (67°-70°) all year. It is a place that people dream of coming back to, and they do; the phone book is a virtual Who Was Who of retired Navy and Marine Corps brass. To keep San Diego unspoiled, the city fathers long ago adopted rigid zoning laws. For decades, all attempts to attract new industry bogged down in the perennial controversy known locally as “geraniums v. smokestacks,” and geraniums were practically growing in the streets.

As a result, San Diego over the years became a land of lotus eaters, so immersed in its happy, old-fashioned ways that the future seemed irrelevant. By failing to diversify its industrial base, the city by 1961 had saddled itself with a 7.5% unemployment rate, far higher than in nearby Los Angeles. Worse, for the long term, was the loss of skilled workers as a result of cutbacks in the aerospace industry, their biggest employer. In 1960, when a group of businessmen got the results of an exhaustive study of the city’s economic prospects, the outlook was so gloomy that, as one economist put it, “you could have cut the pessimism with a knife.”

Not a single office building had gone up in the center of the city since 1928, and the downtown area was a sleazy jungle of honky-tonks and arcades. Suburban shopping centers had relentlessly whittled downtown retail volume; the city faced a 30% decline in sales revenue by 1962. A successful bond issue was as rare as snow. Despite 35 separate attempts to build one, San Diego remained a city without a convention hall. In virtually every other sector of the economy from transit to schools, San Diego was lagging far behind lesser and less-blessed cities.

Facing Facts. The man who first suspected how far was Joseph E. Jessop, president of a chain of jewelry stores and the patriarch of a family that has been in San Diego since 1890. In 1959, Jessop, who had already begun to move his own stores out to the suburbs, called together a group of 60 leading businessmen to start facing the hard facts. “Up to this point,” Jessop recalls, “San Diego was only penny ante. If you asked them for a contribution, they wrote you a check for $200.” Jessop demanded—and got—$100,000 “for a start.” With it, on May 1, 1959, they formed San Diegans Inc.

The group’s first project was an attempt to revitalize the downtown area by building an ambitious complex to serve as a center for the city’s cultural, financial and administrative activities. Financing was a problem. Government-aided urban renewal was considered too controversial for ultraconservative San Diego, one of the only two counties in California carried by Goldwater. A bond issue, which by state law requires a two-thirds majority to carry, was certain to be beaten. So San Diegans Inc. made an outright gift of $1.5 million to the city, which agreed to borrow the rest of the project’s $21.5 million cost from its own employees’ pension fund.

Functional L. Finally after two years of tearing down and building up, San Diego’s functional, L-shaped Concourse is now complete. The complex includes an eleven-story parking garage and, flanked by a pleasant terrace, a capacious Convention and Exhibit Hall, a 14-story City Administrative Building, and the elegant, 3,000-seat Civic Theater, which will also house the city’s symphony orchestra and a brand-new opera company.

Since San Diegans Inc. began its work, nearly $90 million has been invested in the downtown area in building and restoration. The city’s success has inspired other groups to deal similarly with problem neighborhoods. High-powered citizens’ committees have also been formed to attract industry, rehabilitate the transit system, overhaul city finances. San Diegans Inc., which has spent a total of $73,500 in surveys, has just completed a building-by-building blueprint for redevelopment of 74 more downtown blocks.

Thus San Diego has worked its way out of lotusland on its own terms. The city has yet to seek a single cent of redevelopment money from the Federal Government. Without going soft on smokestacks, San Diego in two years has more than doubled the number of research and development plants in the area. Investment in new industry rose from $440,000 in 1963 to $4,000,000 last year, while three big junior colleges and a University of California campus with a projected enrollment of 27,000 in 20 years have just been completed.

Perhaps the most important gain of all is intangible. San Diego, as Banker Ewart Goodwin pointed out last week, has learned under pressure to harness “the mutual power of the community.” Said he: “Business needs the authority of government and government needs business as a salesman.” As a result, San Diego today is not only a nice place to come back to; it is a place to stay.