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How San Diego Speaks to Me
By Nancy Carol Carter
Winner of SOHO's 2024 Historic Preservation Writing Contest
When I made San Diego my home more than 30 years ago, Balboa Park quickly emerged as the region’s most captivating feature. In time, I became a serious student of the park’s founding and development—an interest that has both bedeviled and entertained me for decades. San Diego speaks to me through the history of Balboa Park.
To study Balboa Park history is to become dismayed by the squandering and neglect of the remarkable prize presented to the San Diego citizenry in 1868 when 1,400 pristine acres were set aside as a public park. My preservationist soul longs to roll back the clock—to get ahead of land losses, toxic dumping, disrespectful uses, and the building of freeways that scar Balboa Park and rob it of peace.
Conversely, to visit and use the park engenders a love of the astonishing variety of gathered sights and experiences that Balboa Park—despite all—still offers. In this park you can hike for hours, play volleyball, or quietly toast in the sun. You can see a Rembrandt painting or a Komodo dragon; you can bike in a velodrome or practice Ikebana. A civic organist will entertain you by playing the world’s largest outdoor pipe organ and a resident ceramicist will teach you to throw a pot. Architecture that inspired the look of all Southern California is on view, along with a collection of trees and plants enriched by the generosity of a benign climate.
Amid this Balboa Park array is a battered 116-year-old survivor that has become my San Diego historic preservation totem: the Golden Hill fountain grotto. Nestled into a hillside at the head of a deep canyon, the hidden grotto is accessed by twin stairways built with San Diego’s plentiful cobblestones. In the semi-encircled lower level, a rough-hewn round fountain built of local stone and concrete dominates. It rests on a platform of three rounded steps. Tall stone retaining walls curve away from each side of the fountain and a short wall defines the canyon side of the grotto.
An activist Golden Hill community organization spurred the building of this sunken grotto as a cozy retreat. In the dry and dusty San Diego of 1908, the flowing water of the fountain was intended to evoke the natural springs found in the mountains of East San Diego County. The area around the grotto was made green with dense landscaping.
Instantly popular, the fountain grotto drew many visitors. But its appeal dimmed with the opening of the Panama-California Exposition in 1915 on the other side of the park. Fading popularity and a kind of civic amnesia eventually removed the fountain grotto from San Diego’s memory and recorded history. For decades it was not mentioned in local newspapers and it was overlooked by historians and guides. The dry fountain was plugged to prevent its use as a fire pit, one of the depredations that ensued when the grotto went into decline. The original decorative landscaping around the grotto was not maintained or replaced and the grotto suffered the wounds of official neglect, vandalism, and misuse.
After decades of marginalization, the historical significance of the fountain grotto was slowly recognized. Its rehabilitation was called for in the 1993 Balboa Park Precise Plan for the East Mesa. San Diego Save Our Heritage Organisation placed the fountain grotto on its “most endangered” list of 2009. A Historic American Landscapes Survey (HALS) report on the fountain grotto was accepted by the National Park Service in 2020. The site subsequently garnered a degree of popular attention from an awakened Golden Hill community group and Friends of Balboa Park, which installed an interpretive sign near the grotto in 2021, providing the first official marking of the site.
By conducting research for the Golden Hill fountain grotto HALS report and interpretive sign, I learned that this Balboa Park site has many stories to tell. Stories about the power of community activism, about early park development, and the influence of the Arts and Crafts movement in San Diego. Intertwined are the personal histories of the people associated with this quirky remnant of another age. But the fountain grotto’s most powerful story is one of survival in a neglectful community.
Preserved by a stubborn sturdiness, the Golden Hill fountain grotto weathered 80 years of obscurity before being publicly recognized and appreciated as the oldest designed feature of Balboa Park (excepting roads created in 1903-05). I am so grateful it has survived, but mindful that every historic site cannot so successfully await its day in the sun—the time when historic significance is finally recognized and protections are offered. And mindful, too, that the fountain grotto remains a historic preservation challenge.
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