The City: A Place to Stay

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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.