Old Town

Before Europeans arrived, the Kumeyaay lived here in a village called Kosa'aay. It had thirty to forty families living in pyramid-shaped housing structures. The Kumeyaay were the original inhabitants of San Diego County, and for over 10,000 years they lived as horticulturists, hunters and gatherers. They were the first to meet Europeans when the Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo expedition sailed into San Diego Harbor in 1542.

The San Diego Presidio and Mission San Diego de Alcalá were founded in 1769 by Gaspar de Portolá and Junípero Serra, on a bluff at the western end of the San Diego River valley next to the village. The villagers had given resources to the Portolá expedition. Together the presidio and the mission made up the first Spanish settlement in Alta California, which is the present-day state of California. After five years the mission moved several miles upriver. The presidio stayed on its hill and remained the main settlement.

In the 1820s the town of San Diego grew up at the base of the bluff, at the spot that Old Town San Diego State Historic Park now marks. The presidio fell into disrepair. In 1834 the Mexican government gave San Diego the status of a pueblo, a chartered town. The population then dropped so far that the status was revoked in 1838. Part of the trouble was location. The town was far from navigable water, so every import and export had to be brought ashore in Point Loma and carried several miles over the La Playa Trail.

When California joined the United States in 1850, San Diego was still mostly the Old Town area, and it became the seat of government of San Diego County. Only 650 people lived there. Old Town stayed the heart of the city until the 1860s, when a newcomer named Alonzo Horton began promoting development at the site of present-day downtown. Residents and businesses left quickly for Horton's New Town, which was closer to shipping. In 1871 the government records moved to a new county courthouse in New Town, and downtown permanently took over as the center of San Diego.

The historic park covers around nine square blocks, almost 30 acres, and it can be toured with or without a guide. The Robinson-Rose House Visitor Center is the usual starting point. It has a model of the area as it looked in 1872, maps and touring information, and free guided walking tours leave daily at 11AM and 2PM.

Among the buildings are Casa de Estudillo, an adobe house restored to its original look, and the Black Hawk Smithy and Stable, established in 1860, where visitors can watch blacksmithing demonstrations. The Mason Street Schoolhouse was established around 1865 and was the first public school house in San Diego. The Light-Freeman House was built in 1830 as an adobe saloon and provision store and became the American Hotel around 1856. The original San Diego Courthouse dates to 1847, and the Seeley Stable Museum is a reconstructed stagecoach stop with vintage carriages inside.

The Royal Presidio of San Diego was established on May 14, 1769, by Gaspar de Portolá, who led the first European land exploration of Alta California, then an unexplored northwestern frontier of New Spain. It was the first permanent European settlement on the Pacific coast of the present-day United States, and the base for Spanish colonization of California. Junípero Serra founded Mission San Diego de Alcalá on Presidio Hill on July 16, 1769. The hill had a commanding view of San Diego Bay and the Pacific, so the Spanish could see anyone coming. Less than a month after the mission was founded, Kumeyaay people attacked it. Four Spaniards were wounded and a boy was killed. The Spaniards then built a stockade, finished in March 1770, with two bronze cannons, one pointed at the bay and the other at the nearby village.

Adobe buildings replaced the first huts of wood and brush in 1773 and 1774, and the mission moved a few miles up Mission Valley, away from the garrison. By 1783 there were 54 troops at the presidio. After Mexican independence in 1821 the presidio came under Mexican control, and Spain officially gave it up on April 20, 1822. From 1825 to 1829 it was the Mexican governor's residence. By 1835 it was abandoned and in ruins, because settlers preferred the more accessible town at the foot of the hill. During the Mexican-American War the US Army set up Fort Stockton inside the old fort, and that site is California Historical Landmark No. 54. The presidio itself became a California Historical Landmark in 1932 and a National Historic Landmark in 1960.

George Marston, a department store owner and civic leader, bought Presidio Hill in 1907 to save it. He could not get public money, so he built a private park there in 1925 with the architect John Nolen. Presidio Park covers about 40 acres and has views of the city, the San Diego River valley and the Pacific. Marston also paid for the Junípero Serra Museum, a Spanish Revival building designed by William Templeton Johnson to hold the collection of the San Diego Historical Society, and he gave the park and the museum to the city in 1929. The museum is sometimes wrongly called the Presidio, since nothing of the original fort stands above ground. A fenced area holds the foundations of the chapel and walls, and the site is occasionally dug by archaeologists. The spot where Serra planted a palm tree in 1769 is a California Historical Landmark of its own. The historical society, founded in 1929 by Marston, moved to Balboa Park in 1982 and is now the San Diego History Center.

Casa de Estudillo stands in the state historic park. José María Estudillo and his son José Antonio Estudillo, early settlers and members of a prominent California family, built it in 1827, and it was considered one of the finest houses in Mexican California. It is a U-shaped adobe, 113 feet across the front and 98 feet along each wing, in the Spanish Colonial style. Its 13 rooms sit in a row and connect only through a covered outdoor walkway, not an inside hall. A cupola on top once gave a view of bullfights and festivals in the plaza next door. The house is both a National and a California Historical Landmark.

José Antonio Estudillo died in 1852, and his family stayed in the house until 1887. In 1884 Helen Hunt Jackson's novel Ramona, a romanticized story of Californio life, set off a nationwide interest in Southern California, and tourists went looking for the places in it. Jackson died in 1885 without saying where the story was set. In 1887 the San Diego Union declared the Estudillo house to be the place where the novel's heroine married, even though Jackson never visited it. A tourist had already scratched the name Alessandro, the heroine's husband, into one of the walls. The caretaker began selling pieces of the house as souvenirs, and the building fell into decay.

In 1906 John D. Spreckels' San Diego Electric Railway Company bought the run-down house. The architect Hazel Wood Waterman renovated it to match the novel, taking off the cupola and moving several doors and windows, and it reopened in 1910 as a tourist attraction. It drew 1,632 visitors on one day in 1940. Tommy Getz, the manager, bought the house in 1924, and his daughter Margeurite Weiss ran it until she sold it in 1964. Legler Benbough then donated it to the State of California in 1968. The state restored it to its look before the novel, cupola included, and it is now a museum furnished as it likely was in Estudillo's day. An estimated 1% of visitors now know about the Ramona connection.

The Junípero Serra Museum in Presidio Park has exhibits on early Old Town and a tower with views over the area. The Whaley House, built in 1856, is the oldest brick building in San Diego and is known as the city's most famous haunted house. Its north room served as the County Courthouse in 1869. The Whaley House Museum and the Adobe Chapel Museum are both run by the nonprofit Save Our Heritage Organisation.

Heritage Park, a county park, shows off historic buildings that were moved there from other places, including several Victorian homes and San Diego's first synagogue, Temple Beth Israel. The Mormon Battalion Historic Site and the Immaculate Conception Church, a Mission-style church from 1919, are also close by.

The neighborhood has nine hotels, 32 restaurants and more than 100 specialty shops. There are also 12 art galleries and 27 historic buildings and sites. Fiesta de Reyes (meaning Party of Kings) and Bazaar del Mundo are two of the main shopping areas. A major government employer here is the District 11 headquarters of Caltrans, the California Department of Transportation.

Several annual events fill the calendar. San Diego's Cinco de Mayo celebration is held in Old Town every year, and the Old Town Art Festival runs each October. Dia de los Muertos is a community-wide celebration on November 1 and 2. Fiesta Navidad is a two-day Christmas festival in December, and it features Las Posadas, which re-enacts the journey of Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem. Community groups include the Old Town Community Planning Committee, the Old Town San Diego Chamber of Commerce, and the Boosters of Old Town, which supports the state historic park.

Old Town is just off the meeting point of Interstate 5 and Interstate 8. Driving is simple, but finding a place to park in Old Town can be a real drag, and traffic can clog the big roads in Mission Valley at rush hour and during sports events.

The Old Town Transit Center, at the northwest corner of the neighborhood, is the big transit hub. Buses from the San Diego Metropolitan Transit System meet there, along with the Green Line and Blue Line of the San Diego Trolley, the Coaster commuter rail line that runs north along the coast to Oceanside, and Amtrak's Pacific Surfliner (not every train stops). The airport's free Flyer Shuttle also connects the transit center to the airport. In the 1910s Old Town was one of many neighborhoods linked by Class 1 streetcars, which built up after the Panama-California Exposition of 1915 and stayed a fixture until 1939.

The transit center was built in the early 1990s. The trolley line was extended to it on June 16, 1996, and the Green Line opened on July 10, 2005. The station sits where Rosecrans Street and Taylor Street meet Pacific Highway, next to Old Town San Diego State Historic Park, and it is about two miles southeast of SeaWorld San Diego and Mission Bay. The Blue Line came back to the station on November 21, 2021, through the Mid-Coast extension, and it now reaches the University of California, San Diego, Jacobs Medical Center, Westfield UTC and the border crossing at San Ysidro. Free parking is available for up to 24 hours.