The Happy Accident : San Diego’s Balboa Park Remains Both an Elegant Playground and an Undisturbed Retreat

It is late on a Sunday afternoon in San Diego’s Balboa Park. The summer breeze carries a whiff of carne asada sizzling on a grill. The cries of two capering children shatter the serenity that has settled on a verdant mesa. Two couples, arm in arm, watch while a young man takes aim and hurls a boccie ball with practiced accuracy down a packed-sand court. This northeast corner is known as Morley Field, a sports complex of football, baseball and soccer fields; tennis courts, and such unlikely sports amenities as a velodrome, fly-casting pond, archery range and 18-hole Frisbee-golf course.

But Balboa Park, about 400 city blocks of luxuriant emerald acreage, is more than a sports complex. It is San Diego’s heart and soul.

A Frisbee toss from the city’s center and bounded by 6th Street on the west, 28th Street on the east, Upas Street on the north and Russ Boulevard on the south, Balboa Park takes the shape of a gigantic, near-perfect square, quilted with expansive, tree-shaded lawns, lush canyons, colorful formal gardens and sprawling mesas. A visit to the park is an adventure. Youngsters--and grown-ups--can lose themselves in a walk through a palm arboretum (a densely planted semitropical canyon); ogle a Komodo dragon, the world’s largest lizard, at the San Diego Zoo; and contemplate the peaceful beauty of Eastman Johnson’s painting, “The Cranberry Harvest,” at the Timken Art Gallery.

Although Balboa Park is big enough to contain such varied treasures, it’s not the largest park in a city that controls more than 26,000 acres of parklands and open spaces. Mission Bay Park, at 4,245 acres, is almost four times as large. And the new Mission Trails Park, in the eastern part of the city, will encompass more than 6,000 acres when it is developed. But Balboa Park’s rich blend of theaters, museums and a foreign-folk-culture center--as well as organized sports, the zoo and “passive” park uses--symbolizes San Diego’s emerging cosmopolitanism and its long love affair with the outdoors.

Landscape architect Ron Pekarek, the park’s current master planner, calls it “a happy accident.” In 1868, the city trustees set aside 1,400 acres of pueblo lands (property which, under the Mexican government, was designated for pasturage or other common community uses) at a time when the population was only 2,301--a ratio of about two residents per park acre.

“No one really knows why that much land was set aside,” Pekarek says. It was an incredible amount. It would be comparable to San Diegans of today saying: “Let’s set aside the rest of California for a park.” But in 1868, the city owned more than 40,000 acres of such lands and was selling them for as little as 7 cents an acre to add property to the tax rolls. There was plenty of land to spare for park use.

Other “happy accidents,” Pekarek says, are the park’s square design--which keeps the bustling city far from the park’s center--and its natural geographic divisions. Cutting through the park are two canyons--Florida to the east and Cabrillo to the west--that divide the park into three areas. Tours through Florida Canyon, offered by the Natural History Museum, allow a rare glimpse of what San Diego was like before irrigation--acres of stubby scrub brush, chaparral and cactus. The natural ecological systems are nearly intact; coyotes and red-tailed hawks still vie with gray foxes for a meal of fresh rabbit.

The eastern side of the park, where Morley Field is, has been developed mainly for athletics, including a 9-hole and an 18-hole golf course. The western part has been set aside primarily for passive uses, such as picnicking, strolling and sunbathing under a brilliant sky.

Unlike the rest of the park, the central section focuses on man-made rather than natural recreational opportunities. It’s a city within a city--home to the San Diego Zoo--and it’s paved with plazas and studded with handsome structures that house museums, theaters, meeting rooms, ballrooms, gymnasiums and artists’ studios. Most of the visitors who pour into the park on weekends and holidays tend to crowd along El Prado, the broad avenue through the central section of the park, where musicians, jugglers, mimes and puppeteers beguile passers-by with their various acts.

This sprawling commons has never had a broader appeal. It attracts about 12 million visitors a year, half of them from out of town; as many as 65,000 people a day flock to this urban preserve to enjoy its oceanic and woodland vistas or to visit one of the park’s dozen museums or the zoo.

Yet, all is not well with Balboa Park. The post-Proposition 13 era has brought about changes in the park’s management. Californians have mandated more conservative fiscal practices, and park maintenance is suffering. Some of the clues are less apparent than others; the park’s gardens once were a year-round profusion of color. “It’s not that obvious, but we plant fewer annuals than we used to,” says Gary Stromberg, manager of grounds maintenance at Balboa Park.

“A lot of what we do has to do with perception,” says Stromberg’s boss, Dave Roberts, who oversees several parks and a variety of recreational activities as deputy director of the San Diego Park and Recreation Department. “In government, we deal a lot more with perception than with reality. If the trash is picked up, people perceive that the park is well maintained. But from a horticultural point of view, that might not be so at all. Just like people, trees age and die.” And replacing Balboa Park’s extensive collection of rare plants and trees is an ongoing and expensive undertaking, Roberts says, but city funding is no longer able to keep up with the park’s needs.

But Roberts, who has been with the department for 30 years, knows that as the community changes--the city’s population has tripled since 1950--the use of the park also changes. And the city has changed not only in size, but also in interests.

“There’s a higher concentration of the cultural arts today,” Roberts says. Indeed, half a dozen museums that were not in the park 30 years ago are now drawing crowds. The Old Globe Theatre, which once had only a single stage, now operates a three-stage complex that last year sold 235,000 tickets.

Pekarek states that the heavy use of the park has minimized problems with transients and crime. Consequently, the master plan he has developed can focus on problems arising from the county’s population growth, changing customs and the park’s popularity. In 1961, when a previous master plan, called the Bartholomew Plan, was drawn up, there were fewer people, and they enjoyed the park in a manner different from today’s throngs.

“In the early 1960s, driving in a car was the dominant means of recreation,” Pekarek says. “Now, people want to get out and walk through the landscape, instead of consuming it from within a car.”

The result is a regular weekend gridlock on the roads that enter the park’s central section as tens of thousands of visitors vie for fewer than 2,000 parking spaces near the Prado area. Pekarek has suggested removing the parking lots, building new lots, expanding other lots outside the park and reconfiguring automobile access along the park’s perimeter. He’d also like to “complete” the park and turn it into “an entertainment machine” by balancing passive park use with cultural and active recreational uses and segregating the two further. He would:

Reduce congestion by moving the gymnasiums and activities such as folk dancing and floral exhibits away from the central, cultural-arts section of the park.

Reclaim the 30 acres of park land that have been given over to Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts and Camp Fire Girls. “They’re a special use,” he says, “with their land improvements,” adding that the scouts might be better located in Mission Trails Park. Generally speaking, Pekarek opposes activities limited to a narrow segment of the population and prefers open parklands that are available to the broadest segment of the population, including children, the elderly and the handicapped.

Re-landscape sections to provide more areas for passive uses.

Move golf courses to make better use of landfills and conform to the paths of roadways. “Today, we have the technology to put golf courses on landfills,” he says. Converting and maintaining landfill for open-park use would be almost as expensive as putting in a golf course but would generate no money to defray the costs; golf courses would. Land near roadways, he says, is less suitable for open-space uses. Ultimately, Pekarek says, he’d like to see the golf courses removed too.

Establish quality restaurants on parklands that are undesirable for open-park use. The idea, Pekarek says, is to use every bit of the park. “When the public isn’t using the park, that’s when you lose the park to undesirable elements.”

Install a water-recycling plant. “Currently we’re using potable water,” he explains. “Irrigating with recycled water would be much cheaper.”

Replace the antiquated irrigation equipment.

But the Pekarek plan has sparked more ire than praise. Residents around the park screamed at his suggestion to widen certain streets on the park’s perimeter. Residents on the north side of the park fear that such a move would bloat their neighborhood with condominiums and apartments similar to the 6th Street residential district.

The directors of the museums and theaters objected vehemently to Pekarek’s plan to remove the parking lots near their facilities and to close the Laurel Street Bridge over Cabrillo Canyon to automobiles.

“You can’t close Laurel Street Bridge. It’s a major artery into the park,” says Steven Brezzo, director of San Diego’s Museum of Art. “The original version of the plan showed a lack of sensitivity to the organizations in the park.”

For his part, Pekarek believes that leaders of institutions located in the park’s central section have adopted a me-first attitude. “It’s the question of whose ox gets gored,” he says. But in a political battle at the City Council level, the member organizations of the Central Balboa Park Committee are the odds-on favorites. The heavyweight trustees of institutions such as the San Diego Museum of Art and the Old Globe Theatre command clout at City Hall, so the weekend congestion will probably continue.

Such turf wars are typical of large urban parks, including Balboa Park, which was named for the Spanish discoverer of the Pacific Ocean, Vasco Nunez de Balboa. Its present development, began in 1903, was brought about by the urgings of San Diego businessman and civic leader George W. Marston. Horticulturist Kate O. Sessions is credited with significant early plantings. But most of the park’s present form, including the millions of shrubs and trees, took shape with the Panama-California Exposition of 1915 and the California-Pacific Exposition of 1935--in effect, two world’s fairs.

Retained to plan the 400 acres of the 1915 exposition site were New York landscape architect Samuel Parsons and John C. Olmsted, the nephew and partner of Frederick Law Olmsted--the famed American landscape architect and pioneer in park design. Although Olmsted dropped out after a disagreement with the organizing committee, he is credited with having made a key contribution: suggesting the Spanish Colonial style as the exposition’s architectural theme. Those buildings, designed by architect Bertram Goodhue, set the park’s architectural tone. Most of them were planned as temporary structures, but San Diegans have for 60 years fought City Hall attempts to demolish them; over the years, many of the buildings have been renovated or rebuilt entirely, thanks to the efforts of the Committee of 100, a volunteer organization dedicated to their preservation.

Just inside the great West Gate, the California Building--now the anthropological Museum of Man--bulks and towers in Baroque splendor, much like the Tepotzotlan church outside Mexico City. Another building is reported to have been patterned after the Basilica de Guadalupe in Guadalajara, Mexico, and another is reminiscent of the Hospital of Santa Cruz in Toledo, Spain. Still another was designed in the ornately decorated style of the Spanish Renaissance. Other buildings are modeled on the little chapels of the great cathedral of Mexico City. The main thoroughfare, El Prado, leads past the Elizabethan Old Globe Theatre complex. Opposite is the House of Charm known as Alcazar Gardens. Farther down El Prado are the San Diego Museum of Art, the House of Hospitality, with its restaurant, banquet rooms, offices and snug courtyard, and the Casa del Prado--actually two buildings--which has offices, rehearsal rooms and a 700-seat theater.

Irrigation has transformed this section of the park into a profusion of palms and rare and luxuriant shrubbery. To the south, past the 23-foot-high bronze statue of El Cid and the extravagant pavilion of the recently restored Spreckels Organ (said to be the world’s largest outdoor organ) is the Palisades area. There, architecturally diverse buildings are scattered about the Pan-American Plaza--the Mayan-esque Federal Building, now a gymnasium; the Art Deco Ford Building, which houses the Aerospace Museum, and the humble shapes of the House of Pacific Relations.

Nearby, artist David Avalos is about to close up the huge, brightly muraled former water tank that houses the Centro Cultural de la Raza. Not in evidence on this particular afternoon at the Centro are Latino or Native American folk-dancing sessions--or any other classes; the only sound is that of some hammering as an art student puts together a divider for an upcoming exhibition. Elsewhere in the park, the pace quickens as daylight wanes. Volunteers at the Old Globe Theatre are brewing coffee and setting out past ries as they prepare for the 1,300 people who will be watching the evening’s three plays. Actors are arriving to get into costume and makeup. Picnickers by the hundreds spread out their blankets on the thick lawns in the park’s central section, close to the Globe’s three theaters and the 4,300-seat Starlight Bowl amphitheater. They delve into crammed baskets for an alfresco prelude to Shakespeare or a musical under the stars.

And Balboa Park has other, almost secret attractions. On many Sundays, former California horseshoe-pitching champion John Walker can be found amid a grove of trees near the Balboa Roque and Shuffleboard Club on the park’s west side. Walker almost never seems to miss.

“There was a time when I averaged 80%,” Walker, now 60, says. “But I like to come down to the park on a day like today, enjoy the beer and pitch a few. I’m doing good to hit 50% these days.”

With rubber-stamp repetition, Walker gauges the regulation 40-foot pitch and slowly underhands an iron shoe. It floats through the air, turning gracefully. Clang!