Historical Miscellany
Much of what we know about San Diego’s first decade as an American town is found in the files of our first newspaper, the San Diego Herald. Original copies of the Herald are exceedingly rare but a complete file is preserved in Special Collections at the San Diego Public Library. We owe that complete file to the foresight of Ephraim W. Morse, who preserved a whole run and sold it to the library for $100 in 1901. The letter below documents that important transaction. The library’s run of the Herald was microfilmed many years ago and can be viewed at the San Diego Central Library. The newspaper has also been digitized and is available for research at the Internet site of the California Digital Newspaper Collection: https://cdnc.ucr.edu/

Back in July 2017, I did a talk on San Diego founder Alonzo Horton for the Gaslamp Quarter Historical Foundation. Attached here is the video recording of that lecture. Audio is sometimes iffy but overall, a nice production done by Bill Keller, a docent at the Gaslamp Foundation.
Save the date. On December 3, I’ll be at the North Park branch of the Public Library to share some great stories and photos from San Diego Yesterday. That’s 6:30 p.m. at 3795 31st St.
San Diego (619) 533-3972.
An atomic bomb blast in San Diego Bay? No. More like a mushroom of smoke, mud, and water propelled by 2,040 pounds of TNT in seven feet of water. This bomb was detonated by the Naval Electronics Laboratory just a few miles from the Hotel del Coronado in June 1946. The scale model experiment recorded wave intensity from underwater explosions. The San Diego blast was a warm-up exercise for the world’s first underwater nuclear bomb explosion at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands on July 24, 1946.
Last summer the collections of the San Diego Central Library moved to a new building at 330 Park Blvd. For the past several months the staff of Special Collections has been busily unpacking and arranging boxes of materials once relegated to the basement of our old building. Among reams of material, we make discoveries. Below is a forgotten architectural rendering of the proposed Carnegie Library. The completed structure, designed by the New York firm of Ackerman and Ross, was dedicated in April 1902.
In honor of National Library Week (April 23-29) here’s a little San Diego library trivia:
One of the smaller branches of the San Diego Public Library was the Marston Store branch. As “a convenience to tourists and shoppers,” the room opened in 1917 on the 5th floor of the famed department store at 5th and C Streets. The branch closed in 1921 and its collection was moved to the new Mission Hills branch.
Next Friday I’ll be at the Coronado Historical Society for an illustrated talk on San Diego history. That’s Friday, Jan. 10, 5:30 pm in the Lecture Hall of CHS, 1100 Orange Ave., Coronado, CA 92118. Here’s some more details from the CHA website.
The Ocean Beach Historical Society Presents: San Diego Yesterday Featuring Richard Crawford, Thurs., Oct. 17th at 7PM at P.L. United Methodist Church, 1984 Sunset Cliffs Blvd., Ocean Beach.
San Diego today is a vibrant and bustling coastal city, but it wasn’t always so. The city’s transformation from a rough-hewn border town and frontier port to a vital military center was marked by growing pains and political clashes. Civic highs and criminal lows have defined San Diego’s rise through the 19th and 20th centuries into a preeminent Sun Belt city. Historian Crawford recalls significant events and one-of-a-kind characters that laid the foundation for the San Diego that we know today. Richard Crawford is the Supervisor of Special Collections at the San Diego Public Library. He is the former archives director at the San Diego Historical Society, where he also edited the Journal of San Diego History.
Please join us Oct. 17th, this event is FREE.
On Wednesday evening at 6:30, I’ll be at the Clairemont Library for pictures and discussion about San Diego Yesterday. The library is at 2920 Burgener Blvd.
In Special Collections at the Public Library we come across lots of excellent photographs of early San Diego. Many are unfamiliar. How about the “Pipe Hospital” at 306 C Street in 1915? Or the Grossmont Center Shopping Center when it was just a large excavation? And here’s a nice shot of the submarine S-33 in San Diego harbor.