A mix of modern commercial architecture and turn-of-the-century brick build­ings in varying stages of renovation. Downtown San Diego is an interesting blend of new and old and also reveals the city’s social contrasts, sharp-suited bankers and the destitute, both likely to be spotted along Broadway, its busy main drag (avoid it at night).

The easily-walked Gaslamp District, 16 short blocks of restored buildings south of Broadway between 4th and 6th Avenues, is the one section of Downtown which merits a detailed exploration.

Most of the Gaslamp District’s prettiest buildings are redbrick affairs adorned with Intricate bas reliefs and topped by mysterious-looking towers which arose during the early years of the 20thC, as San Diego flourished at its new bay-side location. (Its former site, now Old Town State Historic Park, was abandoned in the late 1800s.)

Unusually for a major U.S. city, the San Diego authorities have actively encouraged the preservation and development of Downtown, and stimu­lated its leisure-time activity with Horton Plaza, between E and G Streets and 1st and 4th Avenues. One of California’s few shopping malls not sited in deepest suburbia, Horton Plaza – completed in 1985 – is designed in a winning pseudo-Mediterranean style, with six open-air levels which invite window-shopping and people-watching.

Just across Kettner Boulevard beside the San Diego trolley terminal, the Museum of Contemporary Art (http://www.mcasd.org)a sister to that in La Jolla) provides a sympathetically light and airy setting for mostly temporary exhibitions featuring artists of local and international renown.
Detour – Villa Montezuma

In a once-fashionable, now depressed area about 3.6 km east of Downtown, Villa Montezuma is an impressively restored affluent Victorian house which reveals some fascinating details about its original occupant, Jesse Shepard. A cultured Englishman, interested in music, literature and the arts, and with an abiding interest in spiritualism, Shepard was brought to San Diego with the brief to raise the city’s cultural tone. Despite entertaining the city’s well-to-do with musical séances, Shepard eventually died broke in Los Angeles. The San Diego Historical Society keep the villa in fine condition and dispense informative snippets on Shepard and on 1880s San Diego. The villa is located at 1925 K Street.