San Diego's park of dreams - Balboa Park - includes related articles on top 10 spots tourists never see and a guide to Balboa

Sunset, June, 1997 by Matthew Jaffe

Romance, grandeur, and a few racy statues live on at San Diego's restored Balboa Park

Balboa Park is a hothouse version of Southern California. In a region where so much else was left to chance, this park was willed into being, conceived and directed by architects and horticulturists - force-fed with an ephemeral greatness in mind.

It is a place that commands and heightens the senses. Whether basking in the broken shadows of a eucalyptus grove, where the fragrance of the trees works its way deep into your lungs, or marveling at El Prado's ornate Churrigueresque facades, you travel a world of sensations in Balboa Park.

The vision it presents is not necessarily a pure and natural California, either architecturally or botanically. Much of it is exotic, imported from those parallel Californias - Australia and the Mediterranean, particularly Spain, whose flag once flew here.

In fact, legend has it that a Spanish diplomat, upon visiting the park in 1915, remarked that although Spain may have had both more beautiful architecture and lovelier gardens, nowhere did the two come together as in Balboa Park. He declared, "You have out-Spained Spain."

With its cultural institutions and numerous lawns for picnicking and Sunday gatherings, Balboa Park does in fact have the aura of a park that you might expect in a much older city, particularly Madrid or Barcelona. It adds a touch of Europe to a city that would otherwise lack a center. The change can be abrupt.

"Coming into the park from the west side, crossing Cabrillo Bridge, is a transforming moment," says art preservation consultant Will Chandler. "You leave the everyday and enter a different realm."

The realm you enter is a living expression of what Southern California longs to be: a subtropical paradise where ideas and vegetation spring from the soil with an incomparable fecundity. To experience it is to be dazzled. And with recent renovation work on landmark buildings, Balboa Park is perhaps in its best shape since the era of San Diego's two great world's fairs.

It's hard to imagine that it was never meant to last.

RESTORING A HEMP-AND-HORSEHAIR ARCADIA

Beneath the facades, behind the statues, and below the curving entablature that give the promenade El Prado a grandeur from another time lies not stalwart marble or granite but stucco, plaster of paris, hemp, and horsehair.

Originally known as City Park, Balboa's 1,400 acres were first set aside in 1868. History has proved that to be a bold stroke, although at the time, in a dusty city of 2,500, it may have seemed ambitious to the point of delusional. The park we know today is the product of horticultural geniuses Kate Sessions, Samuel Parsons, and John Morley, as well as the massive civic effort that went into creating the 1915 Panama-California Exposition, San Diego's attempt to put itself on the map.

The park's transformation began in 1892, when Sessions began operating her innovative nursery on parkland, paying rent in trees - about 100 a year. The trees, of course, would have a limited life span. But so too, it was decided, would most of the exposition's buildings on El Prado. Even with noted architects Bertram Goodhue and Carleton Monroe Winslow as designers, the structures were intended to survive only for the fair's duration.

But like someone waking up and trying to hold onto a wonderful dream, San Diego refused to let go. Through the decades, that dream has endured fire: a civic ballroom burned on the night of a firemen's ball. The dream survived World War II, when the buildings were taken over by the Navy for hospital space, and the lily pond was used for hydrotherapy. And it just barely hung on as time reduced El Prado from the Toledo of an El Greco painting to virtual ruins by the 1960s.

Thanks to the efforts of the Committee of 100 (a citizens group), the city's Parks and Recreation Department, and the love of generations of San Diegans, many buildings live on. More accurately, El Prado's buildings have been reincarnated, rebuilt from the ground up, culminating with the soon-to-re-open House of Hospitality, which will again contain the park's visitor center.

"In many ways this is the emotional center, the heart of San Diego," says Chandler, "and we all want to keep it." Chandler is one of many consultants who have worked with the city to match details to old photos and restore elements that long ago succumbed to insensitive renovations. Exterior plaster ornamentation has been re-created using casts from the original structures, and long-lost details like the stencil ornament in the House of Hospitality have been brought back.

Although the 1915 fair provided the park with a soul, the House of Hospitality is actually being restored to the appearance it had during the 1935 California-Pacific International Exposition to preserve elements from that second milestone fair. One dramatic benefit is the return of the Maxfield Parrish-style lighting created by leading Hollywood technicians to illuminate the building.

Considering El Prado's stage-set quality, it's not surprising to discover that Hollywood often took advantage of the park as a backdrop. A newsreel company worked full time during the 1915 fair, and Mack Sennett and Fatty Arbuckle shot movies here. Douglas Fairbanks Sr. used El Prado for a movie that was set in South America. And in 1941, the park played Xanadu in the opening montage of Citizen Kane.