Alonzo Horton's Two-Hundred-Sixty-Five-Dollar City

Everything you can see from here, the hotels, the convention center, the waterfront towers, the Gaslamp Quarter's Victorian facades, all of it sits on land that a San Francisco furniture dealer bought for two hundred sixty-five dollars.

His name was Alonzo Horton. In May of eighteen sixty-seven, he stepped off a steamer from San Francisco, walked to a public land auction, and paid two hundred sixty-five dollars for nine hundred sixty acres of empty mesa above the bay. That works out to roughly twenty-seven cents an acre. He had never been to San Diego before that morning. He walked the land after the auction, decided on the spot that this was where the city would be built, and went to work.

The existing settlement, two miles north at Old Town, was considered the real San Diego. Horton's purchase was dismissed as worthless desert scrub. He platted it anyway, calling it Horton's Addition, and recorded the subdivision in eighteen sixty-eight. By eighteen seventy-two, his addition had eclipsed Old Town as the commercial center of San Diego. He sold lots for hundreds of dollars each. He eventually developed a personal fortune from land he bought for a fraction of a cent per square foot.

History gave him the title Father of San Diego. The title carries all the distortions that such titles usually carry: the actual labor of building what Horton platted was performed by Chinese, Mexican, Kumeyaay, and African American workers whose names are not in the founding ledger. What Horton contributed was the audacity of the bet, the willingness to see a future on an empty mesa and to spend two hundred sixty-five dollars on his conviction.

Stand anywhere in downtown San Diego and you are standing on that bet. It paid off.