Del Mar: Village by the Sea

Colonel Jacob Taylor arrived in this stretch of North San Diego coast in the summer of eighteen eighty-five and bought three hundred and thirty-eight acres of mesa land from a homesteader named Enoch Talbert. Taylor saw it clearly: a seaside resort for the wealthy, the most beautiful setting on the California coast. He built a hotel. He platted streets. He called the place Del Mar, meaning by the sea in Spanish.

Then in eighteen eighty-nine, the hotel caught fire before dawn. He promised he would rebuild. He never did. After losing his ranch in a recession, he left California.

The village he abandoned kept going anyway, surviving on its own quiet terms for decades. When sprawling San Diego threatened to swallow it whole, residents voted in nineteen fifty-nine to incorporate. Del Mar became a city on July fifteenth that same year, with five council members and a very firm idea of what it intended to remain.

Residents incorporated partly to keep high-rise buildings off the coast, as had happened in La Jolla. Del Mar had already hosted its first fair in nineteen thirty-six, and in nineteen thirty-seven the racetrack opened after William Quigley approached Bing Crosby, who agreed to back it and recruited Hollywood friends. The Torrey pine, the rarest pine in the United States, grows naturally in only two places, and Del Mar is one of them.