Mount Soledad and the Bishop's School: The Village Above and Below

Rising over La Jolla is Mount Soledad, and from its summit, some eight hundred twenty feet up, you can see the Pacific, downtown San Diego, Coronado, and on a clear day all the way to Mexico. At the top stands a memorial that took decades to settle. Three different crosses have crowned this hill.

The first, a simple wooden one, went up in nineteen thirteen and was stolen. A second fell in a nineteen fifty-two windstorm. The current concrete cross, about twenty-nine feet tall, was dedicated in nineteen fifty-four in memory of the Korean War dead.

Because it stood on public land, it drew a lawsuit in nineteen eighty-nine that dragged on for nearly thirty years, until the land immediately around it was transferred to a veterans memorial association and the case was declared moot in twenty sixteen. Today the site honors more than ten thousand veterans with individual plaques. Down in the village below sits another Scripps legacy, the Bishop's School, founded in nineteen oh nine by Ellen Browning Scripps and her half-sister Virginia.

Its earliest buildings were designed by Irving Gill, a pioneer of modern American architecture, whose clean white forms still shape the look of La Jolla today.