Imagine what the center of town would look like if Spreckels Park was mirrored on the Library side of Orange Avenue and the library wasn’t there
It would be a huge expanse (2 full city blocks) of green, open space, planted with trees, anchoring the heart of our city.
Imagine what it would be like to stand in front of the high school on D Avenue and see all the way to C Avenue, with nothing but grass and trees on Library Park, as well as on Spreckels Park, far in the distance on the other side of Orange Avenue
Beautiful!
The Plat For Coronado
Parks are one of the very first considerations when laying out the plat for a new city. After all, if you’re going to take a big piece of open land and urbanize it, you want to preserve at least a few pieces of open, green space for the coming inhabitantscity dwellersto enjoy presumably forever.
Viewed in that way, many would agree that public parks are the most fundamental of all public assets, and should never be compromised.
Public parks are the planned areas that, unlike every other square inch of a new city, will hopefully never be built upon–their open-space attributes carefully and prudently protected and preserved by responsible present generations for their own benefit, as well as for the benefit of all generations to succeed them.
Virtually all great cities have great parks: New York has Central Park, San Francisco has Golden Gate Park, San Diego has Balboa Park, and although obviously on a smaller scale, here in Coronado we have Spreckels Park.
Some might lament the fact that Spreckels Park isn’t, in reality, two full city blocks as imagined above. Wouldn’t a park of that size, right in the center of townand on both sides of Orange Avenuebe a spectacular thing, and so much more beautiful than just having it only on one side? Surely such a park would be a magnificent central focal point and asset for a great city like Coronado.
Perhaps not remarkably, that is exactly what the city’s fathers had in mind when they laid out the plat for Coronado: a central park of two full city blocks, just as described above, with a “West Plaza” and an “East Plaza.”
And still today, that is exactly what we have! A fact that not many Coronadans know is that Spreckels Park is officially bounded by Sixth and Seventh Streets, and C and D Avenues, with Orange Avenue running through the middle. (The library sits on the West Plaza of Spreckels Park, and the summer band concerts are held on the East Plaza.)
So important was the central park in planning the Coronado of the future that the city’s plat featured it prominently. Of course the main street’s primary purpose would be to take guests directly from the ferry landing to the new hotel that was yet to be built, and certainly it was no mistake that this main street passed right through the middle of the large, central park on the way to that hotel. And what could be more enticing to a prospective visitor to the new seaside resortwho might be enduring a long winter on the East Coastthan the thought of sunshine and fresh oranges in California, inspiring the trees that would be planted on both sides of that wide avenue and thus its name?
Given that Coronado was originally nothing but scrub brush and jackrabbits across its flat expanse, with water in short supply, planting trees was an expensive proposition early on. Besides Orange Avenue, the only other two streets that were considered important enough to be planted with trees, and named after the trees they were planted with, were Palm Avenue and Olive Avenue (which, unlike Orange trees, don’t require much water). And if you look at a map of Coronado today you will see that these two streetslaid out to be unusually wide given their importancelead directly to and from our city’s 2-city-block central park.
(It’s interesting to note that, while Orange Avenue led directly to the Hotel and its prime property fronting on both the ocean and Glorietta Bay, Orange Avenue was also meant to lead travelers and future residents to Coronado’s public beach. This was accomplished by forking Orange just after Tenth Street, the easterly portion of the fork leading directly to the Hotel property, and the westerly portion leading directly to the middle of the public beach (which we now know as Central Beach). That the westerly portion of the fork was given equal importance to the easterly portion is evidenced by its enormous and equal width, which remains the same as Orange Avenue even today, and wider than any other street in town. Current residents will recognize this street as Isabella Avenue. Further evidence of Isabella’s planned importance as a street equal to Orange is obvious by the name given it: Isabella was the wife of resort visionary and Hotel del Coronado builder Elisha Babcock.)
The Plight of the West Plaza
So what happened to the West Plaza of the central park?
As you might imagine, the relatively wealthy people who came to the Hotel del came to relax. They typically came not just to vacation at the hotel, but to actually live there, for months at a time. And of course one of their major pastimes–and really for many people before TV and video–was reading.
In the early days Coronado had a number of Reading Rooms around town and at some point after John D. Spreckels bought the Hotel, he was approached with the idea of a public library building. Clearly Coronado needed one, and Mr. Spreckels was happy to oblige.
Given the resources of its donor, the new building was of course going to be beautiful, although not particularly largeas was the custom of the day. In reality it wasn’t going to be much more than a large reading room in size, but the question was where to put it? Mr. Spreckels made the decision himself, and it was an obvious one: What could be better than a beautiful reading room right in the middle of the city’s beautiful, green, tree-laden central park? Mr. Spreckels presented Coronado’s residents with the beautiful little library on the “West Plaza Park” in 1909, and it reportedly became a great source of pride in the community, its architecture and construction resembling Mr. Spreckels’ private residence.
Presumably at some point after that, the city’s central park was renamed Spreckels Park, no doubt to honor Spreckels’ donation of the library placed there.
The rest is history. In the years that followed the library was expanded, the first time being 26 years later in 1935, then again sometime in the late 50s, again in 1974, and most recently in 2005, each time taking more and more open space away from the city’s central park (“Spreckels Park”) and what it was once envisioned to be.
(And probably, as each library expansion took more and more park space out, the West Plaza of Spreckels Park became less and less park-like, especially in comparison to the East Plaza. It follows then that gradually, as the generations turned over and people forgot the history, the West Plaza completely lost its identity as part of Spreckels Park, and the term came to refer only to the East Plaza which is, of course, technically (and maybe morally) incorrect.)
Why wasn’t the open space in the West Plaza of Spreckels Park more carefully safeguarded? Certainly no one felt it was threatened when, in 1935, someone presumably proposed keeping the grass in one corner of the park in extra-good condition so it could be used by a few lawn bowlers. Nothing wrong with that.
And somewhere along the line, perhaps in the late 50s or early 60s, some avid tennis players successfully lobbied for a couple of tennis courts on the corner near the high school. That might have been easily justified on the basis that tennis was big and growing in Coronado–the Hotel del being a prestigious and recognized center for the sport worldwide at the time–but not everyone could afford to be a member of its Beach and Tennis Club.
And you can imagine why, in the mid 30s, a little Spanish-style maintenance building was erected because obviously, city workers wanted to do a good job of maintaining the city’s primary park and they probably got tired of hauling the equipment back and forth over and over again. Probably when the maintenance equipment was consolidated elsewhere (a Public Works yard?), that must have been the time that the little Spanish-style building was turned over to the Recreation Department, which also makes sense. They might well have been running recreation programs for kids in the park at the time.
In the early 70s a couple of women who worked for the Recreation Department were known to have had desk space there, and a couple of kids who were hired by the Public Works Department to keep Orange Avenue clean kept their trash buckets, orange safety vests, and trash-picker-uppers there. Ultimately, when the Recreation Department women moved out, presumably that was when some seniors were granted permission to use the little building to meet and play cards. And certainly there was nothing wrong with that either.
But in the late 70s and early 80s, there were still many “old Coronadans” who knew the history of what was once the West Plaza Park and the little library that was built there. Many within this group (who in many ways deserve the credit for creating the Coronado we now enjoy) felt that the library should be the only structure on the West Plaza, just as it was in 1909 but bigger, of course.
They felt that the tennis courts and little Spanish-style maintenance building should be planned for removal, and the park restored as much as possible to its original open-space intent, with the singular exception of the library, which obviously was not practical to move or reduce in size.
The Seniors’ use of the little Spanish-style building at the time was viewed as temporary; certainly a better place could be found for them when the new community center was built, if necessary, and they knew a new community center was coming.
Their intent was reflected in the City’s General Plan, which received much attention community-wide in the late 70s and 80s, and does not even today include any specific plan for enlarging or rebuilding the Senior Center on its present location. This was not an oversight or a mistake, but a conscious decision by intelligent people who loved Coronado, knew its history, and had its residents’ best interests at heart.
The Modern Era
As we all know, granting a privilege on a regular basis often turns it into what is perceived as a right over time.
In the case of the West Plaza of Spreckels Park, the privileges granted to the tennis players, the lawn bowlers, and the seniors to use the land they now exclusively occupy have become their rightsnot unlike squatters’ rights. The true and rightful owner of the land is the public at large, and many would agree that it is wrong to carve up and turn over such valuable propertythat was planned and meant to be the city’s central, magnificent, public parkto three special-interest groups that comprise such an extremely small proportion of Coronado’s overall population.
This is a fact that was known to most of the city’s last real generation of citizen caretakers, who despite all of the good things they did, failed to correct the situation before their term of responsibility ended. Public parks are the most fundamental of all public assets and must be protected from overbuilding by every generation–lest they be lost forever.
The current generation of caretakers, no doubt largely unaware of the situation, has perhaps inadvertently made it increasingly permanent. They have replaced the lawn bowling area of the park with a permanent and very expensive “world class artificial green,” apparently so valuable it has to include an ugly and uninviting spiked metal fence entirely around its perimeter to keep the public away.
And the tennis courts, instead of being removed, have been shrouded in huge green privacy screens, making them appear not unlike big, ugly, windowless green buildings, completely occupying the corner they sit upon, of what was once a beautiful park.
And today we are on the precipice of building a new Senior Center, taking the progressive destruction of the West Plaza of Spreckels Park one giant and permanent step forward.
It is the thesis of this article that, due to the expense of this new building, it will be the coup de gras for the West Plaza Parkthe final death blowbecause there will be no turning back, and no recovery ever of the open, green, public space that this park was meant to have, and that made it so beautiful. In catering to the three special-interest groups mentioned above, our politicians past and present have let us down; the silent majority public is the loser, and the vocal minority is the winner.
Elisha and his wife Isabella, Hampton and his wife Adella, and even John D. Spreckels are no doubt turning over in their graves, wondering how modern people (and governments) could be so inept at protecting the things that are so obviously the most valuable to the public at large, and that have been carefully planned, built, cared for, and turned over for their enjoyment.
But of course as modern people we know the answer(s):
– Often people don’t recognize the value of a thing they have inherited and always taken for granted until it is gone–parks included.
– Politicians, even in Coronado, can’t resist the pressures of special interest groups and vocal minorities who relentlessly hammer away at them.
– Property and Transient Occupancy taxes have provided our local politicians with so much money to spend that they can’t resist the temptation to build build build.
– When all of the most convenient building space is used up, it’s natural to turn to and build upon the readily available open space in the public’s parks, forever destroying them in the process.
No serious attempt has known to have been made to explore other locations for a new senior center, but creative minds might be able to generate some other candidates if they were given the opportunity.
One look at the map of Coronado will show a tremendous amount of acreage devoted to the municipal golf course–acreage that dwarfs the tiny West Plaza Park by comparison.
It seems entirely possible that, while the golfers will certainly find reasons why it can’t work, creative thinking might nevertheless find a good solution.
One possibility is in the vicinity of the current golf clubhouse. There are already two buildings there with apparent room for a third, and the parking lot could probably be expanded a little if necessary. Many seniors are golfers, so the opportunity for cooperation between the two groups shouldn’t be a problem. Of course the setting is beautiful and, while it is on one side of town, it is still relatively centrally located, and more centrally located than the Community Center (whose location people have seemed to accept). The excellent catering and restaurant services already located at the golf clubhouse might also be very much appreciated by seniors both for occasional regular meals in small groups, as well as for larger events.
Related Post: Coronado Planning to Expand Senior Center
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This opinion piece, written by Kevin Reilly, was original published by Coronado CAN! in their online publication, The Residential Reporter. To see the original article, click here. It reflects only the opinion of the author and not the Coronado Community Association of Neighbors – which never takes a position on any issue.
This article is reprinted by permission as part of a collaboration between Coronado CAN! and eCoronado.com to enable residents to stay more informed about civic issues, with the ultimate goal of better protecting and preserving Coronado’s small town character and charm.
To read more articles like this one or learn more about this non-profit, non-partisan, all-volunteer organization, visit the Coronado CAN! website.
Coronado CAN! Mission Statement:
Coronado CAN! works to make it easier for registered voters and residents in the 92118 zip code to be well informed about issues that are of interest to them, to speak for themselves both individually and collectively with the strongest possible voice, and to enhance the communication government depends upon to be able to most effectively serve their electorate, the taxpayers, and the community as a whole. Learn more about Coronado CAN!
