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Excavating Golden Hill: The Golden Hill Fountain Grotto

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By Jim Miller

For my last Golden Hill piece, I turned to the wisdom of my 9 year-old son Walter, who, in answer to my query about what he liked best about his neighborhood said, “It’s old and grungy, not fake like the suburbs.”  And of all his favorite places in the neighborhood, he chose the Golden Hill Fountain Grotto because, “It’s a ruin.  You can tell it used to be all fancy and now it’s falling apart with graffiti and stuff.  It’s like something they’d find if we became an extinct species.”

Walt also likes the surrounding Golden Hill Gateway Park because, “it’s where the wilderness meets the city.  There are animals that live there and secret paths and canyons that make you forget where you are.”  So off we went to investigate.   [Read more…]

Excavating Golden Hill: Between “South Park” and “the Other Side of the Freeway”

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By Jim Miller

The southern border of Golden Hill is clearly marked by the 94 Freeway that sets it off from what much of the city still refers to as “Southeast San Diego.”

Despite City Council Member George Stevens’s successful effort in 1992 to ban the use of that moniker in any official city business, it lives on in the cultural imagination of San Diego and, for many white suburbanites, stands in for “the bad part of town,” teeming with gangs, crime, and urban squalor.

Indeed, despite years of dropping crime rates and gentrification, the image of the southern part of Greater Golden Hill as a kind of liminal zone between “South Park” and the ‘hood persists in some quarters of San Diego’s culture of fear.

As someone who spent a lot of time visiting friends in the neighborhood back in the day, well before this current wave of gentrification began, I find this to be an amusing but sad phenomenon, as even when Golden Hill was grittier than it is now, it was never rough compared to other big American cities like Los Angeles or Oakland. What distinguishes Golden Hill from other parts of San Diego then is not crime, but race and class, as it is still browner and more working class than downtown, Bankers Hill, or “South Park.”   [Read more…]

America’s Right: Anti-Establishment Conservatism from Goldwater to the Tea Party

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By Jim Miller

UCSD Professor of Communications Robert Horwitz will be reading from his new book America’s Right: Anti-Establishment Conservatism from Goldwater to the Tea Party on Wednesday, May 29th at 7:00 PM at the Grove bookstore at 3010 Juniper Street . Recently, Professor Horwitz was kind enough to do the following interview with me on his current project.

Why do a book on American Conservatism?

Conservatism has arguably been the most important political doctrine in the United States over the last three decades. It has dominated the intellectual debate and largely set the policy agenda, even during years of Democratic electoral control. But this is a particular kind of conservatism, one focused not just on customary topics of conservative concern as government spending and low taxes, but one anxious and angry about the purported homosexual agenda, the hoax of climate change, the rule by experts and elites…   [Read more…]

San Diego’s Left Found a Haven in Golden Hill During the 1970s

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By Jim Miller

In the first part of my interview with Peter Zschiesche, he discussed Golden Hill past and present and described what he calls “the Golden Hill vibe.”   Much of that feeling came out the politics and culture of the late sixties and early seventies.  In this second and final installment of our interview, Peter talks about that time period and outlines some of the key places and players that made Golden Hill a vital, progressive community.   [Read more…]

Welcome to Golden Park Heights: “A Journey of 1000 Miles Begins with a Single Step”

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By Kelly Mayhew and Jim Miller

For those who know progressive politics in San Diego, Carlos and Linda LeGerrette are local legends. Starting with their roles in founding MEChA at Mesa College in the sixties and flowing through their deep involvement with Cesar Chavez and the farmworkers movement to their local community activism and fine work with the Cesar Chavez Service Clubs in our schools, the Legrettes’ great hearts and regard for their neighbors is boundless.

No one has done more for their community than Carlos and Linda LeGerrette, and they are greatly loved and respected by all those who they have touched over the years. It was our absolute pleasure to interview them on their lives, work, and deep roots in a place they jokingly call “Golden Park Heights.”   [Read more…]

Excavating Golden Hill: The Japanese American Christian Church

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By Jim Miller

It’s easy to miss, tucked away at the elbow of 19th and E streets just above Interstate 5: the Japanese American Christian Church in Golden Hill. You’d most likely drive past this humble place of worship on the way up Broadway without noticing it, but if you happened to be on a stroll down E Street looking at the nice old houses, you’d stumble upon it after the bigger homes give way to a series of California bungalows. It’s there before E turns right into 19th. Across the street from the church, a chain-link fence lines the sidewalk above the 5 where the homeless set up camp on a regular basis before they are swept out and relocated only to return again when the police shift their attention elsewhere.

Historically, the church itself is a product of a relocation of a different sort. As my City College colleague, historian Susan Hasegawa informed me, it was originally founded as the Japanese Holiness Church by Christian Nikkei (immigrants and their descendents) in 1930 and located on Newton Avenue. Sponsored by the Oriental Mission Society, the church focused its efforts on outreach to Issei (first generation immigrant) farmers.   [Read more…]

Excavating Golden Hill: The Mansion on the Hill

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By Jim Miller

Coming up Broadway from downtown, it’s the one thing you can’t miss: the Quartermass/Wilde house, the Xanadu of Golden Hill. In the heart of a district of historic homes, this one serves as a monument to the elite status of Golden Hill in the beginning of the last century. One of the biggest of the remaining Victorian mansions in the city, it is also one of San Diego’s most spectacular historic structures.

With its marvelous rococo towers, Doric columns, and stunning domed cupola, the Quartermass/Wilde House looms atop the hill. This gorgeous Queen Anne Victorian mixes in elements of classical revival style as it sits above the street on stone retaining walls amidst a beautifully landscaped yard featuring a huge Star Pine. When one approaches the house from the intersection of Broadway and 24th, the stairway of the unique corner entrance beckons like Gatsby with the promise of unspeakable wonder.

Once inside, one is greeted by an ornately carved stairwell, walls covered with wood paneling and elaborate tapestries, stained glass windows on the landing, a wine cellar, and 8800 square feet of elegant domestic space. Built in 1897 by department store owner Ruben Quartermass, this mansion spoke the status that was the elite enclave of Golden Hill.   [Read more…]

The “Self Appointed Mayor of Golden Hill” Holds Court in the Big Kitchen

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By Jim Miller and Kelly Mayhew

Judy Forman is a Golden Hill institution. Her restaurant, the Big Kitchen Café, has served as a center of community life and activism for many years. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine the neighborhood without her or her place. I first went to the Big Kitchen myself in the eighties when I met with folks involved in the protest movement against Reagan Administration policies in El Salvador and Nicaragua.

More recently, Judy helped Kelly and me out by playing the role of Emma Goldman in the 100-year Anniversary of the San Diego Free Speech Fight when local labor and Occupy folks took over the intersection of 5th and E downtown. Over the years Forman has been active in LGBT politics, helped out with fundraisers for the Center on Policy Initiative’s Students for Economic Justice Internship program, started the New Play Café (a company devoted to helping playwrights develop their work), and offered up her “kitchen,” as she likes to say, to far too many people to name here.

Thus, to make a long story short, Forman has had her hand in much local activism over the past thirty some odd years and the Big Kitchen has always been one of the progressive hubs of San Diego and the heart of the neighborhood. It was our pleasure to interview her for this Golden Hill series.   [Read more…]

The Golden Hill Vibe: Over Forty Years of Grit, Grace, and Gentrification

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By Jim Miller

This week I move from interviewing a recent arrival to Golden Hill to a longtime resident.

Peter Zschiesche and his wife Pam Clark have lived in the Greater Golden Hill community since 1971 and have seen the neighborhood change quite a bit over the years. Peter was involved in anti-war movement politics in the early seventies and later became a leader in the Machinists Union and played a key part in the strikes at NASSCO in the 1980s. He is the Founding Director of the Employee Rights Center, which began in 1999, and he currently serves as Vice President of the Board of Trustees for the San Diego Community College District. Thus most of Peter’s adult life has been spent fighting for social justice in the service of workers, students, immigrants, and others in Golden Hill and San Diego at large.   [Read more…]

The Greater Golden Hill Community Development Corporation: Striving to Emphasize Community over Corporation

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By Jim Miller

When we at the San Diego Free Press decided to turn our focus to the community of Golden Hill, one of the first people I thought it would be good to talk to was my friend, neighbor, union brother, and colleague Judd Curran.  Judd and his wife Victoria both teach at Grossmont College, live in Golden Hill, and sit on the board of the Greater Golden Hill Community Development Corporation Board  and are quite active in the community.  I know Judd and his wife as smart, progressive, compassionate people who want the best for their community.  Thus Judd is uniquely suited to speak to the issues of community identity, gentrification, and the past, present, and future of Golden Hill.    [Read more…]

Golden Hill: “Tis a Picture Worth Seeing”

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By Jim Miller

May is Golden Hill month here at the San Diego Free Press where we will do our collective best to spotlight one of San Diego’s oldest and most dynamic communities. 

A particularly interesting question we will be engaging is how the imagined community of Greater Golden Hill that is shared by many long time residents as well as entities such as the Golden Hill Community Development Corporation conflicts with the official separation of Golden Hill from South Park.

The more narrow designation of Golden Hill’s boundaries sets Interstate 5 as the western border and 34th Street where A, B, and C Streets end as its easternmost limit.  To the south, the Martin Luther King Jr. freeway separates Golden Hill from its neighbors in ShermanHeights and Grant Hill while Russ Boulevard and A Street mark its northern border.   [Read more…]

Labor Bashing and Lincoln Club Love in San Diego Elections

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The Last Refuge for Losers and Scoundrels in Local Democratic Politics in Assembly District 80 and Council District 4

By Jim Miller

In the race to replace Ben Hueso in the 80th it shouldn’t be shocking that Lorena Gonzalez’s opponent has attacked her for being a “union boss” except for the fact that that charge was hurled at her not from a Republican but from fellow Democrat, Steve Castaneda.  Indeed, Mr. Castaneda, who would surely have taken labor’s endorsement if offered, was far too quick to turn to cartoon like right-wing anti-union stereotypes.  This should tell us all we need to know about this variety of Democrat.

Sadly, he is one of a growing number of Democrats who can blithely turn on labor when it is convenient for their own political ambitions or pocket books.   [Read more…]

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