San Diego: Harbor Frontier

Ships, missions, old town plazas, and naval reinvention on the border coast

Six places on the bay where California began and kept reinventing itself: the floating fleet on the Embarcadero, the 1863 iron barque that survived a mutiny to become the world's oldest active sailing ship, the 1827 adobe sold to tourists as a novel's wedding scene, the original civilian town a sailor sketched in 1835, the hill where Portola planted the first European settlement on the Pacific coast in 1769, and the carrier that never missed a war from 1945 to Desert Storm.

Itinerary

1. Maritime Museum of San Diego — Since 1948 the museum has gathered a floating timeline along the Embarcadero: the 1898 ferry Berkeley, the 1904 steam yacht Medea that served in both world wars, a Cold War submarine, and full-scale replicas including San Salvador -- the ship Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo sailed into San Diego Bay in 1542, rebuilt in public view. No building-bound museum can match the creak of timbers and the deck rolling underfoot.
2. Star of India — She left Liverpool in 1864 as Euterpe -- named for the Greek muse of music -- and within days had collided with an unlit brig and watched her crew mutiny into a Welsh gaol. She went on to circle the globe twenty-one times in the New Zealand emigrant trade, haul Alaska salmon as a barque, and rot for decades in San Diego before sailing again in 1976. Her hull is nearly 100% original, making her the oldest ship in the world still sailing regularly.
3. Casa de Estudillo — Begun in 1827 by a presidio commander's family, this courtyard adobe was the grandest private home in Mexican California -- then a roofless ruin by the late 1800s. John Spreckels rebuilt it early in the next century and promoters, riding the craze for Helen Hunt Jackson's 1884 novel, rebranded the reconstruction 'Ramona's Marriage Place,' selling visitors the setting of a fictional romance over the real family that built it.
4. What San Diego Looked Like Before It Became San Diego — Richard Henry Dana Jr. was nineteen when he first saw Old Town from the deck of a hide-trading ship in 1835, and wrote it into Two Years Before the Mast: a few hundred people in adobe buildings at the far edge of Mexican California. The state park preserves the years 1820 to 1870 -- Spanish rule, Mexican ranchos, and American annexation compressed onto a small slope above the bay, with five original adobes still standing through all of it.
5. The Hill That Started California — On May 14, 1769, Gaspar de Portola established the Presidio of San Diego on this hill -- the first permanent European settlement on what would become the American Pacific coast. The garrison guarded Junipero Serra's nearby mission, endured the 1775 Kumeyaay uprising that killed Father Luis Jayme, and was abandoned by 1835. George Marston bought the hill in 1907 and crowned it in 1929 with the Spanish Colonial Revival Serra Museum.
6. USS Midway Museum — Commissioned days after Japan's surrender in 1945, USS Midway was the largest ship in the world -- too wide for the Panama Canal -- and the only carrier to serve the entire Cold War, from Pacific vigilance through Vietnam to launching strikes in Desert Storm before decommissioning in 1992. After 47 years and 200,000 sailors, she sits at Navy Pier as the most visited naval warship museum in America, her flight deck still hosting Navy ceremonies and 9/11 remembrances.