The San Diego Unified Port District has announced five possible plans for developing a 3.2-acre park encompassing the historic Old Police Headquarters on the southwest corner of Pacific Highway and Market Street/Harbor Drive. The port’s redevelopment plan for the South Embarcadero, which runs along San Diego Bay from the Convention Center to Seaport Village, budgets a $3.8 million park on the 4.2-acre site.

The 1939 Spanish Revival headquarters was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1998. The listing is the 110,000-square-foot courtyard building’s ticket to preservation, and it is one of two Downtown structures Save Our Heritage Organisation is concerned with saving. (The other is Broadway’s 80-year-old Hotel San Diego, proposed by the federal General Services Administration to be demolished for a $185 million U.S. Courthouse addition.)

But there’s more history to the old cop shop site than its WPA-era Spanish Revival architecture — and the 20 percent investment tax credit for its preservation, which varies among the five plans.

There’s a singular matter of land use: whether it’s hallowed ground as the resting place of Spanish sailors.

Punta de los Muertos, Point of the Dead, was a sand spit that jutted into San Diego Bay from the broad tidal flats (that today would be near the intersection of Pacific Highway and Harbor Drive), the place where William Heath Davis built San Diego’s first wharf a century and a half ago. (It began to disintegrate within a couple years and finally met its end a dozen years later as firewood for the small Army barracks on the bay.)

The point’s story goes back even earlier. For years before and after the short-lived wharf, it was this spit where boats that came into San Diego’s shallow harbor landed their passengers, cargo and, one day in the 1700s, sailors from a Spanish expedition who died of scurvy. (Alonzo E. Horton, who founded New Town — Downtown — San Diego, arrived on the same spit in 1867.) Today, the point is surrounded by filled land.

But exactly where were the sailors’ bodies buried?

Before 1850, the mean high-tide line paralleled Pacific Highway and Harbor Drive. Landfill, decades of harbor dredging, and even silt dumped into the bay whenever the San Diego River flooded have changed the shoreline over time.

During one 19th century flood, the river even scoured out an Old Town burial ground. Bodies were buried and reburied. One example was the bodies of soldiers who died at the Mexican War Battle of San Pasqual, which were removed from the battlefield shortly after and reinterred in Old Town.

The Port District’s newest commissioner, Peter Q. Davis, wants to know what happened to the bodies of Punta de los Muertos. “The experts claim it was common knowledge that a graveyard existed at the Presidio,” Davis says. “But I don’t see that as eliminating the possibility of an earlier one at Deadman’s Point.”

The experts are historical attorney Marie Burke Lia and Ray Brandes, former editor of the San Diego Historical Society’s Journal of San Diego History, who completed the cultural resources assessment of the South Embarcadero in 1997. Their report says, “The exact location of the burial site has never been determined, although the most plausible site of La Punta de los Muertos is at the foot of Presidio Hill in Old Town.” They also report the dead sailors were from the Spanish expedition of 1769.

But Elizabeth C. McPhail in her San Diego Historical Society book, “The Story of New San Diego and of Its Founder, Alonzo E. Horton,” writes, “It (the point) had acquired its grisly name when a Spanish fleet in 1782 had stopped to bury its dead in this sand spit before continuing on to land near Old Town.”

And in “The Silver Dons” volume of “The History of San Diego,” Richard F. Pourade describes the point as “where the Spanish Expedition of 1782 buried those who had died of scurvy. The old point lies under filled land at the intersection of Pacific Highway and Market Street.”

That was 13 years after Junipero Serra and Gaspar de Portola set up California’s first mission in San Diego.

This 1839 map of San Diego shows a harbor quite different than today’s. The sharp point where Downtown would be is Punta de los Muertos. (map/‘History of the Silver Dons.’)

The year aside, Bruce Coons, executive director of SOHO, says the burial ground is not the old police headquarters. “It’s not the site of the burial by any stretch of the imagination,” he says. “If you look at the old Pantoja map (drawn by Juan Pantoja in 1782), the point is two blocks away to the northeast near Pantoja Park” (between F and G streets).

Turning graves into parks is not new for the city. A 19th century cemetery in Mission Hills today is Pioneer Park, with a tot lot in one corner — and the collected gravestones in another.

As for the buildings of the old police headquarters, architectural historian Milford Wayne Donaldson did the feasibility study for the port that suggests park alternatives for the site including renovation of the historic structures. Last year, he completed historic guidelines for the Corky McMillin Cos.’ Liberty Station, where the Spanish Colonial buildings of the former Naval Training Center were added to the National Register of Historic Places.

Besides the original central courtyard building, the headquarters also includes a garage, assembly building and additions. Some park proposals call for demolition of those portions for the park, promenade and perhaps a farmers market.

Another fitting use for a portion of the historic building might be as the site for the San Diego Police Historical Association Museum, suggests Robert M. Witty, executive director of the San Diego Historical Society. “We’re all in favor of preservation of important buildings,” he declares.