A quarter of a century ago, then Mayor Pete Wilson demonstrated his commitment to fighting Downtown blight by taking his battle to the streets. Reporters were invited to accompany him into the dreary No Man’s Land south of Broadway. In those pre-Horton Plaza, pre-convention center, pre-cool Gaslamp Quarter days, the area was a seedy world rife with dirty bookstores, X-rated theaters and prostitutes. Undaunted, the mayor, looking disgusted as he strode the littered streets in an impeccably tailored business suit, marched the reporters into a peep show, shining the media spotlight on the startled patrons. The goal: to drum up public support for tough new adult business regulations — and eventually to reclaim this Downtown turf for a better class of shoppers, workers, residents and visitors. He got his way.

Even the most optimistic Downtown enthusiasts could not imagine how thoroughly transformed Downtown would become. But renewal officials emphasize that success was not certain. In the beginning were only ideas and promises. Redevelopment took vision and determination strong enough to overcome stumbling blocks as bad or worse than the presence of undesirable businesses in the Gaslamp. Over the years, redevelopers faced recessions, lawsuits, construction delays, Proposition 13 tax cuts, the voter rejection of a convention center proposal and skeptical naysayers. The redevelopment juggernaut slowed occasionally, but never halted. “Through the recession and everything else, we kept working on the big picture,” recalls Pam Hamilton, senior vice president of the Centre City Development Corp., the city’s renewal arm.

In this redevelopment crusade, Wilson emerged as the most visible and vocal leader. But behind him stretched a determined phalanx of true believers, including planners, politicians, renewal officials, private developers, architects and business people who lobbied for redevelopment projects, took risks and made individual sacrifices. Some were Downtowners like Alice Zukor, owner of Broadway Florist, with a natural interest in seeing the Centre City thrive again. Others were unlikely renewal luminaries, among them Horton Plaza developer Ernest Hahn, who made his fortunes building suburban shopping malls many blamed for sucking the vitality out of the urban core.

Nearly 50 Years Ago, Max

One of the original renewal pioneers was Max Schmidt, who began working for the city in 1955 and was there to witness the suburban exodus that left dying downtowns in San Diego and many other American cities. In 1959, Schmidt was named to a four-person Centre City team established by San Diego’s planning director Harry Haelsig to help revitalize the urban core. Concerned with suburban flight, Haelsig sequestered his team in the tower of the Civic Center (now the County Administration Center) with the mission to focus solely on Downtown. Schmidt’s first task was to come up with a residential plan for Harborview, which later became the popular Little Italy neighborhood.

During the 1960s, the key Downtown redevelopment projects began to take shape. Schmidt, in charge of the city’s community plans, drafted a plan for the Centre City that included three redevelopment districts: Marina, Columbia and Horton Plaza.

Initially, Schmidt says he hoped for a redevelopment district that would encompass the entire Downtown. But the larger area was nixed by City Councilmen Jim Ellis and Lee Hubbard. Only later, in 1992, would the City Council create an expanded 1,200-acre redevelopment area stretching across the blighted eastern side of the city.

As Schmidt worked on city planning through the 1960s, Downtown business owners took heart. San Diegans Inc. promoted redevelopment by encouraging business owners and San Diego officials to tour other cities, among them Atlanta and Baltimore, where urban renewal had taken root successfully.

After touring cities that had refurbished their own buildings, Downtown property owners Tom and Dorothy Hom petitioned Schmidt to create a four-block historic district on Fifth Avenue between Broadway and Market Street. Schmidt liked the idea but suggested extending the future Gaslamp Quarter historic district to the railroad tracks and adding a section of Fourth Avenue. “The Homs were the principals in mobilizing the property owners in support of the district,” recalls Schmidt. “Dorothy particularly was an optimistic, can-do kind of person, very infectious, very enthusiastic about everything.”

In the early 1970s, Schmidt grew eager to change ideas into reality. Despite an adopted plan, funding for redevelopment remained a low priority for the city government. He began to look at Atlanta, a city that had created an independent redevelopment agency to get around the foot-dragging bureaucracy. Schmidt had help from Roy Potter of San Diegans Inc., who was influential in pushing for San Diego to have a separate renewal agency. The concept was written into the Centre City redevelopment plan.

The movement gained political clout and energy when Wilson, who campaigned in support of growth management and Downtown revitalization, was elected mayor in 1972. Three years later, the Centre City Development Corp. was created, and Schmidt moved from City Hall to the new CCDC. With a plan in place, including the concept of a new Downtown shopping center, the stage was set for action. “My previous experience was you can plan, but you don’t have the power to implement,” says Schmidt. “What good are words without actions? I wanted to be part of something like CCDC, which would have the taxing power, the financing power and the planning power.”

Donna Alm, who during her long redevelopment career worked for Wilson, CCDC and the waterfront convention center, says CCDC faced obstacles in the early years but was confident it could make its plans work. It nearly always enjoyed strong backing from City Hall and the Downtown groups, San Diegans Inc. and the Centre City Association. “We had a vision of what San Diego could become,” says Alm, CCDC’s vice president of marketing and communication. “We had a tool in redevelopment law. We had a committed community.”

On The Way To Breakthroughs

In the late 1970s, CCDC gained momentum. Its board included enthusiastic redevelopment supporters, among them Dean Dunphy and Peter Q. Davis. Gerald Trimble was hired away from Pasadena’s renewal program to become the San Diego CCDC’s executive vice president. “I would say he (Trimble) was very straight, very aggressive, very forward,” recalls Schmidt. “He was not always likable, but his tenacity was one of the reasons for the early success of Downtown redevelopment. We made a good team. He was business-oriented, and I was environmentally oriented.”

Schmidt’s environmental and historic bents sometimes ran counter to the wishes of developers, but they had an impact on the aesthetics of the future Downtown. Along with city planner Mike Stepner, he fought relentlessly to prevent historic buildings from being leveled to make way for big new high-rises in the Gaslamp. He also proposed the linear park, Martin Luther King Promenade, that beautified unsightly railroad tracks and helped connect the waterfront convention center with the rest of Downtown.

The 1980s proved to be the breakthrough years, in which all three major projects — the first Marina condominium projects, Horton Plaza shopping center and a new waterfront convention center — were built. But all faced pitfalls that could have doomed them. When Pam Hamilton came to CCDC in 1982 after working for the city of La Mesa, she found that the Park Row and Marina Park condominium projects in the Marina District had hit the market at exactly the wrong time. Because mortgage rates had soared to a painful 18 percent, CCDC subsidized mortgages to 13 5/8 percent, considered a bargain at the time. Sales were sluggish. But the projects around Pantoja Park would later serve as a model for the residential housing boom that today is turning Downtown San Diego into a true 24-hour community.

Never Forget Hahn’s $15 Million

The same year, Ernest Hahn’s Horton Plaza shopping center proposal was in the midst of a funding crisis. CCDC lacked the $15 million to build the crucial parking structure that ultimately made the center a success. The stumbling block arose at a time when Hahn was selling his properties, including Horton Plaza, to Trizec. Hahn, who was supporting Wilson’s Senate race that year, was determined that Horton Plaza would not become an embarrassment to his candidate, says Hamilton. Hahn agreed to put up the $15 million out of his own pocket, purchasing CCDC’s private placement bonds on the uncertain premise he would be repaid out of the project’s future tax revenues. “ He wanted the project to happen so badly,” Hamilton recalls. “He moved heaven and earth to make this happen.”

The convention center also got off to a rough start when in May 1981, the city’s voters rejected the proposal to build it in the Columbia District. After Wilson won his Senate bid, it was left to his successor, Roger Hedgecock, to pick up the convention center gauntlet. Hedgecock led the move to build it on port-owned waterfront property and persuaded city voters to approve the project. The landmark convention center opened in 1989.

Meanwhile, private entrepreneurs made contributions to the emerging Downtown redevelopment mosaic. One of the earliest, most encouraging projects was the renovation of a warehouse for the Old Spaghetti Factory, a chain of restaurants that offered inexpensive meals. Ron Oliver, a Downtown advocate who was the construction foreman for the restaurant, wondered whether customers would venture into a decayed urban neighborhood. He got his answer the day the restaurant opened in 1974. When he quit work that day and exited the restaurant, he recalls, he couldn’t believe his eyes. “It was 4 or 4:15, and there were people standing in line,” he says. “They had a 45-minute to two-hour wait, and it wasn’t just on the weekends. It was every night.”

Pasta Proves Perfect

With the Old Spaghetti Factory proving that people would return to Downtown, other developers looked for opportunities in the historic district. One of the most successful was Bud Fischer, who completed his first historic renovation in 1979, restoring the Backesto Building at Fifth Avenue and Market Street. “What happened is that I actually got hooked at the Backesto Building, and I enjoyed it,” says Fischer. “Before, I had done some industrial and some shopping centers, and those weren’t at all fun. This was fun ... so I somehow managed to stay locked in down here in this part of town. I’m comfortable here.”

Fischer again broke new ground when he teamed up with developer Christopher Mortenson to build the Baltic Inn. A remarkably stylish single room occupancy hotel, it was the first of its kind to be built in the United States in half a century. It garnered national attention.

In the late 1980s, Fischer turned his attention to converting old buildings into loft apartments and convinced the city to pass an ordinance making it possible. The first was a small 12-unit complex at Eighth Avenue and J Street, followed by another at Fifth and Market and the 85-unit Pioneer Lofts at Fourth Avenue and J Street. Altogether, Fischer has created 250 Downtown lofts. “We found a good demand,” he says. “And they are still very popular.”

While Fischer focused on affordable rental projects, developer Walter Smyk was among the first to envision Downtown as a desirable address for the wealthy — a hunch that proved correct a few years later. He built the Meridian luxury condominium tower in the late 1980s and an upscale shopping center, the Paladion, which floundered in the mushy economy of the early 1990s. A center that once housed Cartier and Tiffany’s now is occupied by a service business, American Specialty Health.

A more practical housing solution for that slower era was offered by Jonathan Segal, who specialized in affordable Downtown condos with dramatic high ceilings, city views and a sophisticated urban design. Hamilton says CCDC particularly welcomed Segal’s small projects, built on small parcels of land, because they could be financed even during the recession a decade ago. At the time, progress on many of the largest proposed Downtown construction projects had come to a halt.

Hamilton viewed that recession as only a temporary setback in residential construction. In the mid 1990s, she found out how right she was. She put out a nationwide request for housing proposals on the 11 available parcels in the Marina District, the same area where CCDC had gotten developers to build the first units. To renewal officials’ surprise, nearly 40 proposals came back. “All of a sudden there was a stampede,” Hamilton says.

Led by Canadian builders Nat Bosa (Bosa Development Corp.) and Keith Fernandez (Intracorp), the housing projects spilled into other sectors of Downtown. All of Little Italy seemingly was instantly under construction. Cortez Hill, where Peter Janopaul and Anthony Block accomplished the impossible and restored the venerable El Cortez, is now a trendy address.

A Statue Well Deserved

Today, Downtown advocates look with satisfaction at the results of 28 years of private and public partnership under the aegis of CCDC. Horton Plaza is so successful that a bronze statue of its developer, Ernest Hahn, was unveiled at its entrance last month, across from a bronze of Alonzo Horton, the original Downtown developer. The Gaslamp preserved its architectural heritage and managed to become an entertainment magnet featuring dozens of trendy restaurants and clubs. The waterfront convention center, expanded in the last decade, ranks as one of the most popular in the world. Thousands of expensive high-rise condominiums and apartments have been completed with more under construction and in final planning.

Thanks to the vision and huge financial risk of the Padres’ John Moores, the new Downtown ballpark — not part of the original redevelopment plan — provided a bonus not anticipated in the early redevelopment efforts. Petco Park is serving as a catalyst for redeveloping the East Village. Fischer notes that he “wasn’t crazy” about having two of his properties condemned to make way for the ballpark, but nevertheless he views it as a sacrifice for a higher cause. “It (the ballpark) is becoming a big engine for East Village,” says Fischer, who is currently developing a 393-unit affordable housing project on Broadway. “It probably would have taken 20 years to clean up East Village (without the ballpark), and now it probably will happen in five years.”

But CCDC, now under the direction of Peter Hall, is not resting on its laurels. The agency is still making plans. Hamilton sees the need for parks and amenities to beautify the urban landscape. The long-planned library is still on the drawing board. Alm notes that the 1992 plan set a goal of having 150,000 jobs Downtown and 50,000 residents. At present, there are about 85,000 Downtown workers and 15,000 residents, with condo construction expected to add another 10,000 in the near future. “We’re not even halfway to the goal,” she notes.

On the accomplishments of those pioneers, this latest generation of visionary heroes is moving the ball. San Diego is waiting to see who is next — and who might deserve that next statue.