Category:San Diego

History
Alta California became part of the United States in 1848 following the U.S. victory in the Mexican–American War and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, with the US-Mexican border established just south of the town. The resident "Californios" became American citizens with full voting rights. California was admitted to the Union as a state in 1850. San Diego, still little more than a village, was incorporated on March 27 as a city and was named the county seat of the newly established San Diego County. The United States Census reported the population of the town as 650 in 1850 and 731 in 1860.

San Diego promptly got into financial trouble due to overspending on a poorly designed jail. In 1852 the state repealed the city charter, in effect declaring the city bankrupt, and installed a state-controlled three-member board of trustees to manage San Diego. The trustees stayed in control until 1887, when a mayor-council form of government was installed under a new city charter.

Although some 10,000 men stopped briefly in San Diego on their way to the San Francisco gold fields, few stayed, and San Diego remained sparsely settled during much of the 1850s. Despite its small population, this decade brought investors who saw the potential of San Diego. They bought lots, and built rough houses and shops. One, William Heath Davis, spent $60,000 constructing a wharf near the property he had purchased near the foot of today's Market Street. Remembered as "Davis' Folly", it was completed by August 1851, but was seldom used. In 1853, the steamer Los Angeles collided with the wharf. The damage was never repaired. Unused and poorly built, the damage was not worth fixing. Davis tried unsuccessfully to sell it. Finally, in 1862, the Army destroyed it, using timbers for firewood.

The failure of the wharf was only one indication of depressed times. Houses were dismantled and shipped to more promising settlements. By 1860, many of the enterprises that had been established during the early 1850s had closed. The few businesses that survived suffered from water shortages, high costs of shipping, and a declining population. Davis, however, kept trying. He laid out the grid system the streets, speculated in land in the business district, and constructed hotels and stores. When he ran out of money, leadership in boosterism passed to Alonzo Horton.

The town seemed rundown in 1867 when Horton arrived, but he could only see glittering opportunity: "I have been nearly all over the world and it seemed to me to be the best spot for building a city I ever saw." He was convinced that the town needed a location nearer the water to improve trade. Within a month of his arrival, he had purchased more than 900 acres of today's downtown for a total of $265, an average of 27.5 cents an acre. He began promoting San Diego by enticing entrepreneurs and residents. He built a wharf and began to promote development there. The area was referred to as New Town or the Horton Addition. Despite opposition from the residents of the original settlement, which became known as "Old Town", businesses and residents flocked to New Town, and San Diego experienced the first of its many real estate booms. In 1871, government records were moved to a new county courthouse in New Town, and by the 1880s New Town (or downtown) had totally eclipsed Old Town as the heart of the growing city. Horton also called for city land set aside for a new central park, which eventually came to fruition as Balboa Park.

In 1878, San Diego was predicted to become a rival of San Francisco's trading ports. To prevent that, the manager of Central Pacific Railroad Charles Crocker, decided not to build an extension to San Diego, fearing that it would take too much trade from San Francisco. In 1885, a transcontinental railroad route finally came to San Diego, and the population boomed, reaching 16,159 by 1890.

The influx of new residents was not without its own problems. The Stingaree was a neighborhood of San Diego between the boom of the 1880s and the demolition and vice eradication campaign of 1916. The reason for the neighborhood's fame was its role as the home to the city's "undesirables", including prostitutes, pimps, drug dealers and gamblers. For similar reasons of societal exclusion, it was also the site of the city's first Chinatown. Additionally, the neighborhood was home to many other lower-class citizens, and was in the center of a wider blue-collar residential area encompassing much of the city south of Broadway.

The San Diego of The Witches' Rede is a little more built up than the historical town, featuring several upgrades included a master plan which never actually came to fruition. Of course, New Town being much younger than other locations such as Tucson, its new infrastructure allowed more readily to the various steampunk features described in the books.

Below, find a list of the characters and key locations found in the San Diego area.