Neighborhoods
Downtown is divided into a number of individual neighborhoods, each with its own attractions and personality.
At the heart is Columbia, which runs along Broadway as it approaches the harbor. Columbia is mostly a commercial district and contains most of the city's tallest buildings, the train depot, and a sizable chunk of the waterfront which includes the USS Midway Museum, the Maritime Museum, the cruise ship terminal and the ferry landing. To the east of this lies the commercial and governmental center of Core as well as the shopping district of Horton Plaza, with its splendid namesake mall.
To the north of the main business district are a couple of quieter neighborhoods - Cortez Hill, located on the hill at the north side of downtown, is a mostly residential neighborhood bumping up against Interstate 5, named for the historic El Cortez Hotel, the tallest building on the hill. Closer to the waterfront at the northwest end of downtown is Little Italy (http://www.littleitalysd....), originally a home to Italian fishermen, now a very active district of shops, restaurants, and parks, with an Italian theme.
On the southern side of Downtown, Marina is a highly gentrified waterfront district, containing marinas, highrise condos, hotels, the Convention Center, and the Seaport Village shopping mall. To the north of this is Gaslamp Quarter (http://www.gaslamp.org/), a historic district which was not only the birthplace of downtown but also the focal point of the first revitalization efforts in downtown during the 1970's. Today the neighborhood is the center of Downtown's nightlife scene; a thriving district of historic buildings, shops, theaters and restaurants. Capitalizing on Gaslamp's success, the East Village on the southeastern side of Downtown is undergoing a construction and redevelopment boom, spurred in part by the ballpark of the San Diego Padres, located within the neighborhood.
History
Downtown San Diego began in 1867, when Alonzo Erastus Horton bought 960 acres of land by the San Diego Bay after he decided that this should be the center of the city rather than Old Town, the site chosen by the Spanish for security reasons. Soon Horton found himself in the midst of an economic boom, resulting in the development of the southern Downtown neighborhoods, site of the present-day Gaslamp Quarter. However, in the late 1880s Horton's fortunes ran out and the Gaslamp Quarter began to deteriorate. At the same time, John D. Spreckels, a wealthy entrepreneur who had created a transportation and real estate empire in San Diego, began to develop land north of present-day Broadway, further contributing to the Gaslamp Quarter's decline.
Over the decades, Downtown fell into a state of disrepair as investment in the suburbs took its toll on the central city. In the 1970s, redevelopment efforts began taking off, and in the '80s the area began to rebound with the completion of Horton Plaza, the San Diego Convention Center, and the start of revitalization efforts in the Gaslamp Quarter.