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Super beyond the bowl

San Diego's historic Gaslamp Quarter is the heart of a revitalized downtown.

SAN DIEGO -- When Ingrid Croce opened her first Gaslamp Quarter restaurant, her customers felt the neighborhood was so unsafe that she had to offer them escorts to their cars. And that was during daylight hours.

The widow of singer-songwriter Jim Croce said she didn't even try to stay open in the evening.

"By 5 o'clock, there were so many homeless people in the streets that it was time for everybody else to go home," she recalled. "You couldn't get a license to open a bar because it was so sleazy."

Eighteen years later, customers arrive unescorted at night and often stand in line to get into one of Croce's three bars or two restaurants in the revitalized, 16-block section of downtown San Diego known as the Gaslamp Quarter.

After almost two decades of urban redevelopment, the historic heart of San Diego is throbbing with nightlife, helping to transform this seaside city's image from that of a sleepy Navy town into an exciting urban destination.

Two Sundays from today, when San Diego hosts the Super Bowl, its downtown and the Gaslamp Quarter will become the Super Hub of the nation's most-watched sporting event.

Both are several miles from Qualcomm Stadium, where the game will be played Jan. 26, but the Super Bowl host committee scheduled most of its game-related activities in and around the Gaslamp Quarter because that's "where most of the action will be," spokesman Rick Schloss said.

That is already true on most weekends.

Named for its historic streetlights, now illuminated by electricity instead of gas, the Gaslamp Quarter lures tourists and locals alike to its fine restaurants, boutique hotels, live entertainment, trendy nightclubs and eclectic shopping.

More than 90 restaurants dish up cuisine that ranges from ubiquitous burgers and fries to the exotic dishes of Thailand, India and Spain.

Historic structures, such as the Horton Grand Hotel, display the ornate décor of the 1880s, when the Gaslamp Quarter was this city's red-light district.

Shops, most of them locally owned, carry merchandise ranging from kitsch to collectibles. Loft-style apartments and condominiums fill the buildings above and around the commercial core.

Towering above it all are construction cranes working on 8,000 housing units and a baseball stadium for the San Diego Padres.

"It's become a neighborhood," Gaslamp Quarter resident Jenna Fasack said. "I can't go anywhere without seeing someone I know."

Fasack owns Lucky Dog, a chic pet store selling $25 bottles of "Oh My Dog" cologne and fine leather canine carrying cases called Puchibags that go for $295.

Fasack moved from Los Angeles five years ago and was surprised to find that her new home had a thriving downtown residential core.

"We never had an urban feel in this city before, and people who are used to that urban feel are attracted to living in the Gaslamp Quarter," said Joe Timko, spokesman for the San Diego Visitors and Convention Bureau. "There is an incredible amount of vitality going on down here."

It's the most action this area has seen since the 1880s, when Wyatt Earp owned three of the 71 saloons in the area and some 350 prostitutes plied their trade in 120 bordellos.

It was known then as the "Stingaree" district because it was said customers could get stung just as badly at one of the saloons or bordellos as by the stingrays in nearby Mission Bay.

A 1912 police raid turned off the red lights, and pornographic bookstores, warehouses and other low-rent businesses moved in.

A renaissance, begun in the 1970s with the preservation of the quarter's historic buildings, has turned the neighborhood back into a place to party, albeit in a more civilized fashion.

During a recent weekend visit, I found the Gaslamp Quarter to be one of those rare Southern California spots where I could park my car, walk to restaurants, nightclubs and hotels and find plenty to entertain me.

Strolling past restored Victorian facades, I saw horse-drawn carriages and pedicabs delivering well-to-do diners to their favorite restaurants. Cuban cigar makers rolled fat, round stogies in storefronts. Drunken revelers ogled passing women. Couples decked out in evening clothes lined up at popular nightclubs.

And outside a crowded Spanish restaurant, Olé Madrid, an enterprising panhandler held up humorous handwritten appeals for change from passers-by.

Inside the restaurant, three flamenco dancers entertained diners with their swirling skirts and clicking castanets.

With so many restaurants in such a small area, many offer entertainment or some other gimmick to draw a crowd.

The Gaslamp Strip Club, for instance, capitalizes on the quarter's bawdy past with famous pinup art by Alberto Vargas. But the only strip here is the strip steak that customers cook for themselves on a community grill.

At the Red Circle Café, the former Soviet Union becomes a theme with a red-and-black color scheme, framed Soviet military uniforms on the back wall and a long list of vodka specialties.

The Politburo never would have approved of the bourgeois crowd, the high-priced drinks or the food masquerading as art.

But it might have approved manager Alex Minaeu's plan to shift to an appetizer-only menu to "take advantage of the club crowd."

While these chi-chi restaurants wow the crowds, my favorite dining discoveries were two popular breakfast spots located within a few blocks of one another.

Café 222, a tiny restaurant with outdoor seating at wobbly wire-mesh tables, served a pumpkin waffle worthy of its write-up in Gourmet Magazine.

A local hangout called the Cheese Shop offered outstanding pancakes and other traditional breakfast items.

I spent most of my weekend on foot -- with two notable exceptions. I had to drive a few minutes northwest to attend the grand opening of downtown San Diego's newest hot spot: the W San Diego hotel.

San Diego Mayor Dick Murphy was there to hail the hotel's opening as further evidence that his city's downtown has become a thriving urban destination center.

The W San Diego is the 17th in a chain of "style" hotels featuring sleek designs and a hip clientele. At the San Diego outpost, a crowd dressed in lots of black and leather sipped turquoise-and rose-colored cocktails at Beach, an outdoor, rooftop sand bar with private tented cabañas, a fire pit and heated sand to warm customers' tastefully manicured toes.

"Most places, people check their coats," W publicist Jamie Lynn Sigler said. "Here at the W, we check their shoes."

But I'm not sure San Diego is ready for all this hipness. At the bar, a "screenwriter" actually asked for my astrological sign.

Growing tired of scene-setters, I drove to Little Italy, a few minutes north of the W and the Gaslamp Quarter, to enjoy old-style Italian food at Filippi's Pizza Grotto, a San Diego landmark for 50 years.

Located behind Filippi's deli counter and grocery, the restaurant features red-checkered tablecloths, cheap wood paneling and empty Chianti bottles hanging from the rafters.

The prices can't be beat: $5.50 for a large plate of spaghetti with meat sauce, $4.20 for a side order of their excellent homemade sausage and $13.25 for tasty veal parmigiana. This is a family restaurant where the waitresses hand children lumps of pizza dough to play with while they wait.

Ready for relaxation, I returned to my refuge at the Hilton San Diego Gaslamp Quarter.

The hotel, which the developer described as a cross between an urban loft and a California beach house, enjoys a parklike setting between San Diego's huge convention center and the bustling Gaslamp Quarter.

"We look at it as a place where you can go out and party yourself silly, and have a place where you can come back and recover the next day," said Jeremy Cohen, vice president of the company that developed the Hilton.

Inside the Hilton, the Artesia Day Spa offers several restorative treatments in a small but soothing setting. Massages start at $80 for a 50-minute session and run to to $348 for a "rejuvenating escape" consisting of a full day of treatments.

My masseuse said the spa's hot-stone therapy massages are the best.

"It will take you places no other massage could," he promised.

Taking travelers to new places is the goal of San Diego's tourism business today, and Ingrid Croce is a big believer in marketing the city as more than a place to take the family to visit the zoo or a killer whale named Shamu.

A native of Philadelphia, Croce said she chose downtown for her first restaurant because she preferred its urban feel.

Croce's restaurant was a tribute to her late husband, Jim Croce, who died in a 1973 plane crash after becoming famous for writing and recording several popular songs, including "Time in a Bottle." Despite the well-known name, Croce said her restaurant didn't make much money until the nearby convention center began attracting large crowds in the late 1980s.

The tourism downturn after 9/11 forced her to eliminate weekday breakfast and lunch service.

But Croce said her restaurants and bars remain profitable. And the 55-year-old grandmother of two predicted the Super Bowl would bring her even more business.

"It took years to get people to come here," she said. "But now, we are doing better than almost any other convention city. We don't want people to just leave San Diego thinking this was fun. We want them to leave thinking: Wow!"

About the Writer
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The Bee's Laura Mecoy can be reached at (310) 546-5860 or lmecoy@sacbee.com.

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