Posts Tagged ‘San Diego Gas & Electric Co.’

We are daily growing more and more in need of street lights. We should like very much to see San Diego lighted by electricity, and we believe that the public are quite willing to pay any reasonable expense of that system. But, light of some kind we must have, and very soon . . . –San Diego Union, July 1, 1885.

The solution, San Diegans decided, was the “Arc Lamp,” clusters of arcing electricity in lamps arranged atop 125-foot steel towers that cast a “twilight glow” over downtown streets.

The story of Lighting the City.

Looking north on Fifth Street, circa 1887.

There was a time in America when the standard for personal cleanliness was a weekly bath. The “great unwashed” often found that Saturday night soak in commercial bathhouses. During San Diego’s population boom of the eighties, nearly a dozen bathhouses dotted the city’s waterfront. A decade later the baths had become elaborate plunges and included an architectural wonder: Los Banos at Broadway and Kettner Blvd.

The story of the San Diego Baths.

Los Banos at Broadway and Kettner Blvd.