A youth charity built San Diego's tennis headquarters - then the pros came to it. The Barnes Tennis Center at 4490 West Point Loma Boulevard, beside the San Diego River near Ocean Beach, was built between 1995 and 1997 by Youth Tennis San Diego, the non-profit whose after-school programs have served the city's underserved neighbourhoods since 1953. The facility grew into one of the country's premier public racquet complexes: 25 tennis courts including two clay, 19 pickleball courts, 7 padel cour.....

Anchored by a classic wooden roller coaster on the sand at Mission Beach, Belmont Park is San Diego's long-running seaside amusement park, an old-fashioned mix of rides, arcade games, shops and beachfront restaurants that opened on 4 July 1925. Originally developed by the sugar magnate John D. Spreckels as part of an effort to draw San Diegans across the bay to his new Mission Bay neighbourhood, the park has weathered closures, redevelopments and the decline of seaside amusement parks across the.....

San Diego's heavy music headquarters has been holding the line in Bay Park since disco was king. The club at 1130 Buenos Avenue opened in 1976 as the Spirit of '76 - named for its founding year - and under founder Jerry Herrera became the main stage in pre-indie-rock San Diego where bands playing original music could get stage time, with a mention in Herrera's self-penned Reader adverts counting as a local badge of honour. In 1995 the room became Brick by Brick, and the booking turned decisively.....

A barn-style playhouse inside a state historic park hosted one of San Diego's great theatre success stories for seventeen years. The Old Town Theatre at 4040 Twiggs Street - known through that era as Cygnet Theatre - stands in Old Town San Diego State Historic Park, the preserved birthplace of California where costumed interpreters work streets frozen in the 1840s-1872 period. The building itself dates to 1979, constructed by the state with funds raised by local actor Polly Puterbaugh after the .....

In the historic Old Town district of San Diego, GoCar offers one of the most unusual ways to explore the city, a fleet of brightly coloured, three-wheeled, two-seater vehicles equipped with talking GPS tour guides that lead drivers along carefully chosen scenic and historic routes. The company first opened in San Francisco in 2004 with a small fleet of European-made motorised "Carvers" and later branched into San Diego and several other tourist destinations, including Lisbon, Miami and Barcelona.....

The famous outdoor stage next door seats 1,400 under the palms - but the year-round music at this address happens in the lounge, where the bands play nightly with the marina lights behind them. Humphreys Backstage Live, at 2241 Shelter Island Drive on San Diego's Shelter Island, is the intimate waterfront music lounge of the Humphreys complex, sharing the site with Humphreys Concerts by the Bay, Humphreys Restaurant and the Half Moon Inn. The room's formula has run for decades: Southern Califor.....

Set on the waterfront of San Diego's Shelter Island, Humphreys Concerts by the Bay is a beloved open-air concert venue with one of the most picturesque settings on the West Coast. Part of the Humphreys Half Moon Inn and marina, the intimate outdoor stage looks out over the boats and the bay, and for decades its summer season has been a much-anticipated fixture of the city's cultural calendar. The venue is a compact outdoor amphitheatre seating around fourteen hundred people, with chairs arrange.....

The building San Diegans call the Slim Gym was a Christmas present: at a 1997 holiday party, Sidney Craig surprised his wife - weight-loss entrepreneur Jenny Craig - by announcing a 10-million-dollar gift in her name to build it. The Jenny Craig Pavilion, at 5998 Alcala Park Way on the University of San Diego campus, opened on 5 October 2000 as the 5,100-seat home of the Toreros. The arena replaced a gym with a famous embarrassment: the old USD Sports Center's advertised 2,500-seat capacity tur.....

On the Embarcadero waterfront in downtown San Diego just opposite the bustling Broadway Pier, the Maritime Museum of San Diego operates one of the largest collections of historic seafaring vessels in the United States. The non-profit museum was founded in 1948 with the acquisition of the iron-hulled barque Star of India, the oldest active sailing ship in the world, and has grown over the intervening decades into a fleet of more than a dozen historic and replica vessels permanently moored along t.....

On the Pacific shoreline just north of downtown San Diego, Mission Bay Park is the largest urban aquatic park in the United States and one of the most heavily visited public recreation areas in southern California. The 4,235-acre park encompasses some 2,000 acres of land and over 2,000 acres of protected water, with the meandering bay carved into a coastal salt marsh during the late 1940s through a vast public-works programme. The bay's creation transformed an unproductive tidal wetland known a.....