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 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 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.....

Running for some three miles along the eastern shore of San Diego Bay between Harbor Island in the north and the cruise-ship terminal at the foot of Broadway, North Harbor Drive is one of the most photographed waterfront thoroughfares in southern California. The boulevard forms the spine of the popular Embarcadero district, a long stretch of bayfront parks, museums, ships, restaurants and the city's busiest cruise-ship terminal that has become one of the most heavily visited stretches of public .....

In the historic Old Town district about three miles north-west of downtown San Diego, Old Town San Diego State Historic Park preserves the site of the first permanent European settlement on the United States Pacific Coast. The thirteen-acre park covers the original Mexican-era town established in 1769 around the celebrated Mission San Diego de Alcala and includes a remarkable collection of original and reconstructed adobe and frame buildings dating from the Mexican period through the early Ameri.....

James Brown played the first concert in 1967, and more than 1,200 have followed - more than any other large venue in San Diego history. Pechanga Arena, at 3500 Sports Arena Boulevard in the Midway District, opened on 17 November 1966 as the San Diego International Sports Arena and remains the city's concert workhorse six decades on. The origin was private ambition: Bob Breitbard, a local football hero turned entrepreneur, leased 80 acres from the city and privately financed the 6.4-million-doll.....