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.....

In the bustling Mission Valley area of San Diego, iFLY San Diego offers the unmistakable rush of free fall without the small matter of an aircraft. Part of the international network of iFLY indoor skydiving facilities built around the same proven technology, the venue uses a powerful vertical wind tunnel to lift visitors on a smooth, controllable column of moving air, providing a safe, weatherproof and remarkably accessible way to experience true skydiving sensations at ground level, only minute.....

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.....

The clamshell stage hosted Bob Hope in the 1940s and the sunken dance floor appeared in Top Gun - then the room sat dormant for decades until a 34-million-dollar restoration woke it up. Lou Lou's Jungle Room, in the basement of the Lafayette Hotel at 2223 El Cajon Boulevard in San Diego, opened on 20 January 2024 with a sold-out Thee Sacred Souls show. The bones are mid-century glamour: the 1946 Lafayette was mid-city San Diego's celebrity playground, and its underground ballroom - later known .....

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.....

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.....

Tucked between the city of San Diego and the long sweep of the Coronado peninsula, San Diego Bay is one of the most heavily used natural harbours on the West Coast and a defining feature of the southern California landscape. The roughly twelve-mile-long, four-mile-wide protected bay was carved by tectonic action over millennia, with the long Silver Strand of Coronado forming the natural breakwater that has made the bay one of the deepest and best-protected natural ports on the Pacific coast of t.....