Port, HTA cut ribbon at bayside info center

 

By Donald H. Harrison

SAN DIEGO – For reporters and photographers covering groundbreakings and ribbon-cuttings, such events can tend to blur together in that there often is little to differentiate one from the other.  For the participants however, these events can be important milestones marking the beginning of new chapters in their corporate lives and, more often than not, providing an opportunity for nostalgic reflection.

So it was on Thursday, April 30, when representatives of Old Town Trolley Tours of San Diego and the Board of Port Commissioners of San Diego cut a ribbon outside the Visitor Information Center located on Harbor Drive between the Broadway Pier and the USS Midway Museum.

Although I was there to write up the story—and to search for Jewish angles, which I found—I became a passive participant when Ed Swift III, the president of Historic Tours of America, pointed at me, and told the story of how Old Town Trolley (an HTA subsidiary) happened to come to San Diego.

In 1989, my public relations agency administered the San Diego Cruise Industry Consortium—a public, private partnership seeking to lure cruise ships to San Diego.  I attended in Miami Beach a conference of the Cruise Line International Association (CLIA) and during a presentation by the presidents of various cruise lines, I asked their thoughts about cruising from the West Coast.  In so doing, I identified myself as being from San Diego.  Afterwards Swift and his colleagues from HTA’s corporate headquarters in Key West, Florida, asked if I would extend my stay in Florida to see their Old Town Trolley operation in that city.  I called my wife Nancy, and she said, ‘Go Ahead.’  Being a crackerjack travel agent, she changed my flights.

After I arrived in Key West and rode on the Old Town Trolley there, they asked if I thought a similar operation would work in San Diego.  Yes, I said, and later that year Old Town Trolley was established in San Diego.  I served temporarily as the first general manager, all the while maintaining my public relations agency.  Someone at the ceremony said Old Town Trolley of San Diego started with six trolleys, but I believe it was eight trolleys, soon expanded to 13 trolleys with the purchase of the rival Molly Trolley company that had already been in San Diego. David Thornton, Old Town Trolley’s general manager, said the San Diego operation today has 38 trolleys and carries approximately one quarter million people a year.

In his good-humored presentation—undeterred by the blaring of a horn from a departing sightseeing boat—Swift said Historic Tours of America now employs 1,569 people in the tours and sightseeing attractions it operates in six cities: San Diego, Key West, St. Augustine, Savannah, Washington D.C., and Boston.  The motto of the company is “safety first, courtesy a close second” and its policy is not only to refund the ticket price to any customer who expresses dissatisfaction, but to write or email that person explaining what they will do to solve the problem.  The company also provides passes for the dissatisfied customer and his or her family to try another HTA attraction anywhere in the country.

Swift said he believes this is the way tourism businesses should be conducted all over the United States, adding that Historic Tours of America has more than 700 tourism partners that have adopted this policy, as have some of HTA’s competitors.

On Old Town Trolley Tours in San Diego, Swift said, the company seeks to not only tell San Diego’s history but also “to spread the good and the positive, the pure and the wonderful, about the City of San Diego on our tours and in our information services.”

Old Town Trolley will pay rent to the Port of San Diego while operating the center, at which it will sell not only its tour tickets but also those of other attractions.  Additionally, the information center stocks some gift items.

John Balduc, acting president and chief executive officer of the Port of San Diego, said the Information Center in the South Pavilion  is part of the Port’s recent “$31.5 million makeover of this Embarcadero.”  The project stretches from the USS Midway, adjacent to the Information Center, north to the B Street Pier, where a North Pavilion will include a new restaurant.  He explained that in addition to tourists who arrive in San Diego each year via cruise ships or to attend meetings at the San Diego Convention Center,  a growing number of San Diegans—especially those who live in new downtown high rises—are attracted to the Embarcadero.

With such groups in mind, the artist whose designs were incorporated into the Pavilion – Pae White – conceptualized letters cut into the roofs and sides of the buildings, so that words could be read during the day via the shadows cast onto the pavement, and at night by lights that shine skyward and can be seen from high-rise windows and from airplanes on their approach to Lindbergh Field which is a very short distance away.

The Port’s public relations officer, Marguerite Elicone, noted that there are different colors of glass in the Visitor Information building.  She added:  “Pae White was inspired by dawn and dusk and used the warm colors to epitomize dawn” in the North Pavilion.  “Where the warm colors are, you can see the words ‘ladybug’ and ‘sky.’ She also has cooler colors (in the South Pavilion and Information Center) to epitomize dusk. You can see the words ‘star’ and “steel” in that area.”   Some people believe that White chose the words from the book Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach, but while the artist said she liked that book, the words are not drawn from it or any other book, according to Elicone.

Marshall Merrifield, vice chairman of the board of Port Commissioners, described the new information center as  a “great example of a public-private partnership that we love to do around the Big Bay. “

“The Port built the structure and the utilities to the structure, but Old Town Trolley did all the improvements inside the structure and it just looks fabulous,” he added.  “Thank you for a job well done!”

Therein, I learned, was my sought-after “Jewish angle.”  The improvements were designed by  Aleksey Shafiro, a senior project coordinator with the architecture, planning and interiors firm of Ware Malcomb of San Diego.  Shafiro told me that he had been born in Odessa, Ukraine, and immigrated to Brooklyn with his parents when he was 6 years old.  He only recently moved out to San Diego, he said.

Shafiro told me that the interior was designed to be “simple and plain white” in order to let the colored glass of Pae White’s exterior architecture “bleed through.”  Further, he said, “the open floor plan allows for access and making the kiosk (where Old Town Trolley concierges stand) the focus.”

Had Shafiro not been there to prove that “there is a Jewish story everywhere” – as the motto of San Diego Jewish World proclaims – there was at least one other way of demonstrating the theorem.  The Old Town Trolley on which staff members of Historic Tours of America rode from the trolley “barn” in the Old Town section of San Diego to the Embarcadeoo was named the “Louis Rose” – after San Diego’s first Jewish settler and entrepreneur who developed the Roseville section of San Diego, and gave his name to Rose Canyon.

Old Town Trolley, in its salute to the history of the cities in which it operates, names its tour trolleys for people who were important or notable in those cities. In San Diego, the 16^th century is remembered with a trolley named for San Diego’s European discoverer, Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo; the 18^th century with a trolley named for the City of San Diego’s founder, Father Junipero Serra; the 19^th century with trolleys named for Rose, Juan Osuna, Kit Carson, Yankee Jim Robinson, Thomas Whaley, Alonzo Horton, Wyatt Earp, and Jesse Shepard; the 20^th century with aviators Charles Lindbergh,  TG Ellyson and Mark Mitscher; rainmaker Charles Hatfield;  city visionaries Kate Sessions, John Spreckels, Dr. Harry Wegeforth, Belle Benchley, Ellen Scripps and George Marston; Navy admirals Chester Nimitz and James B. Stockdale; and children’s book writer Dr. Seuss (Ted Geisel).

So far, no trolleys have been designated for 17^th or 21^st century figures.  The only person I can think of from the 17^th century worthy of such designation would be Sebastian Vizcaino, the Spanish explorer who renamed this area in 1602 as San Diego.  Previously Cabrillo had called the area San Miguel. It would be appropriate to name a trolley for a notable member of the local Kumeyaay or Luiseno peoples, perhaps to be designated by tribal councils, and to solicit recommendations from other ethnic communities that have helped to build San Diego. As for the 20th century, there are numerous other figures to consider, such as Dr. Jonas Salk and astronaut Sally Ride.  Perhaps the 21^st Century should be permitted to run more years before attempting to pick its representatives.  All this, of course, are only my opinions; no doubt others might recommend other San Diegans for trolley honors.

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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World.  Your comment may be sent to him at donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com, or posted on this website provided that the rules below are observed.

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