At the end of the 1800s the city of San Diego was not like any other major U.S. city. Enormous in acreage, the streets were still unpaved. With miles of oceanfront, there were no beaches south of Point Loma.
Introduction of the railway gave San Diego a tremendous boom and bust, but the city’s population grew less than 1 percent in the decade following the bust. By 1907 the population was less than the 40,000 it had been in 1886, and although San Diego was connected to Los Angeles by train and to San Francisco by ferry, it was still difficult to reach and didn’t have much to offer.
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