So what if Los Angeles was only a two-hour drive up the coast? San Diegans had a decidedly un-Hollywood way of viewing the world and themselves. Locals took great pride in the surf culture, and the already strong sense of community was deepened by the fact that enemies-Los Angeles, all the kooks who didn’t surf, the NFL’s Raiders, workaholics, the Arizona tourist ‘Zonies who took over Mission Beach-were clearly identified.
Back then, a thriving local theater scene was led by the venerable Old Globe Theatre, the defense contracting industry was overflowing with brainy engineers and several vaunted research and academic institutions were up and running, including the Salk and Scripps Institutes and the University of California San Diego. But in spite of this, my beloved city often felt as if Iowa had been transplanted to the West Coast. It was like a Norman Rockwell sketch with a beach backdrop.
All that started to change with the end of the Cold War in the early ’90s. Berlin may have been a half-a-world away, but the sound of the wall falling reverberated in San Diego, where defense-dependent companies were forced to either retool technologies for non-military uses or die. Out of that resilient restructuring came a technology boom that is now in full bloom. In a study conducted by the Washington-based Progressive Policy Institute, a Democratic think tank, San Diego recently ranked fifth in the nation in how well U.S. metropolitan areas are adapting to the New Economy and positioning themselves to thrive in industries of the future.
This high-tech explosion, specifically in the biotech and wireless sectors, has given the local economy a booster shot by bringing thousands of skilled, educated and highly paid people to town, and giving San Diego an air of sophistication that it has never seen before. But along with growth has come depersonalization and all its accouterments: L.A.-style freeway jams, polluted water and air, a lack of low-cost housing. The transformation has caught many longtimers off guard. Some people I know who’ve lived here 15 years or longer fear that the city is fast becoming indistinguishable from Los Angeles, the place they’ve consciously avoided.
Even more lamentably, say old-timers, the people have changed. Carl Stark, a retired phone company employee, moved to San Diego with his wife Sally back in 1978. They came here because they liked the friendly, sleepy, Navy-town feel. But now people in their neighborhood don’t engage them in conversation as much, Stark says. Attitudes have even changed in the way people drive on the freeways. “When we first moved here, people were happy to let you change lanes. They didn’t get bent out of shape,” says Stark. He thinks people who work in the technology fields are more reserved, more standoff-ish and probably more stressed.
But amid the tech madness and the influx of millions of dollars of venture capital, the city remains defiantly provincial. Our paradoxical nature is embodied in San Diegans like John Otterson, managing director of the San Diego branch of Silicon Valley Bank, a tech-focused commercial bank, and Bob Bingham, an Internet entrepreuneur and investor. Otterson and Bingham, along with several other techie types, meet every Friday morning at such hallowed surf spots as Windansea and Cardiff Reef for some early-morning waves. Talk about casual Fridays.
And for the record, we still think we’re better than L.A. Throughout the years, San Diego has earned a reputation for being the perhaps slightly resentful little sister of that popular and accomplished sibling to the north.
The rivalry between the two cities unquestionably remains: you should have heard the passion with which San Diego Padres baseball fans-myself included-chanted “Beat L.A.” at the recent Padres-Dodgers weekend series.
But even my beloved Padres have changed. When I moved here in 1984, the team had the look and feel of small-town, small-time underdogs. They had puke-ugly brown and yellow uniforms and played in Jack Murphy Stadium, which was named after a local old-time sportswriter. Today, the Padres, who are still typically the underdogs, play in ultra-modern blue and white uniforms and their stadium has been expanded and renamed Qualcomm Stadium, after the locally based wireless tech giant. If that isn’t a symbol of this city’s new economy and its changing ethos, I don’t know what is.
Yes, San Diego’s tech boom and our accompanying new image as a cutting-edge, world-class city gives us a little more to brag about. But also, a little less.
