Horton Plaza park’s historic fountain with its colored lights is on again. Three new pavilions will serve food and snacks. A new ArtsTix booth is opening. And public restrooms are returning.

San Diego’s 146-year-old gathering place, where presidents spoke, citizens celebrated and pro- and anti-war demonstrators assembled, will open for business Wednesday after a $17 million restoration and expansion.

Mayor Kevin Faulconer will officially rededicate Horton Plaza park at noon and kick off a series of opening weekend festivities, followed by regularly scheduled events that could once again make the park the place to meet and mingle.

“It was the town center from 1870 to the present and we’ve been missing it,” said local historian Iris Engstrand. “I know San Diegans will be glad that it is finished.”


Construction crews last week were frantically grouting the granite pavers, installing the drought-tolerant plants and testing the lights and other equipment at the 1.3-acre park at Fourth Avenue and Broadway.

“There are few projects that were more anticipated than the park,” said Kris Michell, president and CEO of the Downtown San Diego Partnership business group. “It will offer hundreds of events each year and is definitely intended to enhance arts and culture downtown. It is a regional asset, not just for those who live and work in downtown but it is one of those sophisticated parks that will appeal to all San Diegans.”

Highlights include the restoration of the historic park that downtown founder Alonzo Horton set aside in 1870-’71 opposite his Horton House Hotel, replaced in 1910 by the U.S. Grant Hotel. The fountain, which featured electric colored lights that were a high-tech innovation of their day, was designed by famed San Diego architect Irving J. Gill, who also redesigned the park for the 1910 opening of the Grant.

That’s especially welcomed by Bruce Coons, executive director of the Save Our Heritage Organisation, which uses the fountain as its logo in recognition of the many battles to save the park and fountain over the last 60 years.


“It’s really exciting,” Coons said. “And I think it will be more of what it was intended to be, a public gathering space.”

In place of the Westfield’s Robinson’s-May department store that was demolished in 2012 is a 37,000-square-foot addition to the 20,000-square-foot history park that stretches south to the Balboa Theater. It includes an amphitheater and interactive fountain, stainless luminaire lighting fixtures and three pavilions that include the park’s first public restrooms since underground facilities were demolished in the early-1980s.

On the blank walls of the Bradley Building, a 1985 recreation of a historic office building on the west side of the park, is a temporary mural by Colorado artist Kelsey Montague — 45-foot-high, 131-foot-long depiction of several upside-down high-rises and a flutter of dragon flies that visitors are free to pose next to for selfies.

These additions to the historic park were made possible when Westfield decided to give the Robinson’s-May building back to the city in exchange for terminating a profit-sharing agreement for parking garage revenues. Westfield also agreed to schedule at least 200 events in the park per year, lease the pavilions to food services and handle maintenance and repairs.


“We’ve walked people through the site and they’re absolutely blown away with the scale and quality of the space,” said Westfield spokeswoman Kim Brewer.

Sarah Richardson, the company’s national special events director, said wedding planners, local companies and organizations and Comic-Con International are all thinking of ways they could hold events in the park. Revenues from private events are expected to cover park management and entertainment.

The northeast pavilion will include a Starbucks coffee shop and Sloan’s ice cream will occupy the northwest pavilion.

Ali Hajisattari, a mechanical engineer who owns the Florida-based Sloan’s franchise for San Diego, said he will stock fresh fudge, cookies, croissants, caramel candy apples and other goodies in addition to 20 flavors of all-natural ice cream.


“I thought it would be more fun,” said Hajisattari, who immigrated from Iran five years ago. “Engineering is not that much fun.”

Bruxie waffles backed out of a lease in the southeast pavilion and a replacement has not been selected.

However, the San Diego Performing Arts League will reopen its ArtsTix booth in that pavilion and 25 volunteers will double as information-please docents to help visitors find their way to the waterfront, Balboa Park and the Gaslamp Quarter.

“I’m fascinated to see, going forward, how this large, wonderful communal space will add to the benefits of living and working and visiting downtown San Diego,” said board President D. Candis Paule.


Horton Plaza has a long history of serving as San Diego’s version of London’s Trafalgar Square in London and Madrid’s Plaza Mayor. President Benjamin Harrison spoke there in 1892. The surrender of the Japanese at the end of World War II was cheered in 1945. Vietnam War protests took place there in the 1960s.

One of the first references to the plaza appeared in the May 7, 1871, San Diego Union, headlined “Base Ball”: “Yesterday two full ‘nines’ assembled on the Plaza and played a game of seven innings.”

But the plaza was never big enough to comfortably hold thousands of visitors. Redesign ideas ranged from replacing it with an underground auditorium and parking garage to paving it over to create an urban hardscape plaza.

When developer Ernest W. Hahn opened Horton Plaza shopping center in 1985, the historic park was restored to its 1910 look. But within six years, period benches, trash cans and grassy lawns were removed to discourage homeless campouts. The fountain, a mechanical marvel in its day, stopped working in 2008 and the park was boarded up four years later when the Robinson’s-May building was demolished.


Downtown leaders hope the old issues of vagrancy and vandalism will be gone for good now that the park is bigger and better managed than ever. But Westfield is leaving it to the San Diego Police Department to patrol the park after hours.

Daniel Kay, the Civic San Diego project manager for the park’s expansion, said a security camera system will help identify any criminal activity.

One problem of immediate concern to SOHO’s Coons is the limitation placed on operating the historic fountain only four hours a day. He said he will lobby the city to exempt the rules in this one case. The fountain’s security is at stake, he said, and its operation is a key part of the historic aspect of the park.

“The tradeoff is having a dormant fountain that is possibly open to vandalism and losing a little water,” he said. “There is much more benefit to keeping it running.”


At a social event Saturday, Faulconer said he did not realize the restrictive hours that might apply to the fountain and would look into the situation.

“It is our most historic fountain,” he said.

Horton Plaza park reopening

Wednesday: Mayor Kevin Faulconer leads opening ceremony at noon. Evening entertainment open to the public starts at 6:30 p.m.: William Close and his Earth Harp Collective will turn the amphitheater into a musical instrument at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday by installing harp strings across it that he will play. “Park Unplugged” performances will include live music from a variety of bands. Food trucks and two beer gardens will be hand, along with the Sacra Profana choir.

Thursday: 11 a.m.-7 p.m. Art & Coloring; Plaza Play games, noon to 7:30 p.m.; 11:30 a.m.-3:30 p.m. Plaza Unplugged music and dance by Santana Pa Ti and Danza Mexi’cayhotl; Cinco de Mayo silent disco, 7-10 p.m.


Friday: Art & Coloring, Plaza Play, Park Unplugged; Sound Off Yoga “bring your own mat,” 6:30-8:30 p.m.

Saturday: Art & Coloring, Plaza Play, Park Unplugged; Sound Off silent disco, 7-10 p.m.

Sunday: Art & Coloring, Plaza Play, Park Unplugged; Mother’s Day Flower Giveaway, 11:30 a.m.