Gaslamp & Waterfront Walk

Welcome to Horton Plaza Park, at the corner of 4th Avenue and Broadway. The plaza is named for Alonzo Horton, the developer who built downtown San Diego. He sold this land to the city in 1895. It was first meant for guests of his Horton House Hotel, which stood across Broadway where the U.S.

Grant Hotel is today. In 1909 the U.S. Weather Bureau chose the plaza for a weather kiosk, and the park was laid out around it, with the center saved for a fountain. The Broadway Fountain, designed by Irving J.

Gill, was completed in 1910, helped by funds from Louis J. Wilde, a banker and part-owner of the Grant Hotel. The plaza has seen big moments. On November 2, 1960, Senator John F.

Kennedy spoke here, making a last-minute appeal for votes six days before the presidential election. The city named the plaza a historical landmark on March 19, 1971.

This is the U.S. Grant Hotel, one of San Diego's oldest hotels and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The story is a family one. Senator Jerome B.

Chaffee of Colorado bought the old Horton House in 1895 as a gift for his daughter, Fannie Chaffee Grant, because women couldn't buy real estate at the time. She had it torn down in 1905. Her husband, Ulysses S. Grant Jr., son of the president, oversaw the new hotel, named after his father.

San Diego voters helped finance 700,000 dollars of the 1.5 million it cost. It opened on October 15, 1910, with two swimming pools and a top-floor ballroom. San Diego's first radio station, KFVW, broadcast from the 11th floor, and Franklin Roosevelt gave an address from it. The very first San Diego Comic-Con was held here in 1970.

In 2003 the hotel was bought by the Sycuan Band of the Kumeyaay Nation.