Institution

The school building opened for the Fall 1942 school year. There wasn’t funding for landscaping or playgrounds until the following year and school grounds were considered hazardous. Carson is one of only a few two-story elementary schools in San Diego. Two concrete bas-relief panels adorn the front of the school on Kramer Street above the entrance and on the auditorium. They were created in 1942 by major San Diego sculptor Donal Hord and are listed on the San Diego Historical Society register. A Los Angeles area “Linda Vista Hospital” is the source of folklore that Carson Elementary was previously a hospital and is now haunted, neither of which are at all true.

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When residents began moving into the Linda Vista development in 1941 there were no school buildings and no funding had yet been provided for their construction. With operational support from the federal government, the San Diego School District provided teachers and opened Kit Carson Elementary School in September 1941, conducting classes in unoccupied project homes on Coolidge St.

Kit Carson Elementary School

San Diego's diverse Linda Vista neighborhood has a unique history, having been built as a federal wartime project. In the first phase in 1941, 3000 homes were built in 259 days. Much of the original construction remains. This tour visits the major civic sites in the core area and passes through parts of the 1941 residential development.

The tour and site entries were developed by the Linda Vista Branch Library, part of San Diego Public Library, and the Linda Vista Town Council.

Linda Vista Historical Walking Tour

Linda Vista was San Diego’s first
major housing development for industrial workers. It expanded the city beyond
the Mission Valley boundary for the first time. And it represented a younger,
more racially diverse and integrated San Diego than characterized the city at
the time.

In 1935, Rueben H. Fleet relocated
his Consolidated Aircraft Corporation from Buffalo to San Diego. While the
United States didn’t enter the war until December, 1941, US aircraft production
was already in high gear in 1939 supplying planes to France and Britain and a
readying US military. Consolidated Aircraft was a principal supplier and grew
from 874 employees in San Diego in 1935 to 41,000 employees in 1941. Ryan
Aircraft and Rohr Aircraft were other major defense manufacturers here.

Houses and neighborhood plan

Single- and mulit-family homes original
to Defense Housing Project No. 4002, the 1941-43 development, are seen
throughout the two walking tour loops. The examples at this location are
typical of the single-family home style. 

Speculative subdivisions and street
plans were drawn up for the Linda Vista area in 1927 as “Chesterton” and
“Chesterton Extension”. These subdivisions never materialized, but portions of
the layout and street names were eventually were incorporated into the 1941 Linda
Vista Housing Development and later expansions.

The combined project architects are
identified as Louis J. Gill, Earl Heitschmidt, Charles O. Matchum, Sam W.
Hamill, and Blanchard &amp; Maher. Louis J. Gill was the nephew and business
partner of Irving Gill. Louis was the lead architect on a number of major San
Diego projects including the County Administration Building, the Mission Hills
Congregational Church (now United Church of Christ), and a number of projects
at the San Diego Zoo.

The neighborhood was modeled on ‘garden
city’ town planning principles and Clarence Perry’s Neighborhood Unit Theory,
which emphasizes a self-contained community with large blocks and open spaces,
a designated service space at the central point, and separation between
pedestrian and vehicular traffic. A few public pedestrian paths remain in the
area: connecting Thomson Ct. and Upton Ct., Ulric St. and Westinghouse St. at
Comstock St, Fulton St. and Eastman St. mid-block, and Eastman St. and Linda
Vista Rd. at the pedestrian crosswalk midway along that long block.

The houses were designed by Public
Buildings Administration architect C.D. Persina to be functional and simple. The
houses share a common floor plan, allowing for low-cost and efficient
construction. 

<div>

Construction
was contracted to Los Angeles based McNeil and Zoss Construction. To allow for
easy disassembly, two-headed nails were used in the construction of many of the
second phases’ “temporary” homes.

The Linda
Vista project homes remained federal property leased to tenants for nine years
following the end of the war. The Lanham Act which created the project
established that the housing was to be temporary, to serve wartime needs. The
debate that followed was whether to then turn the property over to the city and
commercial interests in some mix or to allow tenants an opportunity to purchase
their homes. The tenants organized and won out.

It’s
notable that the federal tenant and later disposition process resulted in Linda
Vista being substantially more integrated than San Diego, which had racial
covenants restricting Black and Hispanic home ownership to Logan Heights and
Southeast San Diego. This had the effect of reducing the degree of segregation
for the whole of San Diego, in contrast to the re-segregating role that public
housing played in many cities.

After a
long process, sales of the project homes began on October 28, 1954. Prices and
priority were assigned to purchasers based on their residency and military
service – another topic of heated debate, as most residents had been civilian
wartime factory workers – by then including for the Korean War.

For
non-veterans, the single family homes cost $6,000 to $7,000. (Equivalent to
about $53,200 to $62,000 in 2016.) Financing was provided at 5% down and 5%
interest over 20 years.</div>

Industry’s demand for aircraft
workers far outpaced growth in San Diego’s housing supply. Besides the largely
self-contained military outposts, the San Diego economy until then had been
substantially built on tourism and real estate, both of which catered especially
to Midwestern retirees. The San Diego community and its traditional industries had
little common interest with the defense industry’s need to build an unprecedented
amount of affordable housing.

The United States Housing Authority
was created in 1937 and made funds available to San Diego to build the housing
needed for the wartime effort. San Diego rejected offers of federal housing funds
in 1939 and 1940. By late 1940, workers were migrating to San Diego at a rate
of 1,500 per week, the city population had grown by 50% over two years, and the
severe housing shortage was impacting defense production. On October 14, 1940
the federal Lanham Defense Housing Act was passed, overriding San Diego’s
obstinacy and contracting for 3,000 housing units to be built on the 12,000
acre coastal sage scrub bluff that is now Linda Vista.

Over 259 days, 3,000 homes and 750
dormitory units were built in Linda Vista, the largest public housing project
in the U.S. for a brief time. The project broke ground on February 19, 1941 and
twenty families moved into new homes on May 19, 1941. Building continued throughout
the neighborhood, with 40 homes completed per day at the peak. A dedication
ceremony was held September 9, 1941 and the initial project was completed on
November 5, 1941. A second phase of 1,845 “temporary” units was completed in
1943 bringing Linda Vista’s population to 16,000.

<div>

City services in Linda Vista were
initially strained by the projects’ relationship to San Diego, heightened by
the fact that the development was exempt from property taxes. Federal payment
in-lieu of taxes to the city began in June 1943. School operations were
supported by the federal government starting in September 1941 but funds for
construction of school buildings, playgrounds, streetlights, or stores of any
kind took longer. It took two more years for those to fully arrive.</div>

Entering the 1940s, San Diego was a city of 200,000 with little industrial base. World War II transformed San Diego and the rapid creation of Linda Vista played a central role. See the rest of this entry for more on the history of Linda Vista.

Linda Vista history and housing

This is the third location for the neighborhood public library, which opened June 30, 1942 in a 400 sq. ft. gardener’s cottage just across Kelly St. from Bayside Community Center. The library was overwhelmingly busy from its first day. A year later a tool shed was relocated to expand the cottage and became the children’s room. Though crowded and among the city’s smallest, the Linda Vista Branch in 1947 had the third highest circulation among San Diego’s 13 branch libraries and the highest juvenile circulation. A larger library facility was built in 1951 to meet the neighborhood’s high use. The building is now occupied by the Educational Enrichment Systems Child Development Center.

The current library facility is an award winning building by architect Rob Quigley, dedicated on December 12, 1987. It features two courtyards which extend visually into the interior space and a raised rotunda with clerestory windows. Playful elements and lightweight wood construction balance the traditional Mediterranean styles, formal spaces, and clear programmatic plan.

Linda Vista Branch Library

Begun in 1942 and dedicated July 30th, 1944, the church features 21 stained glass windows. The centerpiece window over the entrance was donated by Catholic nuns and provides a focal point when looking south down Ulric Street toward the church. A fire in 1980 damaged the annex building which has since been restored. The annex houses the Vine Child Care Center and has also served as Mesa College Extension classrooms.

Linda Vista Presbyterian Church

This Catholic congregation first met in a local home, then in the Housing Administration Building until its church was built at the corner of this large site in 1943. The 1943 building is now the Ave Maria Social Hall. The Modern sanctuary added to the site was designed by architect Joseph F. Dameron and completed in 1971. Dameron designed many churches in San Diego County including St. James &amp; St. Leo, Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, Immaculate Heart of Mary, and Tierrasanta Lutheran Church.

Holy Family Church

The church buildings are notable for having been relocated. The social hall (at left from street) is from the Camp Callan (1941-45) army training center which was located on Torrey Pines Mesa. The central building houses the church office, chapel, and kitchen and was relocated from a Marine Corps base (perhaps Camp Matthews, 1918-1964) where it was used as a mess hall. The school rooms at the back of the property were relocated from a WWII Japanese-American internment camp in Arizona, either Poston or Gila River (both 1942-45).  The large sanctuary at right was completed for the church on site in 1948. Today the church serves a largely Vietnamese and Filipino congregation.


Linda Vista United Methodist Church

Des Lauriers was an architect on the original San Diego airport terminal at Pacific Highway. His first AIA award of merit is for the 1960 Carlton Hills Lutheran Church in Santee. Beginning in 1967 his own firm completed 506 projects in San Diego County. Before the church, this was the site of the Federal Public Housing Authority, which managed the Linda Vista housing project rentals.

Originally Calvary Southern Baptist, this impressive mid-century modern building was designed by prolific local architect Robert E. Des Lauriers and built in 1963. The original colored glass windows were replaced with clear and white glass in a 2010 remodel.

Canyon Ridge Baptist Church

Bayside’s building was originally a church, built in 1957 and expanded by Bayside in 2004. Founded in 1932 by the Sisters of Social Services, the non-profit is one of the only remaining settlement houses in Southern California. Bayside relocated from downtown's Little Italy to Linda Vista in 1978, largely in response to the influx of Asian immigrants as a result of the Vietnam War.  A community garden was added in 2011.

Bayside Community Center

When the Tenant Activity Building opened over 32 organizations began to utilize the space for meetings, social events, church gatherings, recreation, dances, and other related community uses. The building follows the military’s 800 Series Field House barrel roof design and included a gymnasium, an auditorium, a large social and recreation room, two smaller activity rooms, a projection room, a game and recreation terrace, offices, patios, and more. In 1953 the building was sold to private ownership and reopened as a supermarket, a series of which included Roy’s, Alpha Beta, and Hometown Markets between 1953 and 1973. The Tenant Activity Building’s main entrance was originally along the center of the south wall, facing Comstock Street, and featured a large enclosed courtyard. The courtyard and main entrance was removed in the early 1960s. (Look for an outcropping of the courtyard’s red concrete surface near the car wash.) Skateworld moved in in 1975, remodeling then and again in 1983 and 1999. Clerestory windows around the main building were filled in or boarded over, probably in the 1983 remodel.

The 1940 Latham Act that funded the building of Linda Vista housing did not provide for community, school, or commercial facilities. A 1941 amendment creating public works grants and 1942 guidelines for development finally led to Linda Vista’s first recreational and civic facility, the multi-use Tenant Activity Building. Work began in August 1943, was completed within 90 days, and was dedicated on December 26, 1943. The dedication included a week-long celebration including a riveters’ quiz contest, a carnival, youth activities, and a New Years’ ‘swing shift dance’ from 9 p.m. to 4 a.m.

Skateworld (Tenant Activity Building)

The first building to make up the original plaza was a desperately needed Safeway supermarket, which opened on February 2nd, 1943, nearly two years after residents began moving in. Before its opening, residents made do with 14 mile round trip buses to San Diego or with local resale to make any purchases. In the fall of 1943 the rest of the shopping plaza finally opened. It was dedicated by Eleanor Roosevelt, a point of local pride. The plaza was completely rebuilt in 1972 and today looks nothing like the original plaza. The 1941 plans and the 1943 design that followed employed ‘garden city’ principles, with parking around the periphery and a landscaped “main street” or “town green” interior consisting of a lawn, trees, and a semicircular covered promenade which connected the stores and provided park bench seating. The green extended from the plaza to Comstock street. A movie theater, The Linda, was added in 1945. Its entrance faced the green. The plaza was among the first modern shopping center in the U.S. and was influential in the design of centers that followed around the country. <blockquote>Today the redeveloped plaza is home to a successful weekly farmers market and commercial establishments of all kinds. A plaque commemorating the 1943 dedication can be found adjacent the ATM kiosk at the mid-block crosswalk on Linda Vista Road. </blockquote>

The original Public Buildings Administration plans included a central shopping plaza but it was over two years after residents began living here that Linda Vista received a commercial core. The center was designed by Pasadena architects Karl F. Giberson and Whitney P. Smith and was very different than the plaza today.

Linda Vista Shopping Plaza

This building was the second location for the Linda Vista Library. Groundbreaking for the new library was held on July 17, 1950, with the library opening on April 8, 1951.

The facility was designed by F. R. George of the City Engineer’s office and was designed to allow for building of a partial second-story later if needed.

 

Educational Enrichment Systems (ESS)

The Calvary Korean Church occupies what was first the Linda Vista Baptist Bible College and Seminary. Built in 1946, the seminary later moved to El Cajon and the building served as a community social hall. It was the site for social services and resettlement work for Vietnamese immigrants in the 1970s and 80s before being abandoned for a many years. The building was purchased and restored by San Diego Calvary Korean Presbyterian Church in 1991. 

Calvary Korean Church

The school building was originally Stephen Watts Kearny Junior-Senior High School. Like Carson and Linda Vista Elementaries, its first classes were held in project homes. For Kearny these were 37 homes on Ingersoll St. beginning September 15, 1941. The school building was completed and opened for classes in 1942.

Senior High grades were moved to the present Kearny High which opened on September 14, 1953 a mile north-east along Linda Vista Road.


Montgomery Middle School

Linda Vista Elementary School Opened in Fall, 1943.  Need for schools continued to grow with successive phases of the development and Chesterton Elementary opened a year later.

Linda Vista Historical Walking Tour

Kit Carson Elementary School

Introduction

Images

Backstory and Context

Sources

Additional Information