Explore San Diego’s Remarkable Neighborhoods!
Walking Tours: Ross Porter.com

A 90-minute journey through history and architecture conducted by Ross Porter, developed in conjunction with the Designers Showcase projects of the San Diego Historical Society.

Mission Hills - Saturdays at 2 p.m.
April 24
May 29
June 26
July 24
August 21
September 25
October 23
November 27

Bankers Hill - Sundays at 2 p.m.
April 25
May 30
June 27
July 25
August 22
September 26
October 24
November 28

Each tour is $20. Introduction special: Buy one, get one free!
(Bring along a guest for one tour, or attend both tours yourself for $20.)

Reserve at www.RossPorter.com or call 619-549-2793.

Two San Diego neighborhoods – Mission Hills and Bankers Hill – offer insights to San Diego's history and the vision of its leaders. The character of San Diego is well-revealed in the story of how Balboa Park and nearby Bankers Hill developed during the Progressive Era that embraced the career of renowned architect Irving Gill. We
also learn of San Diego's self-image in the quest of George Marston to create a new kind of neighborhood in the early 1900s on the hills behind the old Spanish presidio.

I developed these walking tours alongside the Designers Showcase projects of the San Diego Historical Society. My lifelong interest in 20th century history has led me to tie together strands of a Yale education, stories from my family's four generations spent in this region, archival research and reading – including the great work of San Diego-born author Oakley Hall, who sometimes set his stories in these neighborhoods.

My tours appeal to locals as well as to visitors. Everyone can learn more about the forces that shaped our present day. My task is to introduce the themes that awakened the imagination of our predecessors, and encourage you to see them at work in the walkable, livable, remarkable neighborhoods that we sometimes take for granted.

"… the great products of architecture are less the works of individuals than of society,
rather the offering of a nation’s effort than the inspired flash of a man of genius – the
deposit left by a whole people, the heaps accumulated by centuries, the residue of
successive evaporations of human society – In a word, a species of formation. Each wave
of time contributes it alluvium, each race deposits its layer on the monument, each
individual brings his stone.

What rough or quarried stone will each of us contribute to the universal edifice, what idle
or significant sentence will we write with brick and wood, steel and concrete upon the
sensitive page of the earth?

What monument will we who build, erect to the honor or shame of our age?"
–Irving Gill, The Craftsman, 1916