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The restored Broadway Fountain in Horton Plaza Park, downtown San Diego

Alonzo Horton bought downtown San Diego for $265

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Photo: Epolk, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Alonzo Erastus Horton was born in Connecticut in 1813 and worked as a trader, sailor and businessman in Wisconsin and San Francisco before arriving in San Diego in 1867. The town at the time was centered in what is now Old Town, a few miles from the bay.

Horton thought the city belonged on the water. At a city land auction, he bought roughly 800 acres along the bay for $265, the land that now makes up downtown.

Building New Town

He laid out streets, sold lots and gave land to churches and other organizations to attract settlement. Businesses moved from Old Town to Horton’s Addition, as it was known. He built a wharf at the foot of Fifth Avenue and the Horton House hotel, which opened in 1870 on the plaza across from his property.

Ups and downs

Horton made a fortune in the boom years and lost much of it when the land market collapsed in the 1880s. The plaza across from his hotel, which he set aside as open space, was sold to the city in 1895 and became Horton Plaza. The Broadway Fountain, designed by Irving Gill, was added in 1910.

Horton died in 1909. Horton Plaza Park, restored and reopened in 2016, still serves as a public square in the center of downtown, a reminder that the downtown grid began with his purchase.

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