Party district

The place to be: San Diego's Gaslamp Quarter

THE GASLAMP QUARTER, SAN DIEGO -- Every Super Bowl city has to have a center, a heart. You know, a place for fans to try to find a ticket to the game. Maybe have a beer. Maybe have 16.

Every Super Bowl city needs a place, basically, to hang out until Sunday rolls around.

In beautiful and sunny San Diego, everybody's favorite Super Bowl city, that would be the Gaslamp Quarter.

There's a lot of history to the Gaslamp Quarter. This place dates to the mid 1800s. Wyatt Earp slept here. There were 71 saloons, 120 bordellos and 350 prostitutes in the area in 1887. That's a lot of history.

There's some interesting architecture, too. There's the quaint trolley that runs around the Gaslamp's outskirts. The San Diego Padres' new stadium, scheduled for completion in April 2004, is going up on the quarter's eastern border.

Mostly, though, the Gaslamp is about eating and drinking and eating some more ... and then having a nightcap to top it all off. It's about fun. Especially if you're into eating and drinking.

And, of course, it's about a lot of money changing hands.

"We're probably going to do as good as '98 [the last time San Diego held a Super Bowl], if not better," says Dan Flores, the associate executive director of the Gaslamp Quarter Association, a group formed to enhance and protect the historic value of the area. "Most of the merchants were here in '98, so they gained a lot of valuable experience."

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The impact a Super Bowl has on a city's economy is one of those numbers that folks toss around like they really know how to figure the thing. But different people figure in different numbers, and some aren't figured at all, so what you end up with, often, are wildly different ideas.

Something called the Sports Management Research Institute reported that last year's Super Bowl in New Orleans was worth $396 million to the economy there. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution figured fans spent more than $50 million on food alone in four days of a Super Bowl weekend.

For this one, the NFL and the people in San Diego guess that fans could spend upwards of $250 million.

Who really knows?

This much is certain. Hotel rates are ridiculous here. USA Today reports that they're down, compared to the '98 Super Bowl, but they're still hovering around $266 a night. For $266, you figure you ought to get more than a couple of chocolates on your pillow.

You can find a hotel room, but not without a lot of calling around by somebody. Tickets? Right now, a ticket with a face value of $400 could cost you maybe five times that much on the street. Maybe more.

Whatever the cost, people are spending. And a lot of it is already being dropped in the Gaslamp.

Even as early as Thursday afternoon, traffic was starting to snarl Fifth Avenue, the main drag through the quarter. The sidewalks were starting to get crowded. Parking lots were being transformed into stages for shows throughout the weekend. By Thursday night, with a last call at 2 a.m., you could tell a full-fledged city party was just around the corner.

There are about 100 places to eat in the Gaslamp (Persian? Japanese? Finnish?), 100 or so retail stores (Cigars? Cigarettes? A $144,000 Ferrari?) and 100 or so other places of business (from tattoo parlors to law offices). The Gaslamp consists of about 16 1/2 city blocks running from Broadway on the north to Harbor Drive on the south (just across from the convention center). It runs, across, from Fourth Avenue to Sixth Avenue.

Flores expects maybe 100,000 visitors per day this weekend. A good day for the Gaslamp, usually, is about 30,000. He expects plenty of business Sunday morning, too, when the Gaslamp usually is dead. So no matter how much the merchants make, they figure to make more than they normally do.

"It's fun. There's a lot of tree-lined streets, neat architecture, and the people that are down here ...," Flores said. "It's an authentic neighborhood."

From now until Sunday afternoon, when Super Bowl XXXVII kicks off, San Diego's Gaslamp Quarter will be more than just a neighborhood. It will be the center of the Super Bowl experience.

At least for the fan willing to part with some money.

John Donovan is a senior writer for CNNSI.com.

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