A Playground Divided

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree;
—SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

It is not clear whether the Great Khan's motives were selfish or altruistic, but there isn't any question about the intentions of the builder of the stately pleasure dome that stands at Second Avenue and C Street in San Diego, Calif. Banker C. Arnholt Smith built the $14 million Westgate Plaza Hotel for three reasons: first, he wanted to do something for San Diego; second, he wanted to give his wife Helen a chance to demonstrate her extraordinary decorating talents; and, third, he wanted to be known as the man responsible for the most beautiful hotel in the world. The first reason may have been the most compelling. Ask anybody about Arnie Smith and the answer will be: "Arnholt Smith will do anything to boost San Diego."

The wonders he has wrought have been chronicled before (SI, Aug. 3, 1970), but the most wondrous thing about Arnie is that the wonders never cease. What other man in this century has given his city a hotel with thousands of dollars worth of hand-cut Baccarat crystal chandeliers in the lobby and, at the same time, a baseball team that finished 28� games out of first place in the Western Division of the National League? (The hotel really is beautiful, so beautiful that Buzzie Bavasi, the former Dodger executive who is president and part owner of the Padres, won't let visiting baseball teams stay in it, even though their occupancy would put money in his partner's pocket. "Can you imagine those guys lounging around in the Italian chairs and sprinkling cigar ashes on Helen Smith's Kirman rugs?" Bavasi says.) One has to believe that both the hotel and the Padres are gifts to the city and that Arnholt Smith will not be upset if he never gets anything beyond a tax write-off from either of them. Nor is this attitude exceptional. Smith is only one, though perhaps the No. 1, of several avuncular San Diego sportsmen who set out in the '60s to do something for their city, something to "make it really big time" and to "put it on the map."

On the map? What had happened? Had all of San Diego's stars made a mystery of their nativity? Didn't anybody know that Teddy Ballgame, the greatest hitter who ever lived, or Maureen Connolly, the best of all women tennis players, were from San Diego? Or Don Larsen, the perfect-game pitcher? Did people think Florence Chadwick, the Channel swimmer, was from Los Angeles or someplace? How about Brick Muller, that fellow who went to San Diego High and then, playing on a University of California wonder team, threw a 63-yard forward pass? And all the others—Cotton Warburton, Bud Held, Billy Mills, Bob Gutowski, Lowell North, Archie Moore, not to mention Billy Casper, Gene Littler and Mickey Wright. Why, San Diego was even on the badminton map—Dr. Dave Freeman had won the U.S. championship seven times. Not enough for the big map?

Bob Breitbard, who starred in football at Hoover High and San Diego State, was not as rich as Arnie Smith but he had some money from the family business (laundry) and in 1946 he and his brother established the Breitbard Athletic Foundation as a way of encouraging and rewarding San Diego athletes. In 1960, convinced that San Diego had somehow contrived to remain as unknown as Tierra del Fuego, Breitbard persuaded the city to co-sponsor a Hall of Champions. Still not enough. In 1963 Breitbard moved into the entrepreneurial end of sport, applying for a franchise in the Western Hockey League. The league said O.K., but only if he could supply a rink. Breitbard valiantly, some say pig-headedly, set out to build a sports arena as a feat of venture capitalism. It opened Nov. 17, 1966, with the newly fledged Gulls chilling the Seattle Totems 4-1 before 11,692 newly minted fans. The following year Bob Breitbard, all good guy, the man in the white hat, surpassed himself: he snatched up a National Basketball Association franchise, and the expansion Rockets were organized in time to play the 1967-68 season in the arena. Marvelous! Instant fame—the Rockets had the "Big E," Elvin Hayes, Lew Alcindor's only successful rival.

Long before Breitbard brought the Gulls and Rockets to San Diego, Jack Murphy, the sports editor of the San Diego Union, had been suffering from a dichotomic itch: he wanted to cover major league sports but did not want to leave San Diego. Murphy began solving his problem in 1961 when he persuaded Barron Hilton to transfer his professional football team, the AFL Chargers, from the empty steppes of the Los Angeles Coliseum to cozy Balboa Stadium. Given this triumph, Murphy began to agitate for his real objective: a new multipurpose stadium. He is generally credited with igniting community enthusiasm for the project. A stadium seating more than 50,000 people for either baseball or football, and with a parking lot so vast that it can be converted into a Grand Prix sports-car racing track, opened for business in June of 1967.

The location of the stadium cannot be faulted. It is five miles up the sun-blasted expanse of Mission Valley, once famed only as the course of the San Diego River, the home of jackrabbits and the Spanish mission that provided its name. The valley is now paved with the concrete of freeways, which make it reachable in 30 minutes from almost any point within the city limits.

One of the people Jack Murphy ignited when he lit upon his project was Albert Harutunian, the president of the San Diego Fertilizer Co. Harutunian's response gives body to that old Russian proverb, "Light an Armenian and you'll get a firestorm!" The Harutunian firestorm broke over the city in the spring of 1965 when he was named to a Stadium Authority Board of Governors, a group created to help secure a $27.75 million bond issue. Harutunian promptly produced a booklet, which he sent to 187,000 people, listing all the ways in which a multipurpose stadium would benefit San Diego. The bonds received 72% of the total vote.

As we have seen, none of San Diego's Dutch uncles were Dutch. Now add to the ethnic mix—WASP, Jewish, Irish and Armenian—one Italian. That would be John Alessio, the shoeshine boy who was sponsored by Arnholt Smith and in due time came to operate the Caliente Race Course and function as a partner in Smith's Westgate-California Corporation. There were people in San Diego who thought Alessio was not acting in the city's interest when he tried to take charge of the Del Mar racetrack, 30 miles north of city center, on the basis of a second-best bid. But this was compensated, and more, by another act of John Alessio's. He saved the Del Coronado hotel, a most magnificent Victorian lumber pile that today gleams anew. Alessio bought the hotel, pulled the white clapboard off one sagging side of it, installed a mighty steel beam and had the place boarded up again. The restored Del looked just the same but was years younger, beneficiary of the first spinal transplant.

Why all this emphasis on hotels—building them, saving them, and so on? Do hotels have some special mystique? Well, yes and no. The Triple A tour book lists 47 acceptable hotels in the San Diego area, but there are just two that can be considered grand luxe, the Westgate Plaza and the Del Coronado. And that's not bad. New York has only one, the Plaza. San Francisco has one, the Fairmont. Madrid has one, the Ritz. In San Diego's thrust for a big-league image, two superhotels can count almost as much as, say, one basketball franchise.