Park
Balboa Park
San Diego, CA, USA
Sprawling urban park of gardens, museums and Spanish Colonial architecture around a free outdoor pipe organ.
This guide to Balboa Park in San Diego opens on New Year's Eve 1914, when a crowd first heard a pipe organ built for the open sky roar to life for the Panama-California Exposition. It traces the gift back to John D. Spreckels, son of a German sugar magnate, and his brother Adolph, whose fortune built streetcars, hotels and much of the city's skyline, and the exact sums the brothers split between them to pay for the organ and its pavilion. Sunday afternoons still bring an organist out to this same lawn.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.