Gaslamp Museum at the Davis-Horton House

This guide to the Gaslamp Museum at the Davis-Horton House in San Diego opens with Alonzo Horton buying eight hundred acres of waterfront for pocket change in eighteen sixty-seven, land cheap only because an earlier attempt at a city had already failed here. Seventeen years before, merchant William Heath Davis shipped a prefabricated saltbox house around Cape Horn to found what he called New Town, only to watch a depression and the gold rush empty it into what locals mocked as Rabbitville. In eighteen seventy-three the house was hauled to eleventh and K streets to serve as the county's unofficial hospital, one stop in a story of a building that kept moving long after its builder was gone.