Harbor Island

This guide to Harbor Island in San Diego explains how an entire two-mile peninsula in the bay is artificial, built in nineteen sixty-one from sand, mud and rubble the Navy dredged out of the shipping channel so its ships and aircraft carriers could pass safely. It traces why the land is legally public tidelands where no house can ever be built, and why its boulder shoreline had to be reinforced by hand to hold dredged fill against the tide. Watch the water along the path for a sea lion or a dolphin working the same channel this ground once came from.