Waterfront Park

This guide to Waterfront Park in San Diego starts with bulldozers tearing up parking lots and a mayor's line about turning a parking space into a people space, then rewinds to how this ground was built at all: bay fill pumped in for the county's grand new headquarters, dedicated in person by President Franklin Roosevelt before a crowd of twenty five thousand. It follows the site through a stranger turn only a few years later, when wartime shortages sent office workers and volunteers out to plow up the manicured lawns instead. Listen for how a patch of ground meant to impress a president ended up feeding a city instead.